Curiosities of the Victorian census

25 04 2012

'Filling up the census paper', Punch, April 1851, p. 152.

From the introduction of the modern census in 1841, the census anecdote or ‘curiosity’ became a regular feature of newspaper columns. With the 1851 census came a plethora of ‘amusing’ returns: an Anglesey householder including all his animals on his census paper; a rural householder near Belfast writing under the column ‘Deaf and Dumb’, ‘Husband, not deaf, wish he was’; while a householder in Great Bowden in Derbyshire wrote ‘married, and sorry for it!’ in the column on marital status.

'Case of census-conscience', Punch, 15 April 1871, p. 147.

The 1871 census brought stories of the death of a young woman in Liverpool while filling out her census paper, and the case of a householder in rural Devon who was fined £1 for refusing to fill out his schedule because ‘he knew neither his own name nor his place of birth.’ Coverage of the 1891 census included more stories of householders refusing to complete their returns and widespread coverage of the sad story of Lord James Douglas forced to appear before the West London Police court after his children filled out the census paper while he was ill in bed, describing his wife as a ‘cross sweep’ and a ‘lunatic,’ and his son as a ‘shoeblack.’ The public ridicule he suffered seems to have contributed to his tragic death by suicide on 5 May 1891.

'Humours of the census', 11 April 1891, p. 479

If newspapers found amusement or pathos in the census returns, others found opportunities for social satire, especially on the question of women stating – or rather misstating – their ages. This problem had been of serious concern to the General Register Office, the organisers of the census after 1841. In 1851, they suggested that women over 20 depressed their ages because they ‘choose, foolishly, to represent themselves as younger than they really are,’ a point reiterated by them even as late as 1901.

'The census', Punch, 20 April 1861, p. 162

From 1841 onwards, satirical publications seized on this subject to make polite social comedy. If The Satirist set the scene in 1841, arguing that the ‘vague’ question on age in the census schedule was in response to women not wanting to state their exact age, then Punch, founded in that year, took up the subject in almost every subsequent census. Its 1861 cartoon ‘The Census’, shown above, is typical of its coverage, showing a middle-class family of two with their census-night visitor grouped around a table, on which the elderly head of the household is filling in the census paper. Asking his equally elderly spinster visitor, Miss Primrose, what he should write for her age, she states ‘The same as dear Flora. Twenty last birthday!’ Such gentle satire could descend into outright farce: in the same year, the Adelphi theatre in London staged its own take on the census, titled The Census: a Farce in One Act, in which the census schedule took centre stage, around which a variety of social embarrassments were played out in quick succession.


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Categories : everyday, information design, Victorian

Communal reading and everyday life

13 04 2012

Taking an everyday journey on the London Underground in August this year, I witnessed many different types of reading; in the carriage in which I travelled, a middle-aged couple jointly consulted a London guidebook; a man next to me perused a map of the Underground; a young woman opposite studied some hand-written notes; two passengers read the newspaper; while one was engrossed in a novel. Finally, whilst observing my fellow passengers, I scanned the advertisements on the walls of the carriage. In short, I witnessed and engaged in varied kinds of reading at work on equally varied kinds of reading material.

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On the same day I took this photograph of a group sitting on a bench along the South Bank. These three Italian visitors were engaged in an act of shared reading common to any group visiting a new city: in the centre the older female holds a London guidebook so that the other two people can read it. She looks down at the text, as does the male figure to the left, presumably her partner. Meanwhile the girl on the right, presumably her daughter, looks ahead, not reading the guide, but nevertheless closely tied in with the act of reading by the other two figures. This kind of reading would almost certainly be interrupted by other activities: conversation about decisions to be made or unrelated matters, or observations of surroundings. Finally, we can imagine this kind of shared reading replicated countless times across London at every moment of the day, perhaps more numerous and visible in areas popular with tourists.

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When studying readers of the past, such shared reading must be considered alongside the traditional emphasis on readers of literature, absorbed in their books in splendid isolation, such as those seen in David Vincent’s Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: a Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (1982), which states that ‘reading is a solitary activity’ (p. 125) despite the cover illustration showing a group of Victorian working men collectively reading a newspaper. Bringing to light the experience of shared reading, such as that seen in this photograph, might tell us much about reading as a ‘functional’ activity, that is, one that presupposes concrete acts in the world. By studying such experiences in the past, and analysing the relationship between reading and action, we will uncover varieties of everyday experience that have so far remained ignored by historians, but, like other forms of reading, warrant our close attention.

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Categories : cities, everyday, information design, London, tourism, Victorian

Ornament and memory

27 03 2012

Cast-iron capital, Skipton station, Yorkshire, 1880

‘All I remember of Pilsen, where we stopped for some time, said Austerlitz, is that I went out on the platform to photograph the capital of a cast-iron column which had touched some chord of recognition in me. What made me uneasy … was the idea that this cast-iron column, which with its scaly surface seemed almost to approach the nature of a living being, might remember me and was, if I may so put it, said Austerlitz, a witness to what I could no longer recollect for myself.’

For Austerlitz, the eponymous narrator of W. G. Sebald’s 2001 novel, the repressed memories of his traumatic childhood in Nazi Germany keep resurfacing in unexpected and disturbing contexts. These memories form the basis for the novel’s narrative structure – a kind of stream-of-consciousness text with no chapter or even paragraph breaks. But why might an ornamental cast-iron column in a provincial Czech railway station stir long-submerged memories?

Liverpool Street Station, London, 1875

Sebald, of course, doesn’t give an answer, but it’s something to do with the ‘puce-tinged encrustation’ on the iron capital which makes it seems almost alive and therefore conscious and capable of memory – of remembering Austerlitz when he was a child. A ridiculous idea, no doubt, but one that I find has strong resonances with radical notions of ornament developed by the German theorist Siegfried Kracauer just at the beginning of the rise of fascism in Germany in the early 1930s.

Paddington Station, London, 1852-55

Like other intellectuals of his generation (particularly Walter Benjamin), Kracauer was worried that the modernists’ banishment of ornament would lead to it returning in a ‘dislocated, unmediated’ form that could be utilised for the strengthening of totalitarian power – think the Nuremburg Rally or Nazi propaganda films. Yet, Kracauer also saw a radical potential in ornament. In his autobiographical novel Ginster (1928), the protagonist – an architect – challenges his own sense of alienation in modern Berlin with a developing notion of ornament – encompassing much more than conventional visual decoration and including accidental ornament (creating by the smudging of a window), schoolboy doodles, or the patterns in decaying walls. Kracauer’s broad notion of ornament allows the individual to ‘resubjectivize’ the increasingly objective and rationalised modern city by fixed visual images that mediate the present and the past, thus breaking down the distance between the individual and the whole.

York Station, 1877

It’s precisely this function of ornament that infuses Sebald’s Austerlitz with its narrative potency. Without him knowing it consciously, the cast-iron column in the railway station mediates present and past, partly because its visual appearance – covered in the encrustations of decay – provokes its appropriation as an object that is both present and bears witness to its history. And cast iron seems peculiarly suited to this kind of mediation. In countless railway stations, Victorian cast-iron ornament remains part of  structures that are at once powerfully present and also connected to a past, nebulous as that connection may be.

Preston station, 1880

From their inception in the 1830s, railway stations have functioned as potent symbols of modernity – the onward rush of technology – but also places of immense stillness – of waiting, where time past flows into time present. And, within these spaces, if one cares to stand and look, as Austerlitz did, the cast-iron ornament (especially if it’s rusted or stained) reminds us of these slippages in the sleek image of the modern. They are places where the whole is perceived – the milling crowds, the endless departures and arrivals of modern life – and, paradoxically, where we feel our individuality most strongly and the deep well of memories that we all carry.

Hellifield station, Yorkshire, 1880


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Categories : architecture, cities, everyday, iron, ornament, ruins, symbolism, Victorian

Measuring Victorian London: Mogg’s cab fare map

3 01 2012

1. Mogg’s Postal-District and Cab-Fare Map, 1859. Drawn by Edward Mogg, lithographed by C. Whittingham, London, published by William Mogg, London. 532 x 720 mm (Paul Dobraszczyk)

Running parallel to the development of fare books in the nineteenth century (like Mogg’s Ten Thousand Cab Fares) was the publication of what might be described as ‘at a glance’ information: that is, information contained on one sheet of paper in the form of comprehensive fare tables or maps. Books of fares, no matter how well designed, were clearly problematic to use, whether carried in a pocket or consulted in a cab: in a book format information could never be ascertained ‘at a glance’; pages had to be turned, indexes consulted, destinations and cab stands memorised.

2. Detail of Mogg's Cab-Fare map, 1859

Mogg attempted to address this problem with his series of Postal-District and Cab-Fare maps (1 & 2), drawn by his brother Edward. Superimposed onto a conventional topographic map of London are grid squares at half-mile intervals, labels of the postal districts, and the four-mile radius from Charing Cross (shown as a dark circle) that marked the transition from a sixpence to a shilling fare per mile. In addition, referencing aids are included around the edges of the map: letters along the top and bottom; numbers on the sides. In the 33-page index that accompanied the map and listed 3,000 places, readers were instructed on how use the map (3): first, they were to locate their required destination in the index, and, second, to memorise the letter and figure of the square required (4). By then consulting the map and matching the letter and figure to those given around its edges, the user could find the required place ‘instantly’.

3. Explanation of how to use Mogg's map

4. Index to Mogg's Cab-Fare map

Whether cab maps were indeed ‘useful’ to visitors to London is difficult to ascertain. Punch, in 1851, provided its own satirical image of a map like Mogg’s being used (5). It showed two visitors to London engaged in a ‘topographic problem’, that is, trying to use a similar map to find their way from Seven Dials to the Eastern Counties Railway Station (now Liverpool Street), a distance of about 3 miles. With one visitor holding the map securely while the other squints up close at the obviously far too detailed map to try and measure the distance with his fingers, Punch mocks the optimistic claims publishers like Mogg generally made of their maps.

4. 'Topographical problem', Punch, 1851


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Categories : cities, everyday, information design, London, maps, tourism, Victorian

Measuring Victorian London: Mogg’s cab fare book

12 12 2011

1. Title page of 'Mogg's Ten Thousand Cab Fares' (1859)

In the 1840s and 1850s one publisher dominated the field of London transport guides: William and Edward Mogg. In 1844 Edward Mogg published his first Omnibus Guide which also included a separate section detailing cab fares. Better known was his brother William’s Ten Thousand Cab Fares (1 & 2), first published in 1851 and running to many editions. The authority of this guide centred on the fares being calculated by ‘actual admeasurement’, apparently undertaken at dawn when the city was quiet, with 104 destinations measured from 74 stands using a perambulator.

2. List of fares from the cab stand at Adam Street West

It appears that readers responded enthusiastically to this new guide: The Times celebrated it as ‘one of the most useful little books that have issued from the press that would make London’s cabmen honest’. Such was its fame that the eponymous hero of Robert Surtees’s 1852 novel Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour had his Mogg as a constant companion in his pocket, not for resolving disputes with cabmen but for working out fares in his armchair at home, as a means of relaxation (3). This even extended to keeping it under his pillow at night.

3. Mr Sponge reading Mogg's book of cab fares

Mogg himself encouraged his readers to come to his own offices in cases of disputes with cabmen, where he would act as a mediating authority. If Mogg’s knowledge of London’s distances was not in question, others doubted their own abilities: one writer to The Times in March 1851, anticipating the number of visitors to the Great Exhibition who were likely to become victims to extortionate cabmen, asked: ‘who but Mr Mogg is in a condition accurately to determine exact distances?’ The Illustrated London News encouraged cabmen themselves to read Mogg, the result being that when a cabman was asked his fare ‘there would be no hesitation in his voice or manner’ for ‘he would know the precise sum and would wish for no more’ (4).

4. The Illustrated London News on London's cabs in 1853

Not surprisingly, passengers did not share this hope: even as late as 1870, one regular cab user complained in The Times that even though he had studied his Mogg well and knew ‘the exact length of a shilling fare’, he was still perplexed by the lack of a fixed system of fares. A self-confessed ‘short-sighted, corpulent, dowdy’ man, he felt helpless in the face of disputes with ‘rough’ cabmen who, as countless Punch cartoons showed, had an intractable tendency to rip-off their customers (5).

5. One of many cartoons in Punch picturing the delicate relationship between cab drivers and passengers


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Categories : cities, everyday, information design, London, Victorian

The world in a book: the Post Office London Directory

22 11 2011

1. The Post Office London Directory, 1858 (Collection of Michael Twyman)

Founded in 1800 by inspectors of the Inland letter-carriers called Ferguson and Sparkes, until 1836 the Post Office London Directory consisted mainly of an alphabetical list of names of merchants and trades in London with their occupations and addresses. The first edition in 1800 had only 250 entries; by 1839, just three years after Frederick Kelly took over the company, the directory ran to 1,187 pages with many dedicated to advertisements of one kind of another. By the time that this edition was published in 1858 (1), Kelly was issuing two versions of the directory annually: a shortened edition shown here, containing 2570 pages of close-set type, which included 366 pages of advertisements; and the full edition – in 1858, a book 11-cm thick (2).

2. Advertisements on the page ends of the Post Office London Directory, 1858

3. The Post Office London Directory for 1854 according to Punch

4. Punch's Post Office London Directory for 1859

From the early 1850s, Punch remarked upon the increasing bulk of Kelly’s London directories. In 1853, picturing a man carrying the enormous book on his back (3), Punch argued that the directory ‘laid open’ the ‘mysteries of the streets of London’ with a minuteness that even the most comprehensive city guidebook could not compete with. As an enormous encyclopaedia of London, the directory ‘not only contains all that we want to know, but precise information as to at least a couple of millions of people whom … we sincerely hope that we shall never know’. By 1859, Punch’s version of the London directory had grown to man-size proportions (4). Drawing attention to its materiality – six inches thick and weighing half a stone – the journal wondered at the work involved in the production of the directory but, as before, thought that most people would never read it, despite the fact that it would be often in their hands for the ‘occasional dip’.


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The Ancoats Peeps

3 10 2011

1. Peep 9, 'Clocking Off'

In 2002, the artist Dan Dubowitz was commissioned to contribute to the regeneration of Ancoats – an old and dilapidated industrial quarter of inner-city Manchester. Over the next eight years, he made a series of ‘Peeps’ – twelve brass peepholes in the walls of buildings viewed from the streets which revealed installations constructed in steel boxes embedded in the cavities behind. In addition, Dubowitz also helped create the area’s first public square – the Cutting Room – opened in 2010.

2. Peep 3, 'Mary's Room'

As documented in the 2011 book The Presence of Absence, the Ancoats Peeps offer ‘a fleeting glimpse of a walled-in space; a tunnel, a disused toilet, a spinning governor, a bell tower, a gauge.’ The worlds seen through the Peeps are intimately connected with Ancoats’ industrial past. It was once the first industrial suburb of the centre of the world’s cotton industry – that is, early Victorian Manchester – and the Peeps are saturated with nostalgic images of heavy industry: strange machines (2), dials, dirt and the toil of incessant work governed by the clock (1). Yet, despite being grounded in the history of the area, they are enigmatic images, strongly suggestive of former lives but ultimately mysterious in their meanings.

3. The Beach Club in Ancoats

4. The patina of decay on a wall in Ancoats

As an integral part in the planned regeneration of Ancoats, the Peeps are also much more than isolated visual reminders of the area’s industrial past; rather, they’re very much part of a projected image of a future for this now run-down and virtually silent part of the city. Walking around Ancoats on a grey Sunday afternoon with my wife and daughter, searching for the Peeps was bound up with experiencing the city in a new way. Ancoats is not an area of Manchester one would visit for any reason: it’s a forbidding place, almost devoid of people, its buildings seemingly in an interminable state of decay apart from a few pockets of gentrification. In the courtyard of one former warehouse, now converted into apartments, a makeshift nightclub is walled-in by images of the sea, its floor covered in sand (3); the wholesale decay of other buildings offering strange patterns that are sometimes mirrored in the forms of the peeps themselves (4); while a single tile on a wall is stencilled with the word ‘DEFECT’ (5). Are these also artists’ interventions, bits of history, or simply the result of natural processes of decay?

5. Defective tile or artist's intervention?

In one sense, the creation of the Peeps and the activity of looking for them makes you see urban space in a different way, one that makes everyday things suddenly seem like art (and vice versa). This re-enchantment of urban space has a long history, often bound up with densely theoretical texts and practices, but the way it happens here is disarmingly simple and bound up with an experience that is open to all (6).

6. Peeping in Ancoats


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, art, cities, everyday, Manchester, ruins, Victorian

The Vienna sewers

22 05 2011

1. The river Wien, Vienna

The prevailing image of Vienna is of a city of pleasure: the opera, waltzes, refined luxury etc. Yet, like all modern cities, it has an underside – real underground spaces that allow the city to function: from its bland yet smoothly efficient underground railway to its invisible system of sewers built at the end of the nineteenth century.

2. Scene from The Third Man (1949)

Vienna’s sewers transcend their everyday domain largely thanks to one defining representation: Carol Reed’s film The Third Man, made in 1949 and written by Graham Greene. Like all of Greene’s work, The Third Man explores human depths – unconscious motives, hidden political and personal treachery, and death – which are symbolised by, and return through, the ultra-rationalised spaces of the Vienna sewers just after the Second World War. It is here, in a celebrated sequence that the black marketer Harry Lime is cornered and finally shot by his one-time friend, Holly Martins (2). Throughout the film, the Vienna we know today is barely recognisable – here the city is battle-worn, barely more than a collection of ruins controlled by a disparate group of foreign occupiers.

3. Scenes from The Third Man projected on the sewer walls

Today, with the help of Vienna’s sewer authority, the Third Man tourist agency have cashed in on the film’s reputation and opened up – for paying visitors – the section of the city’s sewers that was actually used in the film. Descending the lotus-like manhole used by Harry Lime in his attempted escape, you enter the same murky world he inhabited. Here, montage from the film is literally projected onto the walls of the sewers (3), sounds from the film appear from unexpected crevices, and strategic lighting gives added drama to the spaces. It’s a themed excursion into the underworld that could be accused of hollowing out the originality of both film and sewer space.

4. Foul water meets clean water

5. Passages between the sewers

Yet, in reality, the raw brutalities of the sewers win out, with their grotesque stench, hostile spaces and foul rushing flows. In one space, chocolate-coloured water merges before one’s eyes into clean water in a mesmerising display of slowly-shifting eddies and whirlpools (4); in another, labyrinthine passages confuse in their topographical strangeness (5) (as they do so powerfully in the film); while, in the submerged river Wien – used by Lime to move swiftly and unnoticed between the city’s four occupied zones – is revealed as an astonishing, vaulted cavern, receding seemingly infinitely into the darkness (1 & 6). Here, with spectacularly appropriate lighting and ominous sounds, patches of graffiti can be made out along the walls of the tunnel: signs of the present-day successors of Harry Lime – those who yearn for freedom of movement and a brief respite from the oppressive rationality of the world above.

6. The river Wien under Vienna


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Categories : architecture, cities, death, everyday, film, sewers, tourism, underground space, Victorian, war

Temples of convenience: cast-iron fountains and urinals

10 03 2011

1: Water fountain, Clifton Downs, Bristol, 1866

From the mid-1850s onwards, temperance societies in Britain actively promoted the building of water fountains in public places as a potent aid in their mission against drink. In the second half of the nineteenth century many hundreds of fountains were installed in villages, towns and cities across the country. Some were constructed in stone or marble, but many more were provided for (at a lower cost) by the large iron foundries that dominated the industrial landscape of Glasgow, particularly George Smith & Co, and Walter Macfarlane. These companies produced their own designs which embraced the religious and moral language of the temperance societies. In almost identical examples found in Preston, Wallingford, and Bristol (1), Macfarlane’s design for a water fountain exploits the decorative potential of cast iron with a host of elevating aquatic motifs including: a heron standing upon leaves in the bowl of the fountain and repeated in the dome above (2); salamanders crawling on the pillars beneath the bowl (3); and Biblical and moral inscriptions above (4). Winged lions – symbols of civic pride – surmount the corners of the canopy, which in a larger example in Darwen (5), become part of a tour-de-force of naturalistic display, featuring arabesques of leaves and flowers infilled with birds supporting a dome of intertwined garlanded wreaths.

2: Heron, water fountain, Shirehampton, Bristol, 1886

3: Salamander, water fountain, Wallingford, Oxon, 1885

4: Fountain canopy, Clifton Downs, Bristol, 1866

5: Fountain canopy, Whitehall Park, Darwen, 1906

These associations of natural abundance, water, civic pride and religion were interweaving aspects of Britain’s sanitary revolution in the second half of the nineteenth century. Casting fountains in iron provided a ready means of asserting these values in visual form throughout the country at a cost far lower than the commission of individual designs for each location. They also promoted the work of specialist ornamental founders like Macfarlane and the reputation of cast iron as a material suitable for decorative treatment. Such designs could be selected from a series of examples illustrated in Macfarlane’s increasingly lavish catalogues, issued from 1855 onwards.

6: Canopy inside the men's urinal in Mina Park, Bristol, 1886

7: Men's urinal in Mina Park, Bristol, 1886

Ornamental cast iron was also responsible for another piece of sanitary street furniture in the Victorian period: the urinal. Often located in urban parks in close proximity to water fountains, Victorian urinals (in both male and female versions) still survive in Bristol, Bath, Birmingham and London. Standing beneath the dome of the urinals in Mina Park, Bristol (6), one could be forgiven for imagining oneself to be in a strange wonderland, despite the overpowering stench and rusting surfaces. Manufactured by Macfarlane’s Glasgow rivals, George Smith & Co., these urinals adopt similar motifs to those of fountains, although with an emphasis on naturalistic flora rather than fauna (7). In one sense, this naturalism is suitable to the park environment in which the urinal is located; in another, it refers to the perceived elevating nature of sanitary improvement embodied in public urinals. To perform one’s necessity in this space is no mere vulgar bodily activity; it is, rather, an ennobled act, as much part of the natural as the ornament proclaims. As such it contrasts sharply with the more familiar toilet spaces in public places, characterised by their uniform white tiles and functionalist design, where the acceptability of the excreting body depends only upon its assimilation into a neutral environment devoid of symbolic meaning.


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Categories : architecture, cities, everyday, iron, ornament, religion, Victorian

Dreams in iron: Bolton’s Victorian market hall

18 01 2011

Photograph of the interior of Bolton's market hall, c.1900

In the nineteenth century, market halls transformed the buying and selling of everyday goods. Previously, markets were usually open-air and acquired a reputation for all manner of insalubrious activities, including food riots and fighting between animals such as bears and dogs. In addition, animals were not only sold at market but also slaughtered on site, leading to complaints by more well-to-do residents about bad smells and insanitary practices that they saw emanating from the market. By the early 19th century the old market had assumed much of the social function of the old fairs – many of which had already been closed because they were regarded as centres of wickedness and immorality. They were seen as promoting bad habits – like heavy drinking, poaching and theft. In short, the market was a poorly controlled space, that for middle-class residents, provided a focus for anxieties about disorder and chaos that they saw played out in these spaces.

The new market halls that were built throughout cities and towns in the Victorian period were promoted against the background of these perceptions. Bolton’s new market hall was a relatively early example of the aspirations of civic authorities in promoting a transformed urban environment of buying and selling. Constructed between 1853 and 1856 and designed by the architect G. T. Robinson, Bolton’s market hall was, for many years, one of Britain’s largest – it measured 218 by 300 feet – larger than any railway station from this period. The interior is divided into two nave-like spaces that cross in the centre: a 50 foot wide nave on the long side and an equal width one on the short side. This created a dramatic focus for an elaborate fountain in the interior, now sadly lost. At the intersection of the two naves is an elaborate cast iron lantern, rendered in a kind of arabesque form of decoration – semicircular arches and richly decorated spandrels that towers 112 feet above the central space.

Interior of Bolton's market hall today

Detail of the ornamental cast iron lantern, Bolton market hall

The principle reason why Bolton got a new market hall was to in order to improve the town’s health by removing food sales from the unsanitary open market and to bring the town’s public market in closer proximity to its growing population. Just as important was the intention to elevate the town’s status by means of a lavish but orderly architectural display. What we get is a monumental Classical exterior, complete with a Corinthian portico with 50ft high columns and taking up an entire block in the town centre. This contrasts sharply with the iron and glass interior and its sense of open space and lightness, which was a necessary aspect of its sanitary requirements: both light and air were considered prerequisites for a clean environment and these could only be achieved in such a large space by using iron and glass.

Commemorative wood engraving of Bolton's market hall, 1856

Bolton’s new market hall was opened on 19 December 1855 to an audience of 18-20,000 people, with 3,000 women of Bolton seated in the galleries. In fact, the whole town was effectively closed for the day and given a public holiday: church bells rang, flags adorned many buildings, while a procession moved through the streets. What all of this demonstrates is that market halls, like Bolton’s, were much more than functional buildings: they were a visual spectacle in themselves, a kind of architectural showpiece for the town. The first visitors described the interior of Bolton’s market hall as reminiscent of ‘the fabled palace of Aladdin, or its more real type, the Moorish palaces of Granada and the East’. In the ornamental ironwork, they perceived an exotic counterpart, one that contributed to the market hall becoming the focus of entertainment on Saturday evenings, but of a more civil kind than bear baiting. Social mixing was encouraged in its new spaces, because they were clean and well controlled by the police. They provided a model in defining morally uplifting urban leisure-cum-commerce. The iron and glass interior – with its rich decoration – was perceived as a fitting location for this new form of entertainment. If the market was now sanitised it was equally glamorised.


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Categories : architecture, cities, everyday, iron, ornament, symbolism, Victorian

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