Seaside Photographer at Work

Between the wars every seaside town and resort would have at least one photographic business that specialised in selling visitors their photographic likenesses.  With large plate cameras they would record the departure of every charabanc tour and have prints of the participants ready for them to purchase on their return.  Others would haunt the esplanades and deck chairs taking photos on spec in the hope of selling prints later.  Often they would hand a docket to their subjects with a reference number and an address where the finished prints could be purchased. Another strategy was to gather the largest possible crowd of trippers at a point where a camera could record the scene from an elevated position.  They were then directed to a nearby shop where prints were on sale in less than hour.  The legal right to a week’s paid holiday was only established by the Holidays with Pay Act of 1938 but since the 1870s major employers had been closing factories and mills annually for a week enabling the workforce the luxury of an unpaid summer holiday commensurate with whatever they had saved during the winter. So there was no shortage of customers for the photographer’s services and photos like this must survive in hundreds of thousands if not millions.

What’s especially fascinating is the high definition that the plate camera supplied, leaving us with images that reward close scrutiny with remarkable clarity of detail. A rich variety of physical types and expressions turn up alongside a wealth of information about contemporary fashion trends. I counted only 16 hatless adults in this image. This camera confronts a mostly happy multitude of holidaymakers, it’s undated (the time is inscribed as 6.45pm) but on the reverse is the address of a Bournemouth photographic studio by the name of Bailey. Bournemouth with its origin as a Spa resort cultivated an image of respectability reflected in its Invalid’s Walk and the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery while they made the most of endorsements from the likes of Thomas Hardy and JRR Tolkien.  Many proud fathers, often in collar and tie, hold their offspring high for the camera and there’s an air of prosperity apparent in many other faces suggesting that the middle class is well represented here.  These aren’t the sort of people you might see on a Jarrow Hunger March.

A few details are selected here - faces that jump out of the crowd, some that are almost instantly recognisable, others that look like nobody we’ve ever seen before. There’s no lack of traditional British grumpiness to be seen but there’s also an impressive level of equanimity and good cheer - testament to the healing powers of a day at the seaside. These were the last decades of White British domination - pre-diversity Britain. After the war this would begin to change and a new and very different pattern of ethnicity arrived on the scene.  People who came to Britain because Britain had come to them.

 

Central Arcade Newcastle

Even in a city well supplied with buildings of quality, the Central Arcade stands out for its sumptuous ceramic decoration. In plan, it links two sides of a triangular island building with a spur connecting to the third side (see diagram below).  The original building of 1840 was intended to serve as a Corn Exchange but before opening, it was remodelled as a conference hall with a coffee house and subscription newsroom included.  In its third iteration it was converted into a concert hall and art gallery in 1870. By 1897 it had become a vaudeville theatre which 4 years later was destroyed by fire. During rebuilding as shops and offices in 1906 the toffee coloured Central Arcade was cut through the centre to a design by J Oswald and Son. It is listed at Grade II* by Historic England.

Like the opulent, theatrical County Arcade in Leeds (1900) the faience decoration was supplied by Burmantofts of Leeds.  Renaissance motifs with rococo flourishes strike a more sober note on Tyneside than the exuberant floral swags and polychromed ironwork arches to be seen in Leeds. Central Arcade offers a café crème experience with a rich depth of colour in place of the dazzle of Leeds.  At each end, twin-arched entrances are topped by operatic ensembles of ornamental ceramics designed to impress. The shop fronts are restrained and close to the originals, there are no banners or intrusive signage to confront us with the vulgarity of commerce. Mostly specialist shops trade here as in many other arcades, less reliant on passing trade. Footfall is light despite the surrounding streets teeming with pedestrians - most who make there way under the arches are taking a short cut for the sake of protection from the elements and a time saving of about a single minute.  A more economically viable future for such places is difficult to imagine but for now at least the Central Arcade continues to delight the eye with its superb interior.

The immaculate condition of the arcade is a tribute to the owners and city planners who have enabled such sensitive conservation of an architectural treasure that despite a city centre location is unable to attract the prime retail that draws the Leeds public into the County Arcade in great numbers.  Perhaps it’s an act of contrition for permitting the demolition of one of the finest arcades in the country. This happened in the 1960s when the Royal Arcade of 1832 got in the way of an urban motorway project. There’s a low-res image that gives some impression of its magnificence below but what seems to have doomed it was the originally chosen location on the very edge of the city centre where it struggled from the start to attract custom.

Royal Arcade (1832 - 1963)

 

Scarborough’s Grand Hotel

Above is a detail from a painting of 1867 in the Scarborough Museum and Art Gallery - it shows the seaward side of the just completed Grand Hotel on a day of unusually perfect weather.  The artist is John Wilson Carmichael (1799-1868) whose speciality was maritime subjects and coastal views who retired to Scarborough after a working life based in Newcastle.

In 1852 Cuthbert Brodrick (1821-1905) won a national competition to design a Town Hall for the City of Leeds. When his ambitious design was finally complete in 1858 the opening ceremony was performed by Queen Victoria.  Brodrick was 37 years old and his building had been hailed as a triumph - he stood on the threshold of a brilliant career but it never quite happened.  It has been argued that while his contemporaries mostly worked under the influence of Classical tradition, Brodrick with his preference for the French Second Empire style (“opulent and coarse” in the words of Jonathan Meades) was increasingly out of step with public taste. For the Leeds design Brodrick had made use of Classical elements and restrained his Frenchified tendencies but in his design for the Leeds Corn Exchange he surrendered to his passion for the Halle aux Blés in Paris (later rebuilt as the Bourse de Commerce). For more about the Corn Exchange follow this link to my blogpost of 2008.

Scarborough’s Grand Hotel was Brodrick's last major commission and he seized the opportunity to design a massive and imposing exercise in Second Empire style that wouldn’t look out of place on Haussmann’s Parisian grands boulevards. Built on a V-shaped plan between 1863 and 1867, it was one of Europe's largest luxury hotels adorned with corner domed towers, rounded windows, ornamental balconies and terracotta decoration. On the landward side there are 4 floors plus 2 attic levels, facing the sea an additional 3 basement levels are visible. It is claimed that the 4 domes represent the 4 seasons, while there are 52 chimneys for the weeks in a year and 365 rooms for the days in a year. After remodelling today's hotel has only 250 rooms. It retains a formidable sense of presence on Scarborough’s South Bay but is no longer a destination for the wealthy visitor drawn by the restorative powers of the local Spa waters, operating as a budget hotel as part of the Britannia Hotels group. Britannia Hotels consistently occupy last place in the annual Which survey of customer satisfaction and make less than perfect custodians of Brodrick’s great landmark.  YouTube has many hostile amateur videos of the horrors to be encountered there - one of the less hysterical examples is embedded below and it makes depressing viewing.  There’s no avoiding the evidence of internal dilapidation and the mistreatment of key architectural features and elaborations that seem increasingly obscured by clumsy partitioning and lowered ceilings. This would be Brodrick's last major commission - in 1870 he retired to France where he and his wife lived quietly for decades in the well-heeled western Paris suburb of le Vesinet.

Durham in Six Seconds

A long held ambition was finally fulfilled on an evening in late August when I was in the right place at the right time to photograph the view of the city from Durham Viaduct through the window of a passing train. After a day of persistent rain in Newcastle the sky cleared as the train approached Durham and a much anticipated opportunity opened up as it left the station. Six photos in six seconds of the castle and cathedral commanding the south eastern skyline in a jumbled sea of rooftops and foliage. An Asian restaurant, a Methodist Church and a domed Clock Tower exit left as a bus station and a cluster of back-to-back terraces are revealed. The eleven arch viaduct was built in 1857 by the North Eastern Railway and carries the East Coast Mainline between Edinburgh and King’s Cross. Its importance is recognised with a Grade II* listing by Historic England.  The appeal of the elevated viewpoint is well known - a moment when everything is reduced to manageable proportions, unusual patterns and formations are suddenly visible, and an unnaturally expanded breadth of vision breeds a delusionary sense of omnipotence.  Model makers toil for a lifetime to reproduce these effects on a diminished scale for the reward of having seized a segment of reality, taken control of it and cut it down to size.

 

Jane Parminter and A la Ronde

In 1784, at the age of 34, Jane Parminter having recently inherited her father’s estate embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe with three companions, her sister Elizabeth, her cousin Mary and another female friend. Their travels would last almost ten years and although Jane kept a detailed journal, all but the first volume were destroyed in the Baedeker bombing of Exeter.  What details we have of their itinerary has been extrapolated  from the significant quantity of paintings, prints and souvenirs they brought home. It seems certain that they explored France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and likely that they also took in Spain and Portugal (Jane was born and spent her early years in Lisbon where her wine merchant father had his own business). 

As expedition leader, Jane had revealed an unusual strength of character and defied the limitations that polite society routinely imposed on unmarried females. She and her cousin Mary had become firm friends and resolved on their return to build a new house of their own specification in which to share their lives. In 1796 Jane bought a parcel of land on high ground between Exmouth and Lympstone, with a panoramic view of the Exe Estuary.  The plan for the 28 acre plot was to build a house of their own design, create a 'ferme ornée' (or ornamental farm), and establish a school for girls from disadvantaged backgrounds. There’s no settled view on just who was responsible for the design or the plans from which the house was built - the 16 sided floor plan must have come from Jane and the many affinities with the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna (which made a powerful impression when they visited) in spatial organisation likewise.  Few practising architects would have contemplated such a radical departure from convention.

The completed house became a base for their philanthropic activities, a refuge from a male dominated world and above all a treasure box for all the memorabilia gathered on their travels where much time had been spent staring into cabinets of curiosities and dreaming of creating their own.  Daily life would never have been straightforward in such an unusual layout which left oddly shaped rooms and difficult spaces for staircases.  But they persevered, ignored the discomforts and gradually populated the spaces and decorated the walls to schemes entirely of their own devising.  This sense of autonomy and freedom from masculine interventions was crucial to the plan - it was their good fortune that the Parminter and Walrond inheritances made it all possible.

Best known of all their schemes is the Shell Gallery at the very top of the house - nobody knows how long they spent in a very cramped space, collaging sea shells in multiple configurations across eight separate surfaces or whether it was all done unassisted. But the sheer scale of ambition and endeavour is compelling, though the installation is now too fragile for visitors to inspect. It has recently been repaired and spruced up and the process was broadcast by the BBC in April this year.  When Jane died in 1811 she left the property to her cousin Mary on the condition that it could only be bequeathed to an unmarried female relative. That condition was honoured on the death of Mary in 1849, not until 1887 would the condition be rescinded and a male heir take possession.  This lead to a programme of modernisation that included replacing the thatched roof with slates, installing Dormer windows in the upstairs rooms, introducing central heating (hence the massive radiators seen in the photo) and obtaining a Dumb Waiter to bring meals from the kitchen  to the upper level, thus avoiding the restrictive staircase.

This story of female agency and empowerment is especially fascinating today to all who share concerns about gender imbalance - Jane Parminter exhibited a firm resolve to be unconstrained by male expectations of female conduct in an age where the rights of women came second to their status as male property. That it left a deep scar can be seen in Jane’s determination that no man should get his hands on the home she had worked so hard to create.  A la Ronde is the monument to her singular independence, strength of character and intellectual sensibility. 

 

Pioneers of German Graphic Design - Part Two

This is the long promised follow-up to the post of May 26. A further selection from the book, Pioneers of German Graphic Design, Callisto Publishers Berlin, 2017 (ISBN: 9783981753912) featuring Karl Schulpig to Jupp Wiertz plus an appendix of less well known designers.  The visual ingenuity and graphic impact of these images have lost none of their power over the years and will continue to serve as a vital source of inspiration for generations to come.  A superb book that I shall never tire of browsing.