The afterlife of objects: the Coalbrookdale gates

9 02 2012

1. The Coalbrookdale gates at the International Exhibition in 1862

When the Coalbrookdale Company exhibited a lavish set of ornamental cast-iron gates at the International Exhibition in London in 1862, they were building on a well-established reputation for ‘artistic’ castings. Celebrated by the Illustrated London News as ‘pure and rich in character’ (1), these gates were probably created as a gift for Queen Victoria to guard her rural residence at Sandringham; evidenced in their combining of highly naturalistic motifs – flowers and leaves – and the Prince of Wales’s feathers braided in a wreath of laurels over the centre of the gates. The eminent Victorian sculptor, John Bell, designed the figures standing atop the pillars as well as some of the other Coalbrookdale exhibits shown behind the gates – a statue of Oliver Cromwell and an ornamental umbrella stand.

In the event, it seems that the Queen snubbed the offer of the gates for her Sandringham estate – the story being that, on seeing the gates at the Exhibition, she took offence at the nearby statue of Cromwell and, by association, decided that all the Coalbrookdale Company’s products might be tainted with republican sympathies. After the Exhibition, the gates and the Cromwell statue went back to Coalbrookdale and languished there in a warehouse for many decades.

2. Warrington's heraldic motifs incorporated into the gates

3. The gates with Macfarlane's new lamps, installed in 1895

Yet, both objects had an afterlife. In 1893, Frederick Monks, a wealthy iron founder from Warrington, discovered the gates at Coalbrookdale and offered them as a gift to his home town. They were re-erected at the entrance to Warrington’s town hall, the royal regalia replaced with the heraldic motifs of the town (2). At the same time, the Glasgow iron founder, Walter Macfarlane, erected many ornamental lamps in the town, including two flanking the gates, as well as a new railing extending around the park surrounding the town hall (3). With a great deal of civic ceremony, the gates were opened on 28 June 1895 – the date of Warrington’s most important annual festival, Walking Day, when garlanded children paraded around the town in a visual spectacle of civic boosterism (4). The gates quickly became a source of local pride, the product of an act of personal philanthropy that provided an aesthetic and decorative reference point in a disheartening urban landscape. They also proved to be a spur for similar acts of public giving and Monks himself bought the Cromwell statue for Warrington in 1899, with another local bigwig, Sir Peter Walker, donating a lavish ornamental cast-iron fountain, made by Macfarlane and installed in the park beyond the gates (5).

4. The opening of the gates on Walking Day, 28 June 1895

5. Ornamental cast-iron fountain installed in the park behind the gates in 1899

Yet, the story doesn’t end there. For, in March 1942, all these cast-iron objects were at the centre of a fierce debate when the War Government required that many towns and cities remove their cast-iron fittings to be reconstituted as munitions. It seems that the citizens of Warrington willingly gave up the ornamental fountain to be melted down but resisted attempts to do the same to its railings and gates. Residents objected to the brutal assault on their private property and the mess that was often left behind. While many of the town’s gates were being made into guns, the Coalbrookdale examples survived, perhaps because they now represented the town as a whole, rather than any one individual; and they continue to do so today, providing a vision of luxurious abundance in an otherwise rather nondescript post-industrial townscape (6).

6. The Coalbrookdale gates today


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Categories : iron, London, ornament, symbolism, Victorian, war

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

Study day on decorative iron and Victorian architecture

19 12 2011

Saturday 24 March 2012 — Book here

10am to 5.30pm. Art Workers’ Guild, 6 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AT.

A study day organised by me (Dr Paul Dobraszczyk) exploring the development of decorative cast iron in Victorian architecture.

Victorian architects and theorists made a clear distinction between ‘building’ and ‘architecture’: for them, a building became architecture only when historical references were invoked. The development of new constructive materials, in particular cast iron, directly challenged this perceived distinction. A new material possessed no history: how, therefore, could it be architectural?

Dragons in the Kirkgate Market Hall, Leeds, 1901-04

The development of decorative cast iron in architecture – the subject of this study day – was seen as a solution to this problem, and it flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century when it was applied in an astonishing variety of contexts: street furniture, exhibition buildings, seaside architecture, railway stations, industrial buildings, glasshouses, museums, market halls and arcades. it was a time when some architects, engineers and theorists believed that the fusion of iron and historical and natural motifs would both enact a reconciliation of art and technology and also create a new, modern architectural language.

'Birdcage' bandstand, Brighton, 1883

Despite much new research on the structural use of iron in this period, its decorative use in britain has received no significant attention from historians since the early 1960s, mainly as a consequence of its condemnation by influential champions of architectural modernism. in the light of the waning of modernism’s dominance and a questioning of its nineteenth-century origins, it is high time for a reassessment of this rich but neglected subject.

Tracery, Paddington railway station, 1854

Talks include:

Iron and its Critics Dr Paul Dobraszczyk, University of Manchester

Iron and the Railways Dr Steven Brindle, English Heritage

Seaside Architecture and Iron Professor Fred Gray, Sussex University

Scottish Ironwork David Mitchell, Historic Scotland

Iron and Victorian Shopping Dr Paul Dobraszczyk

Exporting Iron Buildings Jonathan Clarke, English Heritage

Conservation of Ornamental Iron Ali Davey, Historic Scotland

To book your place go here and download the booking form.

Water fountain, Glasgow Green, 1893


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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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A Victorian collaboration: two London lamps

29 07 2011

1. Lamp in Southwark Street, London, The Builder, 1865

This extraordinary cast iron lamp, one of a pair unveiled in Southwark Street in London in January 1865, was designed by an architect, Charles Henry Driver for Joseph Bazalgette, the chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, and was manufactured by the ironfounder Walter Macfarlane, based in Glasgow. It was this collaboration that formed the focus of the illustration of the lamp provided in The Builder published a week before the lamp was unveiled (1). Although not specified in the text accompanying the image, the identity of one of these figures is revealed by this photograph below, which undoubtedly formed the basis for the engraving (2).

2. Photograph of the lamp and Walter Macfarlane

3. Detail of the figures around the lamp

In the photograph Walter Macfarlane himself stands in front of one of the lamps, erected in the grounds of his Glasgow foundry before being transported and re-erected in Southwark Street. The features of both lamp and Macfarlane in the engraving correspond almost exactly with the photograph, although reversed as one would expect with a printed image. However, more figures are introduced into the engraving (3), including the recognisable figure of Bazalgette behind Macfarlane, who has presumably brought his wife to admire the quality of the lamp. The figure on horseback on the right and the related female figure are probably Charles Driver and his wife, although his name isn’t mentioned in the accompanying text. Driver definitely did appear in another Builder illustration in 1868 (4), showing another Macfarlane-produced lamp that is explicitly stated in the text as designed by Driver – to the left of lamp, he appears, with his wife, opposite Bazalgette, although this time minus Macfarlane. Driver’s features are replicated in the 1865 image, including his riding crop, which appears in the 1868 image, despite the absence of an accompanying horse (5).

4. Another lamp depicted in The Builder, 1868

5. Detail of the figures around the lamp

Even without this close observation, it’s clear that the 1865 image shows both an architectural object and the key players in its coming-into-being – namely, patron, designer and manufacturer. Indeed the collaboration depicted is very like that which produced the image in the first place, that is between an artist and wood engraver, represented in the image itself as the two signed names at the bottom left and right of both prints (1 & 4) – W G Smith and Walmsley.


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Categories : cities, iron, London, ornament, Victorian

Another Place

14 07 2011

Another Place, Brighton-le-sands, Merseyside

Another Place is a seaside sculpture by the British artist Anthony Gormley. It consists of 100 cast-iron replicas of the artist’s body arranged over a 2-mile stretch of beach near Crosby north of Liverpool. Originally made in 1997 for exhibition on a beach in Germany, the sculpture travelled from there to Norway, Belgium and finally Britain where, after much local debate, it was decided to keep the sculpture permanently.

1: 'Sound II', Winchester Cathedral crypt, 1986

2: Figure on the roof of the Royal Festival Hall, London, 'Blind Light' exhibition, 2007

Cast iron is a material Gormley uses on a regular basis – and casts of his body appear in such diverse locations as the crypt in Winchester Cathedral (1) and on the tops of various buildings in London, as part of his 2007 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (2). In making multiple replicas of his own body, Gormley invites questions about the production of art, the mechanisation of the human body, and how the reproduction of art affects our consciousness of it. In addition, in his use of cast iron, Gormley harks back to an earlier era of industrialisation and the location of works like Another Place and The Angel of the North in former centres of industry reinforce these connections.

In Another Place these connections are further strengthened by cast iron’s relationship with the British seaside. In many of Britain’s seaside resorts, cast iron was formative in the transformation of sites defined by wild nature into artificial environments, in that it provided the raw material for both structures (piers, pavilions and shelters) and ornamental utilities (lamps, railings, toilets and kiosks). Today, much of this Victorian ironwork remains but now, in its state of rusting decay, a melancholic reminder of the slow decline of British seaside resorts from their heyday in the early twentieth century.

3: Another Place, figure on the shoreline

4: Another Place, rusting head

5: Another Place, view towards Liverpool docks

Gormley’s sculptures fill a relatively undeveloped stretch of coastline north of Liverpool, away from the Victorian resorts of Southport or New Brighton. All the figures face the same way – out to sea – and they are arranged in lines stretching from the high- to low-water tide lines. What is striking about the figures is their varying degrees of naturalisation. In only a few years, some of the figures are almost completely covered in barnacles or seaweed (3); others are rusted with golden patterns (4); some seem almost as new; others have even been given clothes to cover up their nakedness (5). Where Victorian cast iron in nearby Southport is being repainted to keep rust at bay, here the iron is deliberately exposed to the violent natural forces of wind, sea, sand and salt. The result is a sense of positive value given to both artifice and nature and the relationship between the two, which here assumes a highly individual character despite the original figures being exact replicas. Here, Gormley perhaps offers, in these cast iron figures, a metaphor of ourselves being both similar to each other but also made unique by our individual trajectories in life.


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Categories : iron, landscapes, seaside, Victorian

Architecture and history: London Bridge station

17 06 2011

1. The Shard under construction in June 2011

In its slow progress upwards, London’s Shard (1) is already Britain’s most high-profile skyscraper and, when finished, will be – at 1,017 feet – the tallest building in Europe. According to its architect, Renzo Piano, part of the inspiration for the design came from the railway tracks adjacent to the site of the new building, which centre on London Bridge station, one of London’s eighteen railway termini, and constructed mainly in the mid-1860s out of an existing jumble of buildings of several competing railway companies (2). At the present time, Network Rail are planning to remodel the entire station – an attempt to transform a notoriously cramped, messy site characterised by spatial confusion into a building that reflects the character of its new spectacular neighbour.

2. London Bridge Station from the south

The contrast between the two buildings – Shard and London Bridge Station – is startling. The Shard is the epitome of spectacular high-tech modernity in architecture, a spire entirely clad in glass panels that will create a dazzling landmark visible for miles around; while London Bridge station is Victorian bric-a-brac architecture, its bits and pieces including a brick train-shed wall fronting St Thomas Street pierced with monumental arches, and an enormous viaduct stretching for nearly a mile southwards, slicing the land in half and supported on a repeating series of  triple polychrome arches (3), pierced by tunnels that link Tooley and St Thomas’s Street (4). Today, most of the arches are in an advanced state of decay, their polychrome facades chipped and faded, the cornices awry and sunken from decades of neglect (5).

3. London Bridge viaduct from St Thomas Street in 2004

Network Rail’s plan to sweep away much of this Victorian heritage in its new design for the station has encountered opposition, mainly from local residents, channelled through the Bermondsey Village Action Group (BVAG). As Southwark Council plan to line St Thomas Street with new high-rise office buildings, the BVAG are formulating an alternative ‘heritage-based’ approach that seeks to conserve and repair the existing Victorian buildings. The central question raised by these plans is one of urban image: on the one hand, the Shard proclaims a new image for the city, centred on the idea of architecture as talismanic presence, inspiring a new spirit of urban optimism that looks forward and not to history; on the other, London Bridge station asks us to appreciate urban space shaped by the chaotic and conflicting demands of both city life and of its history, its decay prompts thoughts on what exactly should be valued in the built environment. For some, the sense of decay and mess around London Bridge station is a positive attribute in itself – a liberating alternative to the clean surfaces and ordered spaces of an increasingly dominant high-tech urbanism.

4. Tunnel under the viaduct between Tooley and St Thomas St

5. Decaying arch near Crucifix Lane

What would continue to make this site really interesting is a willingness to engage with multiple ways of imagining urban space, its future as well as its past. Despite the fears of many, the presence of the Shard may not necessarily overwhelm the long and complex history of the site; at the moment at least it serves to highlight the contradictions and juxtapositions that make big cities such fascinating places to be. Whether or not that continues to be the case depends on how much we allow our urban spaces to be shaped only by one seemingly overpowering image and not by the many that have given them their history.


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, London, ornament, ruins, underground space, Victorian

Victorian bazaars

11 05 2011

The introduction of shopping arcades in Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century coincided with another new retail space, the bazaar. More exclusively a building type confined to early-Victorian England, the bazaar, in common with the arcade, collected a variety of traders under one roof and were controlled by a single proprietor. Unlike arcades, bazaars were defined by their spatial openness and by their multifunctional spaces: many also included winter gardens, picture galleries, tea rooms, and other spaces for other popular entertainments, such as dioramas and panoramas. In his Curiosities of London (1867), John Timbs listed nine bazaars in London, the first being the Soho bazaar (1816), but they were adopted in many other towns and cities in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. As their name suggests, bazaars were adapted from the Islamic model of a covered shopping space characterised not by luxury goods but by their variety of trades. Yet, architecturally, they had little in common with their Islamic precedents and were based on a series of courtyards and rooms with skylights, light wells, and multilevel galleries.

The Pantheon Bazaar in 1845

With their emphasis on spatial openness, entertainment and multifunctional spaces, it is not surprising that bazaars, rather than arcades, became the focus of architectural experimentation in early Victorian retail spaces. London’s Pantheon bazaar was built in 1834 by Sydney Smirke inside the existing Pantheon theatre, built in 1812. With its wide, sky-lit, basilica-style hall, rich papier maché ornamentation, and an iron-and-glass aviary ‘ornamented in Saracenic style’, the building evoked wonder to its first visitors. Such ornamental extravagance also characterised bazaars in provincial towns. The Norfolk and Norwich Royal bazaar, built on St Andrew’s Street in Norwich in 1831, included a gallery level that functioned as both a retail and exhibition space and which was supported by ornamental cast-iron columns in the form of palm trees, a decorative embellishment originally employed in the Brighton Pavilion (1815-16). Whilst bazaars did not follow Islamic precedents in terms of their design, the flamboyance of their decoration and inclusion of exotic spaces such as aviaries and winter gardens had direct, if generalised, oriental associations. Palm leaves were equated with distant, exotic lands; aviaries derived from an Indian building type; while ‘Saracenic’ ornament referred more specifically to Islamic motifs such as the horseshoe arch, geometric surface decoration and arabesques.

St James' Bazaar, London, c.1830

The Crystal Palace Bazaar, London, 1858

The most architecturally adventurous bazaar of the Victorian period was the Crystal Palace bazaar (1858). Designed by Owen Jones, this bazaar was conceived as a city-centre complement of the Crystal Palace building, re-erected in the south-London suburbs in 1852-54. Squeezed between buildings fronting London’s most crowded shopping streets – Oxford and Regent Street – the Crystal Palace bazaar had multiple entrances and a spacious interior with a wide hall covered with a vault 36-feet high. In common with Jones’s other retail architecture, the bazaar was characterised by a highly original treatment of iron and glass: the vault was formed from wrought-iron ribs infilled with diamond- and star-shaped coloured glass; and the vault itself was supported on two tiers of ornamental cast-iron columns. In addition, Jones paid careful attention to colour: the interior cast-iron columns were painted light blue, white, and red in their upper sections with dark maroon, light blue and white below, with the abacuses of each column and the gallery railing gilded. The effect, according to The Illustrated London News, was a ‘gem-lighted hall’ with ‘golden and silvery light’ that was even more magical at night when lit by gas lamps.


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

Great Victorian ways

25 02 2011

1: Joseph Paxton, perspective view of the Great Victorian Way, 1855

In July 1855, a Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications published its report on how best to improve London’s chronic traffic congestion. One of the proposals came from Joseph Paxton, celebrated designer of the Crystal Palace in 1851. Paxton’s plan comprised a vast iron and glass arcade, which would form an uninterrupted covered space of 10 miles around central London: the ‘Great Victorian Way’ (1). Unsurprisingly, given its projected cost of £11 million, the Committee decided not to adopt this scheme, despite Paxton’s high reputation, and would later choose a far less ambitious underground railway, which was built from 1859-63.

2: Wayfarer's arcade, Southport, 1896

Despite the failure of utopian projects like Paxton’s, the idea of a micro-city under glass and iron persisted in the second half of the 19th century. Although never realised on the kind of scale envisaged by Paxton, there were attempts to create sealed environments offering protection from both the elements and the chaos of the street, most notably in the countless shopping arcades that were built in Victorian towns and cities. One of these – the Wayfarer’s Arcade in Southport – was designed to integrate into an already existing network of covered walkways. Built in 1896 by the Scottish iron manufacturer Walter Macfarlane, this arcade extends the concept of the canopy beyond the street, creating a new enclosed space between two buildings fronting Lord Street (2).

3: Lord Street, Southport

In fact, Lord Street itself is unique in its scale in the Victorian period. For over half a mile, covered canopies project from the shops creating an almost continuous shelter for shoppers in the unpredictable seaside weather of north-west England (3). These canopies were not built by a central municipal authority (as would have been the case if Paxton’s proposal had been built), but by individual property owners responding to demand. One at a time, and presumably in competition with one another, each property owner acquired a canopy for their premises, employing a host of mainly Glasgow-based iron manufacturers to produce ornamental cast-iron columns and railings. So the castings of Walter Macfarlane sit next to those of J & A Law (4); those of McDowell, Steven & Co sit next to George Smith (5). Different-sized columns sit side by side in what amounts to an exhibition of the ironfounders technique. The result is a sense of unity in diversity, with each company vying with its competitors to produce the most elaborate designs to attract customers and heighten the esteem of the property owners. It is almost as if the resulting covered arcade is an accident, achieved piecemeal over the years by the principles of free competition.

4: Lord Street canopies, Southport

5: Lord Street canopies, Southport

If Southport’s Lord Street represents the part-realisation of utopian dreams in relation to iron and glass, other seaside resorts had similar ambitions. As early as 1874, Walter Macfarlane proposed building a mile-long iron colonnade under the cliffs in Brighton. This was never built, but its concept was revived 25 years later in the construction of Madeira Drive (6), a vast covered walkway that formed part of the wholesale re-sculpting of the cliffs to the east of the Palace Pier, which included terraced walkways and an elevator at the eastern end. All of this was the product of cast iron being produced and employed on an industrial scale for decorative purposes. The resulting colonnade was likened to a enormous grotto, hewn from the cliff and emblazoned with mythic subjects: Neptune, acanthus leaves, and water nymphs. This was iron remaking nature into a modern, progressive space but simultaneously adopting the image of an ancient and mythic past.

6: Madeira Drive, Brighton, 1888-95


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Categories : architecture, cities, iron, London, ornament, seaside, symbolism, Victorian

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