Centurion Bar, Newcastle Station

I first glimpsed this extraordinary interior about 10 years ago from the doorway.  Within was the intimidating spectacle of a vast darkened room, echoing to the declamatory racket of a regiment of raucous drinkers, their attention fixed on a Premier League football game showing on an enormous plasma screen. On that occasion I went no further but promised to return at a more opportune moment.  Last August was my chance to revisit and we must thank the North Eastern Railway for this dazzling space - in 1892-93 the space was transformed by architect William Bell from a conventional waiting room into a beautiful ceramic clad First Class Refreshment Room. A Baroque styled decorative scheme was applied in faience supplied by Burmantofts of Leeds that not only covered the walls but extended upward to enclose the lantern ceiling surround. Browns, yellows and greens predominate. There was an interlude in the 1960s when the room was converted for British Transport Police use as holding cells for Geordie miscreants and it was only in 2000 that the stud walls came down to reveal the concealed ceramic splendour. When restoration was complete the only absent feature was the semicircular faience-clad bar that was lost at some point. It’s a reminder of how unusual it is in this country that the public are permitted to patronise such opulent premises without paying a premium for the privilege.

 

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)

 

Great Railway Stations No. 13: Gare de Lens

Coal mining was the major activity for over a century in the medium sized town of Lens in Northern France but none of it remains today. Like many similar towns and cities in Britain it has struggled to find a new role for itself. In an effort to attract tourism, an annex of the Louvre (Louvre-Lens) opened in 2012. The gallery displays a selection of artworks brought from Paris for a provincial vacation. Visitor numbers have fallen from 900,000 in the first year to 450,000 in 2017 which suggests the Bilbao-effect is fading fast. Some of these visitors will have arrived by train in which case it’s to be hoped they had a good look at the station buildings or they would have missed one of France’s most distinctive and eccentric station buildings.

The present Gare de Lens was designed and built 1926-27 by architect, Urbain Cassan (1890 - 1979). Cassan also designed stations for Senlis, Brest and Saint-Quentin and later was involved in the design for the Tour Montparnasse (1973). For Lens, Cassan came up with a plan said to be inspired by the shape of a steam locomotive boiler in which the rounded arches represent the wheels and a tower to represent the funnel. The concourse and booking hall was decorated on all four walls with mosaic panels that portrayed the local industry, coal mining and the miners who extracted the coal in stylised pictorial form. They were the work of Auguste Labouret (1871-1964). Labouret was principally a stained glass artist with a reputation for the sensitive restoration of church stained glass. But he often worked on railway stations, among others, Saint Quentin (also designed by Cassan), Lyon and Gare Saint-Lazare.

Each decorative panel is about 1.5m in height, extending to almost the full width of the station interior. Over the ticket windows we see colliery winding gear and associated industrial buildings in a modified Cubist idiom. Another panel is flanked by grim-faced miners, shouldering pick-axes and gripping miners’ lamps against a backdrop of pit-heads, slag heaps and smoking chimneys. The third panel is a landscape of bridges and factory buildings with cargo ships and tugs. The final panel (and the one that greets the arriving passenger) continues and develops the communication theme, pipes and tubes, telegraph wires to one side – on the other a massive steam locomotive powers its way into the composition. The installation appears to be made with standard-size tiles, some of which are laid intact, though most are fragmented to a greater or lesser degree. The colour scheme is a muted harmony of blacks, whites, greys and brown.

The station buildings and the tower are all rendered and painted white with decorative patterned concrete mouldings. The Art Deco-inspired window frames are formed of slender, geometric glazing bars, painted in red. A Deco-styled font was used for the original cast iron signage on the platform. To see the resemblance to a steam engine requires a little imaginative effort but it remains a splendid conceit and the only scheme where Cassan attempted anything like it. To their credit, SNCF maintain the building in first class condition.

Maison Coilliot, Lille

Lille has many buildings of quality, but, despite its proximity to Flanders, it’s not a centre for Art Nouveau. The Maison Coilliot in rue de Fleurus is the only Art Nouveau landmark in the city. It dates from 1898-1900 and is a fascinating example of a style that flared into existence in just a few years before dying out with equal rapidity. Architect Hector Guimard was working on a portfolio of designs for the Métro Parisien at the time he was developing this commission for the proprietor of a ceramic business in Lille. The flamboyantly decorative lettering on the ceramic panel has a close affinity with the station signage he produced for the Métro. Two years earlier work had completed on the Castel Bérenger in Paris – the zenith of Guimard’s obsession with imposing organic decoration on architectural form.

The ground floor was a showroom for Coilliot's ceramics business, above was a 3 storey apartment, stepped back with an angled façade, for Coilliot and his family. Coilliot's factory premises and warehouse were situated behind the rue de Fleurus. The ground floor is composed of typically Art Nouveau organic teardrop forms while the upper storeys are more of a medievalist fantasy with a Gothic timber frame. An optician presently occupies the ground floor. The optician trades as Optique Coillot but the window display pays little respect to the building's design heritage. The inscribed plant-like forms in the rusticated stonework seem in good order but the building as a whole would benefit from some restoration work – cleaning the stonework and treating the timber superstructure would make a difference.

The interior was furnished and decorated by Guimard with the same attention to detail as the exterior – there is no public access but a short film from 1977 takes us briefly behind the scenes after a short verbal exchange between a young female student and a master of condescension.

Marxism in Mosaics

Totalitarian regimes always have resources available for large scale public art as a way to reinforce the state ideology. These mosaics adorn the Haus des Lehrers (Teachers’ Building) at Alexanderplatz in what was then East Berlin and wrap the building in suitably uplifting educational messages. It was one of the DDR’s first modernist tower blocks and housed a large library of books on education and conference and meeting facilities for educators. Walter Womacka (1925-2010) designed the scheme, known as Unser Leben (Our Life ) to focus the public mind on the technological and economic achievements of Socialism and the one true path to world peace. Womacka was a regime favourite and had risen through the world of art education to become Rector of the Künsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (DDR State Art College) from 1968-88. As Vice President of the VBK (compulsory state register of artists) it was his job to identify and expel the ideologically unreliable. He was rewarded with a series of major state commissions for giant murals on public buildings. State approved overseas travel was another regime perk – on a visit to Syria he was invited to paint a portrait of President Hafez al-Assad, father of the present incumbent, Bashar - ophthalmologist and mass-murderer.

The visual language was an embalmed version of the Mexican Muralists with their impeccable revolutionary credentials combined with Socialist Realism, by tradition and practice, an idiom from which all visual excitement was excluded. A gowned and masked surgeon poses in the operating theatre while satellite dishes and communication towers beam down a message of hope. Then a white coated chemist holds up a flask containing the distilled essence of Marxist-Leninist thought. To his right, an astronomer of Asian origin stands in front of a vast radio-telescope while a rocket is launched bearing fraternal greetings to the farthest reaches of space. Elsewhere doves of peace are released into the heavens to melt the stony hearts of the capitalist West. Contented proletarians enjoy the blessings of state-controlled consumption, proudly observing their dutiful offspring acquiring the scientific skills that will take the nation forward into its glorious future. Among all these uplifting messages, it’s difficult to select just one but the constant repetition of the language of pacifism is perhaps the most egregious element. Some guilty pleasures catch the eye – tilting planes and surfaces locking compositional elements, period mid-century infographics and the occasional echoes of Leger, another who never lost his faith in Marxism.

Cork Flooring

The High Altar in the apse at St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork rests on a mosaic floor designed by William Burges. Crustaceans, molluscs and amphibians in mosaic form share the space with artisans, scholars and parfait knights. The initial inspiration for this piscatorial fantasy came from St. Matthew, “.... the kingdom of Heaven is like unto a net that was cast into the sea and gathered of every kind”. There’s a useful account of the mosaics in J Mordaunt Crook’s William Burges and the High Victorian Dream – Crook is well disposed toward the mosaics but clearly regards them as a minor aspect of Burges’s achievement. Crook tells how they were manufactured in 1877 by Burke & Co. in Paris by a team of Italian craft-workers from Udine using Pyrenean marble fragments. The imagery has a light and playful character that is not something routinely found in a High Anglican place of worship but one of Burges’s many redeeming features was an appetite for fun and a liking for puns. The latter inspired him to include bobbing corks (unfortunately not visible in this selection) in his aquatic fantasia.

W H Smith Decorative Tiles

Newsagents and booksellers for more than 200 years, W H Smith has more than 600 stores on British high streets plus another 700 at airports, train stations and motorway services. In most of these locations it is unchallenged by any competition. Despite its longevity and ubiquity it seems to command little affection on the part of its customers. The shops are fitted out to a rigid and universal formula and the range of products is severely restricted to items that can be reliably sold in large quantities. Harsh lighting, artificial fibre floor coverings and a persistent smell of cleaning products makes for an uncomfortable browsing experience. It’s common to find only a single staffed checkout with a long, slow moving queue from which shoppers can contemplate the generous provision of frequently malfunctioning self-service checkouts. Any staff savings are cancelled out by the need for attendants to sort out all the customer problems. It wasn’t always so – in the inter-war years the business had a reputation for its ornate oak shop fronts (a few of which survive) and decorative pictorial tile panels designed and manufactured by Carter & Co. of Poole. An exhaustive survey of these panels was published in the 2015 Journal of the Tiles and Architectural Ceramics Society by Ian M Betts who listed 60 stores where examples can still be seen. The four examples shown here come from the branch in Mostyn Street, Llandudno – the postcard shows a W H Smith store in the right foreground. The present store where these photographs were taken is some half a mile further up Mostyn Street – presumably the tiled panels migrated with the shop to its new location.

Hoover Building, Western Avenue

It’s indicative of Britain’s hollowed-out industrial base that so many of our best known factories are now carefully preserved relics of a lost age of manufacturing. This example alongside Western Avenue in Perivale, built for Hoover (1932-35) is perhaps the most famous and the most esteemed. Architects Wallis, Gilbert & Partners specialised in designing long, low and deep factory premises for the wave of American manufacturers of consumer goods expanding into the UK in the inter-war years. For American business, advertising and promotion began with the factory facade and a prominent location. Wallis Gilbert & Partners rapidly developed unique expertise in the provision of eye-catching buildings tarted up with newly fashionable Art Deco detailing.

Western Avenue and the Great West Road offered highly visible development sites on newly expanded arterial roads to businesses that saw the future in terms of road transport rather than rail. Internally the new factories embodied all the latest efficiency thinking in production line technology and conformed to contemporary best practice in placing the journey from raw materials to finished product entirely under one roof. The Hoover and Firestone factories (the latter on the Great West Road) became the best known of these dazzling and exuberant facades designed to please and were viewed with affection by the passing public despite the generalised aversion to Modernism in the wider population. After 1980 when the Firestone Building was destroyed in an act of corporate vandalism there was renewed public support for conserving what remained of these time capsules as a result of which the redundant Hoover Building, by now II* listed, was redeveloped in 1993 to accommodate a Tesco supermarket behind a carefully preserved facade.

Joan S Skinner (in her book, Form and Fancy, Factories by Wallis Gilbert & Partners, 1916-1939) takes a dim view of the Hoover Building. In her eyes it’s visually incoherent and lacking in unity – an unhappy combination of individually interesting but unrelated forms. She points out the uneasy relationship between Egyptian and Native North American design traditions. Modernist sensibilities were also offended by what they saw as vulgarity and frivolity, an absence of rigour and a regressive aesthetic. In 1951 Pevsner delivered his verdict (in the Buildings of England, Middlesex) – “perhaps the most offensive of the modernist atrocities along this road of typical bypass factories”. Pevsner’s seal of approval was reserved for the purest expressions of Modernist geometry – never to be found on Western Avenue. This is architecture as advertising – a working building with a flashy facade, best seen when floodlit after dark from the windows of passing Armstrong-Siddeleys, Lanchesters and Alvises cruising by en route from Denham Studios, Gerrards Cross or Beaconsfield to the West End.

The present situation has endured for more than 20 years but all is about to change. IDM Properties are preparing to convert the former (and now untenanted) office accommodation inside the Hoover Building into apartments. Planning permission and listed building consent for 66 apartments (zero affordable) was obtained on appeal in February 2016. Assuming the facade is refurbished and protected and there is no plan to provide car parking in front of the building this may be no bad thing, although from a social perspective, the all too familiar provision of zero affordable is deplorable. The external finishes are showing signs of decay so redecoration would be desirable.