Category: Urban

Smeath House

Smeath HouseSmeath HouseSmeath House, Horbury, my home for twenty years, right through my school and art college days, went on the market today. Looking at Tim Baker’s photographs in the brochure, I can see that the ambience of the place had an effect on the way my work developed. Aged nine, I filled an exercise book with sketches and nature notes including a map of the birds I saw around the shrubberies and lawns.

I can see why I’ve always been fascinated by the Victorian period, surrounded as I was by so many period features. In the 1960s there were still people around, my grandparents for instance, who grew up in the last days of Victorian England. Our era seemed rather colourless and mundane compared with the world of Dickens and Thomas Hardy.

Grandma and Grandad Bell at Smeath. They met at the celebrations for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.
Grandma and Grandad Bell visiting us at Smeath. They met at the celebrations for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

The house was built by the Baines family who were worsted spinners with mills in the valley below. There’s a box-shaped bay window on the west-facing corner of Smeath House which my brother imagines Richard Baines standing at early each morning to check that his foreman had stoked up the fire for the steam engine that drove the machinery.

We met Enid Baines, a daughter of the family, in the late 1950s or early 1960s when she revisited Smeath House. Her mum was then aged 100 but didn’t come with her. I would love to have seen any family photographs showing Smeath House in its Victorian heyday.

Links

Smeath House, Hodsons estate agents

Smeath House Flipbook looks so attractive, I wish that I could afford to make an offer!

Tim Baker Photography

The Woman over the Window

caryatidThere are carved heads on keystones above the entrance and the windows of this Venetian palace style branch of the Wakefield and Barnsley Union Bank (now occupied by Barclays) built in Ossett in 1870. The Santa Claus lookalike above the door seems to be a portrait, perhaps of the first manager, but this woman over the window has classical proportions and probably represents a mythological figure.

The man in a winged helmet over another window is probably Mercury but it would be nice to think that he was Osla the Viking, who, according to one interpretation of the town’s name, settled at ‘Osla’s seat’ or ‘Osla’s ridge camp’ a century and a half before the Battle of Hastings.

School Chair

school chair This school chair is less than three feet high. I like the way the back legs taper together towards the floor, giving a wider back at the top, while the front legs splay outwards to give stability. The change from the square section at the back to round at the front gives it an organic charm, as if it had grown rather than being popped out of a mould in a factory, like a modular 21st century stacking school chair.school chair

Uniglaze

uniglazeI enjoy drawing bits of buildings, often the side that the architect didn’t intend us to see. This window showroom at the top end of Cluntergate, Horbury, was drawn with a fine Faber-Castell Pitt artist pen as we sat in the Caffe Capri opposite.

The watercolour was added later using a photograph I took on my Olympus Tough as reference.

Gable End

gable endAt first sight the gable end of a house might not seem the most inspiring of subjects but it’s surprising how absorbing such a common sight can be if you keep looking at it for half and hour or more.

gable ends

Walking down into Horbury to buy sandwiches I get the chance to draw more gable ends as I sit in the Caffe Capri waiting for my order. I make a mental note of the colours. Later, as I add the watercolour, I make an informed guess about where the shadows were falling.

It’s a change for me to use a bit of imagination in reconstructing a scene after the even. I think about Cezanne’s studies of the huddle of red roofs of the village of Gardanne which seem like a starting point for Cubism.

gable

I rejoin Barbara at her sister’s and get a slightly different view of the house beyond the boundary wall.

The paper in my Moleskine sketchbook is buff which isn’t ideal for scanning but I’m enjoying the mellow tone it gives my drawings. This my out and about sketchbook, so why not indulge myself with its gentle warmth.

Giardiniera

Pizza ExpressIt’s a tough life, delivering books all over the landscape and on the return trip from my book suppliers I’m starving so, with a voucher in my wallet, how can I resist calling at Pizza Express, Meadowhall Centre, Sheffield, for a Giadriniera (veggie) classic pizza and a Caffe Reale (cappuccino plus figs and marscapone).

It’s also an excuse to call at the Apple store and marvel at the Retina display iMac!

Cloud Base

heronspire in the mistA grey heron doggedly makes its morning rounds against an equally grey sky.

The cathedral spire, looming out of the afternoon fog, appears to connect with the cloud base.

The Brick-banked Beck

gulls by the beckbindweedThe Westgate gulls are there again, gyrating around some centre of attraction hidden down in the brick-banked beck.

A few white trumpets of greater bindweed remain on the twisting vines on a chain-link fence at the edge of a car park.

wasp clusterI return to a dozen wasps, some dozy, some dead, to evict from my studio this afternoon. The way three of them were huddling up in the top corner of the window this morning, I’d guess that they were  hunkering down for the winter but only the queens will make it through to the spring.

They’ve been nesting in the roof-space in an ever-expanding colony since midsummer.

Gullscape

welbeckgulls at the bottom of Westgategull on playing fieldA hill across the Calder valley from Wakefield has been created by landfill, taking waste from across the district and beyond. I’ve seen huge flocks of gulls swirling over it but this afternoon they’re gathering in smaller groups on playing fields around the city and near Westgate Beck, which runs alongside the Dewsbury road into town.

As the sun sets, more gulls are making their way down the valley towards Pugneys country park lake, which has long been a gull roost.

The City and Moor

city and moorDistant moors are turning bronze-gold as the sun dips behind them. From Pinderfields, looking back to the city across twelve acres of open fields (now earmarked for residential development) you appreciate how Wakefield, a market town at least since early medieval times, fits into the landscape.

ochre hedgeMigrating birds travelling north or south across Yorkshire or from east and west across the Pennines, follow similar routes to the Roman roads, packhorse trails, inland navigation, rail routes and motorways that have played such a part in the development of the town.

A ragged row of trees by a car park on the edge of the city has now turned to full autumn ochre.

Grand Arcade

Grand ArcadeLooking for some old slides I came across this Leeds street scene from the early 1970s. It’s the sort of everyday view that it would never normally occur to me to photograph. Martin Salisbury, one of our tutors in graphic design at Leeds Polytechnic, suggested that I should go out and photograph the city to bring a bit of contrast to a project on prehistoric Yorkshire that I was working on.

busThe streets that I walked through are already part of history and I wish that I’d taken more shots.

When I see archive film of events such as the miners strike of 1974 (there was another ten years later) it’s hard to believe that the environment looked so  monochromatic and dismal.

Today television dramas set this period are usually shot in low key colour. My Agfa Gavaert colour slides show that that’s not artistic license; it really was like that.

miniIt’s so long ago that even the minis were half-timbered. In every photograph that I’ve looked at so far, all the vehicles that I can identify are British-made. Those look like Rovers in the background.

And would you believe that there are no parking restrictions so near the centre of the Leeds?!

 

Wakefield Street Life, 1876

The butter cross, Cross Square, WakefieldCross Square

Richard Knowles of the Rickaro Bookshop in Horbury recently came across these photographs of Victorian Wakefield. They were probably used as business cards by George & John Hall, photographers, who had premises at 26 Westgate.

Someone, presumably George, has dated three of the photographs Saturday, 15 July 1876.
Reverse side of the Chantry Chapel photograph.

The Butter Cross was built in 1707 and, according to some sources, demolished in 1866/67, but that was ten years before the date on the photograph. Wakefield council still have one of those pillars but I’m not sure where it is kept since the old art gallery, where it was displayed in the garden, closed.

The medieval Chantry Chapel now has a mid-twentieth century facade so these photographs are a valuable record of these buildings but it’s the incidental detail that I particularly like.

The shops by the Butter Cross would be a useful reference if I was illustrating Dickens or painting the Paddington Green backdrop for Oliver!

G & J Hall, photographers, were awarded a medal in the highly successful Wakefield Industrial and Fine Art Exhibition, 1865.
G & J Hall, photographers, were awarded a medal in the highly successful Wakefield Industrial and Fine Art Exhibition, 1865.

 Six Chimneys

The Six Chimneys

The 6 chimnies, Kirkgate, Wakefield

The Six Chimneys, an Elizabethan house, stood on Kirkgate, on the site of the present roundabout and pedestrian underpass. It collapsed following structural alterations at 7.45 p.m. on 16 May 1941.

To judge by the shadows, this was taken on the Saturday afternoon. Holden’s (the butchers?) has more or less sold out apart from a flitch of bacon and a single sausage (if that’s what it is!). There doesn’t appear to be any glass in the window, unless Mr Holden had gone to the expense of fitting plate glass.

Bell’s the coopers are displaying an impressive array of baskets and barrels, no doubt all made of locally sourced materials, most of them biodegradable.

Parish Church

Cathedral 1876

 The parish church wouldn’t become a cathedral until 1888.

Considering that this is the centre of town at half past eleven on a Saturday morning Wakefield seems uncannily quiet. Where is everybody?

handcartThree boys eyeing the camera and this porter or street-sweeper has stopped to chat to a woman who appears to be carrying a bag.

Street Urchins

Wakefield’s street urchins gathering at the Butter Cross. Was that ladder used by the town’s lamp-lighter?

handcartHandcarts seem to be a common feature around town. It probably wasn’t worth the trouble of loading barrels, baskets and boxes onto a horse drawn cart for delivery around town, so the porter and the delivery boy would have been a familiar sight.

I remember local author Stan Barstow telling me that one of his first jobs was to take a handcart as far as Lupset on the Saturday morning delivery round for one of the Horbury butchers. From a later period, I remember a big black butcher’s bicycle with a large rectangular basket between the handlebars, parked outside one of the High Street butchers in Horbury.

Wakefield Words

on the Chantry bridge

Finally, here are a couple of Saturday morning strollers, stopping for a chat on the Chantry Bridge.

As we’re looking down on them, this must have been taken from the Kings Mill.

What were they chatting about? Wakefield is lucky in that one of my predecessors William Banks who, like me, wrote a book of walks around Wakefield, took the trouble to make a note of the town’s dialect and phrases.

Wakefield Words page 77

So they could well have been saying;

‘Hah goes it? Owt fresh?’

‘Naah, nowt; what’s t’best news wi’ thee?’

Wakefield WordsSo, if you’d like to know a little about the words these street folk of old Wakefield used for weather, food, childhood and schooldays, the countryside, proverbs and a few supernatural tales, you can order a copy of my book Wakefield Words.

Price £3.99, post free (and as it’s a small paperback, for once I can make that post free outside the UK too).

If they ever invent a time machine and you get whisked back to Victorian Wakefield, it might make a useful phrase book! I was fascinated by William Banks collection of words and phrases and, as you’ll see from the book, I had fun adding cartoon illustrations to bring them to life. I’d always wanted to do a real little paperback book and I’m really pleased with this one. It’s quite jolly and I love the smell of a fresh paperback. Mmm! – you don’t get that with a digital version, do you?

More of my publications can be found at Willow Island Editions or, if you happen to be in Horbury, you can find the full range of titles at the Rickaro Bookshop.

My thanks to Richard Knowles of Rickaro for the loan of these evocative photographs.

Link; Rickaro Bookshop, Horbury