People's Palaces - The Golden Age of Civic Architecture: Neo Classical [BBC, Full Documentary]

in the north of england we used to build in solid brick and stone today we clad in glass and steel this is liverpool one the city fathers have delivered unto the people of liverpool the biggest city center shopping development outside london in fact since the end of the second world war these 42 acres will only ever be shops temples rising to the sky to celebrate the new gods the big brands but once upon a time when the north built the world looked on and applauded the city fathers then had different ideas of how architecture could contribute to the shape of their cities and improve the lives of their citizens by lining the streets not with temples to the gods of commerce but buildings that expressed the grandeur and nobility of a great civilization those who gave liverpool its architectural treasures would inspire other city fathers right across the north of england the civic buildings they created would transform the industrial towns of lancashire and yorkshire and revolutionize urban landscapes for decades to come money rivalry ambition and power sounds like a jackie collins novel but i'm talking about victorian architecture in the industrial north of england 200 years ago these cities were themselves novel but a new breed of mercantile princes and governors came to build a raft of civic buildings to explore those buildings is to uncover the messages that reveal their story in the 17th century before the industrial revolution the north looked nothing like it does today liverpool the famous second city of empire was an insignificant backwater a small town of just seven streets wars changed all that with the english channel littered with french and dutch warships the southern ports became too dangerous for merchant sailors liverpool offered a safer destination for their cargo tobacco and sugar from the new world and so very quickly the town became a major trading port and its inhabitants grew very rich indeed on the proceeds brian blundell was one such man a salty liverpool sea dog whose life on the high seas skirmishing with pirates was the stuff of boy's own adventures from cabin boy at age 12 he rose to become one of liverpool's richest sea captains after nearly 30 years at sea in 1717 he came home to liverpool and decided to spend some of his wealth on a project for the public good a school for poor and orphaned children the architect of the blue coat chambers is unknown but this was the english baroque the ultra fashionable style popularized by sir christopher wren architect of saint paul's the blue coat is the oldest building in liverpool city center a real charmer look at it it's a very pretty building and it's in what's normally called the queen anne style which to me is the end of the 17th century tradition of classical building that tradition is to do with craftsmanship and inventiveness a certain clumsiness and charm that go hand in hand let me show you what i mean this gate pier in classical building you'd call this rustication um which means big chunky blocks that come from the earth but here actually it's just cut in the shape of timber paneling totally illogical wonderfully charming but pointless through the arches and you'll realize that you've come through gate piers with pyramids on the top and this is the way in which you sometimes get the clumsy charm coupled with really profound meaning because those pyramids uh signifiers have a gate between two states in ancient egypt the gateway to the afterlife and people understood that these symbols of death and so for the georgians then gateways were the trans transition point between two spaces and for children coming into a school those urchins who came from the city and then made their way through the gates to an education and a new life pyramids would be the appropriate form now the symmetry of the whole thing and the alignment of all the windows creates this wonderful sense of order when you first see the building but when you get beyond that basic pattern into the details that's where queen and buildings can often fall down take for example that string course which is a horizontal band of stone dividing two stories you see it it starts between the coin stones they are the cornerstones that give you a sense of of mass and strength on the corner well it's not the same proportion as them it's just wedged in between them it's a bit awkward it's it's it is not of the rest of those stones and it continues this flat band going right the way across it frankly crashes into the door halfway through its moulding and then it carries on and where it meets the main range it just smashes into the side of another coin stone the whole thing is a bit of a car crash when you look at the details it's the way in which the whole thing is not unified consistently which shows this to be the work of someone who's making it up as he goes along who is craft-based and it's not someone who is rigorous it may be a slightly botched bit of building but the blue coat did at least appear to meet an urgent social need in 1795 the writer james wallace published a general and descriptive history of the ancient and present state of the town of liverpool he wrote of the blue coat there are in this school 79 orphan children 143 fatherless children and 58 whose parents are in indigent circumstances they are completely clothed lodged and dieted the boys are taught reading writing and arithmetic and those intended for c are instructed in navigation the girls are taught reading writing sewing spinning knitting and housewifery children are admitted at eight years of age and put out apprentices at 14. the patrons may have felt they were offering poor children a life of relative privilege and comfort but that's not the whole story lawrence how were the blue coat children treated well for many of the children it was a real step up you know three meals a day an education these a lot of these children would have been little more than than a street urchins but probably most disturbingly if your child came to the school you lost all rights to how they would be apprenticed when they came to leave it was the responsibility of blundell so where did blondel's money come from uh well blundell traded mainly with the chesapeake area of uh north america transported tobacco he was also involved in transporting what we call refuse slaves terrible term and that was slaves that had been working with sugar and sugar is such a labor-intensive crop that slaves would basically become exhausted after a very short period of time and he would take these slaves which you could buy on the cheap up to the chesapeake to work on tobacco which was a less labor intensive crop so it was a form of speculation so he was basically a slave trader and a tobacco merchant if you go to the records office you can see book after book of a print of indentures where apprentices are literally their lives are being signed away in the name of brian bundle to go and work on board slave ships or it's going to work on the plantations of the chesapeake or in the caribbean and many of those children would have never seen their parents ever again or seen liverpool so liverpool's slave culture is is endemic it's so ingrained that what seems to be a philanthropic project actually fuels slave culture african children also came to be educated here and many of them would go back to africa to help to facilitate trade because they would have a good command of english after spending a few years at the school so it was a place that was it certainly had a purpose it wasn't necessarily just for the benefit of the children who came here i've learned something from the blue coat it's not that there's a strong link between trade and philanthropy in early 18th century liverpool i mean this stuff's got to be paid for somehow it is the depth of self-interest that this early school building represents a really uncomfortable link between charity and brutality throughout the 18th century liverpool was controlled by men like blundell the traders businessmen and merchants who made up the corporation it was a closed shop of cronies unelected sons who succeeded their fathers on point of death they looked after the town's needs but chiefly they looked after their own in the three decades since blondel built the blue coat liverpool had prospered to such an extent it needed a new symbol of civic identity this is liverpool town hall the chosen architect was the fashionable designer john wood of bath woods buildings were essays in the style of one of the most influential architects of all time the 16th century italian genius andrea palladio an important principle of palladian buildings is that they're bound by symmetry geometry and number in firm proportion they're about the creation of order using a flexible repertoire of classical elements and what better way to convince the people of your town that you're in control than to make an example of order in the design of your town hall in this case the typical features are these the rusticated base which elevates the main rooms up to the first floor level called the piano noblely the use of the classical column on the side to give a sense of meter and rhythm and proportion one really crucial feature and this is what palladia is quite famous for is the application of a temple front to a building it gives it a sense of centrality of balance and nobility and positioned at the end of castle street this is a monument liverpool couldn't ignore the new town hall wasn't all order and restraint to glance between the sculpted capitals is to go on a virtual safari as you encounter a crocodile an elephant a lion and hyenas not to mention the heads of african characters clearly in the 1740s the slave trade was nothing to be embarrassed about it was to be shouted from the rooftops to all people for all time but neither the slaves whose sweat paid for this building nor the workers who sweat actually built it were ever allowed inside everything that lay beyond that front door was strictly off limits to all but the city elite john wood's fine town hall marked the heart of modern liverpool the exchange on the ground floor and these reception rooms above are simply two sides of the same golden coin because those same merchants who traded in the daytime traded the business of politics in these rooms in the evening wood's name lent cache to the project he was commissioned to create a building both functional and seductive where liverpool's legendary corporate hospitality could grease the wheels of trade now joseph to what extent was this town hall a real seat of government well municipal government in the late 18th and early 19th century was on a much more modest scale from what we're used to today so the government of the town was confined to a few rooms on the ground floor of the building and but the most important function of the building was on the first floor and was the provision of space for entertainment a suite of rooms for banqueting for balls and meetings of that kind so tell us how this place was used for entertaining well liverpool was a great commercial center who had a constant stream of vip visitors from overseas um and this is the place where they were entertained by the town and so there were constantly parties and balls and things of that kind taking place in these rooms one thing that strikes me joseph about this town hall is that if you compared it to a building and let's say florence or rome it is essentially a palace isn't it it's a palazzo it's a square building with the noise and the dirt of commerce at the ground floor and elevated above it is this grand suite of rooms with gilding and formal reception and so on i mean this is a grand mercantile palace isn't it yes i think what you just described is is true and it's um it's a kind of microcosm of liverpool um this uh affluent lifestyle of for the few uh based on commercial activity at a lower level palladio was from the republic of venice an independent city-state which derived its wealth and its power from its position as a strategic trading port it may be no accident that liverpool chose the palladian style for its town hall the northern towns could never compete architecturally with london but by emulating other great cities of the past they sent out a message as to how they wished to be seen it's tempting to walk past this fine town hall and think of 18th century liverpool as simply a place of growth and prosperity but for some contemporary observers it had a serious image problem indeed the intellectual life of the town was described as a barren waste all money no class the very same men who were prepared to spend fortunes on beautiful architecture also frequented rowdy societies like the ugly club essentially a drinking club where the merchants would sing bawdy songs and find each other for failing to consume enough alcohol condition of entry an ugly face any member who married would be disbarred and if an uglier man joined well then the least ugly member would be ejected there were however some voices speaking out against all this philistinism one such voice belonged to william roscoe a man of gentle manners and thoughtful mind when roscoe died they said he was a man too civilized for his own town born the son of a publican he was entirely self-taught a barrister amateur botanist and keen art collector his wife jane once sent him out to buy apples and he came back with a painting his collection of medieval italian art hangs today in the walker art gallery roscoe also wrote a best-selling biography of lorenzo de medici the renaissance banker diplomat and artistic patron and for many the father of mercantile philanthropy roscoe's biography contained a thesis which set the model for the victorian relationship with culture he argued that the glories of renaissance florence weren't due to the established church or to the aristocracy it was down to lorenzo himself who ushered in a period of peace and let the self-made manufacturers and merchants spend their wealth on works of art it was they who translated personal magnificence into common munificence quite a standard to set for liverpool roscoe himself put his money where his mouth was and became a key player in the formation of the liverpool athenaeum that name athenaeum it was chosen specifically to link a northern english town with athens the civilization whose golden age produced many of the great philosophers artists and scientists of antiquity london and many other cities would later build athenaeu of their own but liverpool's was the very first the original building was demolished in 1928 but its replacement still upholds the same athenian values david what was the inspiration for the afternoon and why in liverpool well of course in 1797 when the the afternoon was founded louisville was a fairly rich city and the only place you could read papers was uh was in the coffee shops and they were crowded and noisy and the people couldn't always get the papers they wanted so a group of uh people got got together and founded the afternoon really as a quiet place to come and read the papers so how did the athenaeum contribute to the culture of 19th century liverpool it's certainly a library it's certainly a club i mean one of the great strengths is that you've got all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds political religious and so on who like to have an intellectual conversation roscoe and his fellow athenaeum members were abolitionists and progressive thinkers they believed a modern city had to be more than just a place of commercial exchange it should be a focus for culture learning and sociability as those ideas gained in currency so the turn of the century saw an increase in gentlemen's clubs and institutes devoted to arts and science across the north and guess which architectural style they chose for the exteriors of their buildings liverpool's lyceum was europe's first lending library designed by thomas harrison in 1802 this fine little building has good strong bones greek bones at that and a greek name and there are three greek characters that convey a message about liverpool's identity on that side is a geographer possibly eratosthenes mapping the world with his dividers on this side is hermes god of communication and commerce about to send a packet of something somewhere in the middle is apollo god of the arts music poetry put those three together then you get a sense of what liverpool's all about exploration begets commerce begets culture liverpool was fast becoming the athens of the north stung into action manchester's merchants struck the first blow in what would become a game of architectural one-upmanship they recruited the man who built liverpool's lyceum thomas harrison and instructed him to build their handsome portico library and it didn't stop there the next thing manchester built would signal the arrival of a remarkable talent just a hundred yards from the portico is the royal manchester institution a building for the promotion of art paid for by the town's mill owners they invited architects to enter an open competition to win the commission triumphant was a callow 29 year old who would go on to become one of the greatest british architects of all time the plans of the winner charles barry were widely circulated and drew the admiration even of the king himself george iv what they represent is a very practical realization of all the criteria of the competition brief in a greek revival design you'll see the greek style in the ionic columns and the greek sculpture but barry went on his grand tour in 1817 age 22 and he reached as far as egypt and you'll see in the raking shape of the windows and even some little hint in the curving cornice that there's some inspiration from egypt here as well like all the other contenders barry submitted his design under a motto the one he chose was nihil pulchram nissi utale beauty is nothing without utility his building is a manifestation of that principle in keeping with barry's neoclassical theme the vestibule was decorated with casts of the parthenon marbles whilst upstairs were large and practical rooms to display the art the institution provided the people of manchester with a building to inspire and educate right next door to it is another barry building manchester's own athenaeum built almost 40 years after liverpool's but there is a difference whereas liverpool's athlete was very much an exclusive gentleman's club for affluent subscribers the manchester version was a genuine adult education institute intended to provide cultural opportunities for blue collar workers there it is hewn into the stone for the advancement and diffusion of knowledge charles dickens spoke at its annual general meeting in 1846 i think it's grand to know that while her factories re-echo with the clanking of stupendous engines and the whirl and rattle of machinery the immortal mechanism of god's own hand the mind is not forgotten in the din and uproar but is lodged and tended in a palace of its own charles barry would go on to find fame as the designer of the houses of parliament but the gothic revival had yet to reach manchester at this point the appropriate language for civic architecture was still that of classical civilization it isn't hard to work out why the burgers of england's northern towns found the architecture of ancient greece so appealing the age of the grand tour was in full swing the privileged class of architects could now travel to greece and behold the wonders of the ancient world with their own eyes the fashion for all things greek was further fueled by the work of romantic poets like byron and lord elgin's exhibition of stunning marbles from the parthenon the men who paid for these buildings believed this monumental architecture was good for the common man the rapidly expanding cities with all their attendant crime and squalor were unsettling unstable and even uncivilized places to live but to emulate greek aesthetics was to emulate the cradle of civilization itself the bible for all this greek building was stewart and revit's antiquities of athens which provided architects with a pattern book of authentic greek detail sadly too many failed to adhere rigorously to the principles identified in the book playing fast and loose with the rules resulted in an architectural mishmash by the time the manchester athenaeum was built in 1836 liverpool was already preparing its response the game of architectural one-upmanship was about to enter a new phase in 1827 the liverpool architect john foster jr built this the oratory a mortuary building which now stands just beneath the city's magnificent anglican cathedral foster who had previously visited greece during his own grand tour of europe showed the fastidiousness of the true purist in what is his last surviving masterwork the columns of this building are different outside to inside the outside ones are doric they seem to derive from typically buildings like the parthenon on the acropolis and these internal columns are also from the acropolis they're from the nearby erecthion and they're of the ionic order more feminine order than doric it's actually associated with learning as if they're scrolls of parchment to be pulled out in a way that plato or his acolytes might have done at the athenian academy beautifully carved the egg and dark moulding in particular is this greek device that the romans then used by the mile but everything is harmonious integrated proportional and the quality of the curves on those spirals is just endlessly elegant liverpool architect james pickton said that the city used greek architecture in all possible and some almost impossible situations by impossible he was thinking of modern many windowed buildings like houses banks offices even gin palaces to which maybe a couple of greek details might be added this happy survival shows us though what greek architecture was capable of in temple form and it's a real testament to foster's skill john foster was the town surveyor as his father had been before him he was a corporation man but he was to be one of the last in 1835 parliament passed a key piece of legislation the municipal corporations act signaled an end to the old ways for liverpool's corporation it meant out with the cronies and in with a new democratically elected council keen to make its mark on the landscape with a new civic building what the town needed were law courts and a jail to act as a criminal deterrent what the council wanted was a concert hall to represent the improving tonic of high art and so in 1839 an advert was placed in the newspaper they already had a name for their buildings and george's hall that even bizarrely already laid the foundation stone all they needed was an architect who could take their civic ideals and transform them into stone the idea was to rebrand the city of liverpool until 1807 it had made much of its money from the slave trade but now as victoria took to the throne it had the chance to show itself in a new light a city of commerce which could turn its wealth into virtues artibus legibus conselius to arts laws and councils the foremost of those was arts from 86 entries the council chose a design by a young london architect harvey lonsdale elms just 25 years old with a head full of ideas and nothing on his cv he would provide liverpool with one of the finest neoclassical buildings in the world a lot of people find classical architecture a bit forbidding as if it's it's the weight of authority is just too heavy but elms himself thought that if you just was slavishly copying details that's really evades the point the idea is to be bold and original as the committee were making up their minds exactly what kind of building they wanted here it was the boldness and originality that won them over because this building doesn't express the functions within it the law court the concert hall the whole thing has a very picturesque envelope which speaks very different language on each of its four sides elms had a difficult job he had to combine the separate functions of concert hall and courts with all their attendant needs space for an organ a library juries witnesses and solicitors but above all the building had to send a message charles dickens referred to it as liverpool's front office it told you when you came out from the newly built lime street station that you'd arrived in a town you could do business with i reckon part of elm's genius is in the way that he manages to be both monumental and picturesque at the same time because when you first see saint george's hall it looks like a a great rectangular roman temple but come round to this end and you'll see a circular temple something maybe from tivoli and rome uh and it's just attached to the end this is like a greatest hits of ancient buildings and he's put them all together and smoothed out the junctions and made something quite distinctive and original portico is the most familiar temple part of the building it looks like the front of some great roman or greek temple its classical features meant very poetic and evocative things the line of slender corinthian columns with their elaborate capitals are said to derive from the proportions of a woman holding a basket of acanthus leaves on a head and up there is the greek key which um grecian buildings have this is a double decker one it's layer upon layer of that kind of squared spiral and this is what elms really knocks your socks off with as you approach the building you see this temple you see the decoration and everyone must have been impressed when they saw it obviously even today becca and kaza and keegs like to associate themselves with it how is the completed building greeted by liverpool and the nation marvelous the opening ceremony is one of the great weeks of the liverpool press everybody thought it was brilliant and then the campaign started seats toilets sound couldn't get any food couldn't get in oh but it's a good building though isn't it it was wonderful it was all the usual glorious liverpool comments that you get from september 1854 right through that week everybody loved it and everybody complained so it was in fact an accident that the two separate designs for law courts and music hall were both won by the same person had there been two separate winners they may not have coalesced into one building the coalition of the two buildings is wonderful because it it provides us with the two opposites of the victorian age in one spot the joy of being in this room for some of the great events of the 19th century to the misery of being in the courts and often that purgatory was in the same day within the same hour they've been one of these vast annual events in here and this lady wrote to the local paper and she said during the evening i went out for some fresh air with my bow that's boyfriend and she says on the staircase there are bars and it feels as though you are in a prison and the editor just put underneath madam it is a prison one of the hall's most glorious features is its minton floor a mosaic of over 30 000 individually fired clay tiles it prompted the prominent 19th century architect richard norman shaw to describe the hall as a swimming pool with no water and no deep end however it's so fragile and precious that it sits permanently beneath protective boards and is only unveiled once every 10 years or so steve tell me the story behind this fabulous but hidden minton floor have you heard the story about liverpool they've built a floor so famous they've had to cover it up so no one can see it that was one of the national reactions to this extraordinary project i think its unattainability its mystery has aided it the floor has gained a kind of heroic mysticism basically because nobody can see it except every so often when they can now one central question i've got in my journey to understand the value of victorian civic buildings is who they were designed for and whose lives they they improved did it elevate the bottom of the social pyramid yeah i think it did the people elevate themselves to some extent but to do that they've got to be given a chance where they can move beyond mere survival and you can't really elevate or organize or think about things until you're not starving until you know that on friday you're going to get nine shillings or ten shillings because of that because of the precarious nature of life here because of the casual nature of most of the employment it was unsettling it was on the edge it was precarious but this elevation needed there needed to be a road put down no matter how bumpy and difficult that road was so people could essentially elevate themselves to name the hall after saint george is to evoke the ancient christian message of good versus evil and when this magnificent edifice was being built evil was all around in super abundance the streets of liverpool were throbbing with crime squalor immorality and disease in the minutes of council meetings there's constant reference to the phrase second city of empire but what sort of empire was it that reduced the life expectancy of the working men of its second city to just 20 years and where nearly half of its children were dead before the age of 10. you can't help feeling that liverpool's improvers sought to create something of such goodness such inherent value that it would elevate the whole city as the slaying of the dragon did with st george as the building went up the numerous stresses associated with its construction began to take their toll on young elms and under doctor's orders to rest his visits to the site became less frequent he was eventually diagnosed with consumption tuberculosis and yet from his sick bed elms continued to conduct operations through letters to his friend the engineer robert rawlinson on december 7th 1847 rawlinson was sent a letter it was in a shaky hand it ran my dear sir you will i'm sure be much grieved to hear that poor mr elms is no more he died after much suffering on friday last it was from mrs alms and it was the last correspondence he would receive the great tragedy is that elms never got to see his building completed he died aged just 33 and the project was finished off by charles robert cockrell it was cockrell who provided liverpool's music lovers with the more intimate small concert room a gloriously opulent circular space which sits at the building's north end you can't help but think of young elms well he's in his mid-20s isn't he sitting scratching away with hardly any other experience of architecture taking on this enormous burden on his shoulder you can feel the weight of this building on him but what he creates with cockrell completing this decoration is so substantial it's so extraordinary it's a testimonial not only to the civic vision of liverpool to have this thing done but of a leap of faith in a designer an architect a person vision to bring together all of these sometimes competing themes into one astonishing self-contained beautiful space lasting tribute saint george's hall took 15 years to build but during that time it kick-started a wave of competitive building throughout the north it not only showed other towns what classical architecture looked like it gave them the confidence to do likewise in bradford where they pride themselves on a no-nonsense approach it was believed they could knock one up a little quicker no frills no law courts or jail cells this was to be a concert hall pure and simple subscribers were canvassed and the biggest owner was the splendidly named titus salt bradford's peter familias salt was a victorian all-rounder milo owner mayor philanthropist and much loved in his hometown the architects he chose were the local firm of lockwood and mawson with the political weight momentum and finance of tight assault lockwood and mawson provided a perfectly adequate and workable design it was never going to be as inspired as some george's hall liverpool but nonetheless as a classical block it fitted in well with the existing warehouses of bradford the columns give you a sense that there's something going on inside but there's none of the wit or bravura you might expect from a major place of entertainment nonetheless lockwood and mawson finished their son george's hall in just two years well ahead of liverpool's exemplar and what they provided was a major venue for the people of bradford now inside the building lockwood and mawson provided a superb musical venue acoustically it's night perfect functionally you can get up to a couple of thousand people in here and it's put up with two fires and about nineteen shades of blumange and is still packing them in a victorian venue doing what it was designed to titus salt and the rest of bradford's civic leaders were immensely proud of their new building they felt the speed of its creation reflected the dynamism of the industrial elite and as a bonus it was one in the eye for the rival mill towns of yorkshire bradford's success with saint george's hall grated on the people of leeds and they needed a new civic symbol in fact more than that more even than the description town hall would account for because the express ambition for this was a noble municipal palace the problem is there's only twenty thousand pounds and sixteen people joined the competition to design it the winner the person who could achieve so much for so little was a relative unknown step forward mr cuthbert broderick like so many of the successful architects of the time broderick was absurdly young a 29 year old from whole he articled under lockwood and mawson and traveled in italy and france at his father's expense indeed we still live with his parents mrs broderick may still have been doing her son's laundry but he was about to make her very proud when the subject of a new town hall was raised john heaton the secretary of leads improvement society made a poetic case for one if a noble municipal palace that might fairly vie with some of the best town halls of the continent were to be erected in the middle of our hitherto squalid and unbeautiful town it would become a practical admonition to the populace of beauty and art and in course of time men would learn to live up to it broderick had seen the best town halls on the continent his time in paris had instilled in him a love of french architecture bureaucratic buildings whose grand scale was befitting of a king's residence and broderick delivered them a palace what you've got are columns on a gigantic scale with classical sculptures over the doors all the right ingredients it looks like a pavilion from versailles broken loose and is making its way to the yorkshire dales for its holidays you know any great building's got to manage the double whammy of welcoming you graciously and then knocking your socks off and the vestibule of leeds town hall really does that there is the rich minton floor and you would have been greeted in the middle by queen victoria here so she'd have seen you head on when you came in and reminded you that she traveled up from london to give this place a blessing in front of the people of leeds but when albert died she was put to one side albert to the other and she is about the most elegant introduction to the corridor toward the lose you could wish for and then you see the vaulted ceiling rich in its gilding and its color it tells you that leeds is not just a provincial town it's not just important to the north of england but there is europe there is america and africa and asia with australia included by default but you get the point this is a world city but you know all this is just a taster it's a and a moose boosh compared to the room that comes after it that is the main dish and boy is it substantial you by the 1840s coin did leeds set itself up against the bigger industrial cities to the west of the pennines or was it more a dialogue with the woolen towns to the east well the real rivalry was bradford and bradford had got a good architect to build this and george's hall a wonderful great concertal they were ahead of leads on that and i think there was real rivalry this this town hall was to be bigger and better than this and george's hall in bradford and by the time it was built they were up for running special excursion trains from bradford to bring the people from bradford to look and admire did the commissioners know precisely what they were looking for or was this down to the creative genius of the architects i think there were people commissioning who dreamed of a great palace for leeds but broderick was a genius of a designer and he had a real imaginative streak in him that could produce unforgettable shapes now broderick was what 29 at this point he was an unknown as an architect and still lived at home with his parents did the commissioners have faith in him or was there nervousness about this anjanu though one thing in his favor was that his design was selected by charles barry you couldn't have a better backer than that with barry saying he was a young man he could have confidence in a man who could be relied on to produce anything that was needed then the town council felt happy to go ahead on that recommendation what did the people of leeds think to it oh tremendous tremendous popularity once once the building went up people in leeds really liked it and thousands of people turned out to say tens of thousands the silhouette those massive columns that sumptuous tower soaring into the sky it became almost the symbol for civic architecture of the northeast there's nothing like it anywhere else at the time perhaps but it's subsequently been emulated and copied not just across the north not even the country but the british empire without a clock tower a 19th century town hall seems harder to deserve the name how many times a day do you do this as little as possible around your head when you come through the dark so for 150 years it's stood as a landmark but what's it used for today leech town hall is a hall for hire uh we have conferences dinners uh concerts on a on a saturday night is organ recitals on a monday if you want to hire the hall you can hire the hall it's up for the people and for the people 150 years on you would argue that it still fulfills the function it was designed for the broderick his brief was to create a performance space to elevate the people of leeds it's still awesome definitely most definitely could i hire it as well because i'm i'm from lincolnshire originally what yorkshire people call a yellow belly i can still hire it we'll have your money off you that's the civic spirit eric despite providing leads with two more fabulous buildings in the corn exchange and the mechanics institute work dried up for broadway after years of his competition entries being rejected he retired to france where he died in obscurity in 1905 and as the classical revival spread from liverpool to bradford to leeds and beyond smaller towns were also caught up in the fever this is todd madden 23 miles west of leeds you know at first glance todd burton town hall looks like a late offspring of birmingham town hall 40 years it's junior but it speaks a very special language about its location and the people who built it this is the colder river and it runs straight underneath the building it straddles yorkshire to its right and lancashire to its left and you see that in the sculpture of the tympanum the triangular section in the middle of the pediment on the top you've got twin sisters of lancashire and yorkshire with their arms around each other it's all very endearing to the left commerce of lancashire the making of bobbins and the production of cotton and on the right the agricultural produce of yorkshire the two are brought together in symbiosis now that union of lancashire and yorkshire of course has a longer history and in the entablature the stone beam carried by the columns you see the tudor rose the reconciliation of warring lancashire and yorkshire at the end of the wars of the roses and the tudor dynasty now given that this is a manufacturing area the whole thing is an extraordinary testament to the skill in local mason craft from the sculpture and the pediment through to those fine columns where they're very florid capitals the window surrounds it's a major triumph in a minor town by the 1870s a spider's web of neoclassical buildings had been spun from the northwest across the penins to yorkshire and beyond but elsewhere in britain in particular london and manchester the gothic revival began to take hold leading the charge was the architect augustus welby northmoor pugin who denounced classical architecture as decadent and pagan yet despite the spectacular gothic successes of manchester and elsewhere liverpool stuck to its guns the city fathers even upped the architectural ante by transforming a shabby stretch of heathland known as shaw's brow into the culmination of their civic ambition they created a classical forum a group of buildings which would emulate the governmental and intellectual center of ancient rome liverpool's forum began life with the library and museum opened in 1860 and paid for by william brown a canny an exceptionally wealthy ulster banker such was the scale of his generosity the equivalent of more than 26 million pounds in today's earnings that brown received a knighthood and shaw's brow was renamed in his honor seventeen years later william brown street had its next civic building the walker art gallery as a thank you to the city for making him mayor local brewing magnate andrew barkley walker personally funded its construction the equivalent of 13 million pounds from his own pocket he too was knighted for his generosity but not everyone was happy one extraordinary illustration shows the walker art gallery as pretty much a gin palace covered with the statistics of misery in liverpool of the poor and the destitute in fact there's a prostitute with a bottle but beggar with his begging tin and the devil himself sitting on a ton of walkers xxx no one forgot that walker had made his money from providing liverpool with alcohol the final piece of the jigsaw was slotted into place in 1879 a drum shaped building designed by cornelius sherlock this fantastic space is temple to learning is the last great building to contribute to liverpool's new forum the picton reading room was placed between the museum and library that way and the walker art gallery in that direction outside it responds to the curve of the small concert room in saint george's hall inside it embraces an entire city who want to read in this space and the fact it was built at all is due to one man james picton there he is he spent almost 40 years of his life campaigning for public libraries there's only one fault with it the acoustics stink when the reading room opened a banquet was held in picton's honor he gave a speech at the beginning of the last century lancashire was the most backward-looking county in england and liverpool was about the most backward town in lancashire small ill-built and poverty-stricken its emergence seemed all but hopeless look at what a century and three-quarters have done for us the picton library essentially completed the transformation of shaw's brow it gave liverpool an exemplary collection of classical buildings prototypes that could be rolled out across the north of england and as an ensemble they gave britain its closest approximation of a roman forum classical architecture was supposed to evoke the grandeur of past civilizations but was that really enough in 19th century britain architecture after all couldn't put bread in the mouths of the poor it couldn't heal the sick or provide a cure for cholera instead it's about the government that happens within these buildings that's what really matters architecture after all is merely a stage set it requires the actors to play their part by the time liverpool completed its forum the classical style was in obeys instead of looking to ancient greece for inspiration the civic leaders of manchester rochdale and elsewhere were looking to the great buildings of the medieval world they were the agents of a new gothic revival which with its pointed arches gargoyles and spires was the perfect style for exhibiting the skills of northern craftsmen it granted town planners new freedoms to depart from the rigid principles of classical architecture and its associations with church building and christianity were powerful antidotes to the pagan temples of athens and rome thanks to the rising prosperity of england's northern industrial towns gothic architecture would transform public spaces leaving a second civic legacy that survives right up to the present day stay with us the next part of the people's palaces the golden age of civic architecture is coming up next you

Channel: playdo

Views: 225,157

Keywords: BBC, Documentary, People's Palaces, The Golden Age of Civic Architecture, Neo Classical, Neo-classicism, Rome, Athens, architecture, urban environment, towns, cities, north, England, Britain, History Of Architecture (Field Of Study), Neoclassical Architecture (Architectural Style), Dr, Jonathan Foyle, Georgian, Victorian, civic buildings, Liverpool, Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Todmorden, Civil

Id: vgKpw-vAL88

Length: 59min 8sec (3548 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 30 2014