Culture: Heritage | guardian.co.uk
-
George III's tin bath rediscovered at Kew Palace
Monarch's tub used to soothe him during period of assumed 'madness' to go on display with original kitchen setting
As two centuries of lumber was cleared out of the abandoned Georgian kitchens at Kew Palace in west London – the smallest of the royal residences – a unique and poignant piece of royal history was uncovered.
The brown tin tub found stashed away in a chimney opening was the bath in which King George III took regular soakings in hot water, a prescription to calm him as he and his attendants wrestled with his terrifying bouts of mania.
At that time, the early 1800s, he was assumed to have been mad; he is now believed to have developed the hereditary condition porphyria. He was virtually imprisoned at Kew to prevent a political crisis if the full extent of his condition became known, as the previously gentle and clever king roared obscenities and terrified his wife, Queen Charlotte.
The discovery bears out a Kew legend that the tormented king took his baths not in the sumptuously furnished main house, but amid the domestic clatter of the royal kitchen.
Curator Susanne Groom believes the bath was set up for King George in a small room normally used for keeping silver under lock and key, which would have given him some privacy. It had a fireplace and so could be made comfortable, and was next door to the main kitchen with an endless supply of hot water from the copper boilers. The bath will be displayed in this room in May, when the kitchens open to the public for the first time after a £1.7m restoration. The main building will reopen in April.
The kitchens will be displayed using sound and light to evoke a significant date, 5 February 1789, when George was judged well enough to be given back his knife and fork, and sat down with his wife and daughters to a meal.
The menu survives in the national archives, and includes soup, pigeon pie, veal, sweetbreads, pike, chicken, a leg of lamb and a roast goose, pheasant, blancmange, anchovy salad, a mille-feuille gateau and pancakes.
Groom was told the story of the bath in the kitchen by a descendant of a visitor. In 1823, after Charlotte died, the palace was virtually abandoned and the kitchens fell into their long twilight. The visitor had been told by the royal housekeeper, a Mrs Tunstall, that George insisted on bathing in the kitchen to save staff the trouble of carrying heavy cans of hot water to the house.
"That has to be true, that is George to the life," Groom said.
Because the kitchen block gradually filled up with junk and stores, it escaped being fitted out with Victorian gadgets and is now a rare and historically important survivor. Original elm tables and dressers, bread ovens and roasting spits, hooks for hams and sides of meat, and a large cupboard where the precious spices were kept have all survived.
"Since the palace reopened, the question we are most often asked is, where was the kitchen and where was the bathroom? Now we can answer both," Groom said.
• Kew Palace reopens on 2 April and the kitchens in May.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
-
Chastleton House – 360º interactive panoramic
Explore Chastleton House using our 360º interactive panoramic tool
-
Another 'old north' landmark comes crashing down
Vast and brutal, the 'Dunston rocket' didn't even do its basic job of housing that well. Gateshead eyes will mostly remain dry
Another Brutalist landmark by the Owen Luder partnership is biting the dust in Gateshead, which recently disposed of his famous, or alternatively notorious, 'Get Carter' car park.
There have been fewer palpitations about the fate of the 'Dunston Rocket' than there were about the car park, which did have a curious grace in addition to its role in the cult film starring Michael Caine.
The 'rocket' is a 30-storey tower block of uncompromising, well, ugliness, commissioned in a rather remarkable feat of localism by the long defunct Whickham town council. The intentions were admirable but the execution and subsequent maintenance apparently less so, down to the revolutionary caisson foundations which doubled as a car park.
Not for long. They were so revolutionary and the geology was so treacherous that they flooded repeatedly and were soon abandoned as none of the tenants owned a submarine.
The 'rocket' had a downmarket version of Get Carter through starring in a TV commercial for Tudo crisps, but that failed to endear it to anyone much over the years beyond diehard fans of Brutalism. Certainly Gateshead's Labour council leader Mick Henry isn't too upset to be losing it. He's been up to the top floor to give a brief initial hand to two radio-controlled robot demolition machines which are nibbling at floors 30 to 19 because conventional methods of dismantling would be too dangerous.
Henry says:
I'm aware that some people find the building architecturally interesting. But, the fact is, people did not want to live here and a 30-storey tower block cannot be maintained on claimed architectural merits alone.
Indeed, there are mixed views about its architectural merit and many people in the area have longed to see a skyline without this building. They feel it represents a Gateshead of the past, with long outdated misconceptions about what the modern North East is like.
It's good to celebrate the past, but it's also important to build the future. And that means housing and facilities that are fit for the future of Gateshead and its residents. We've already waved goodbye to the 'Get Carter' car park and, now that the 'rocket' is coming down, we can move forward with new confidence, reflecting our firm ambitions to become a city.
Gateshead is very bullish about its chances in that department, with the Queen expected to name at least one new city as part of her diamond jubilee. Sunderland has done nicely out of its elevation in 1992, as has Preston, which became a city ten years later. It gives a place added confidence.
Gateshead has an unusual combination of distinctions in its shorthand argument for joining the select category. It calls itself:
the location of the world-famous Angel of the North, birthplace of the electric light bulb and one-time home of the family of the Queen Mother.
It also has some very fine red kites.Whatever your views on the council's choice of structures to remove, no one can argue with its record of putting new ones up. The four great glories of modern Tyneside – the Angel, the Baltic, the Sage and the Winking Bridge – are Gateshead projects, every one.
The 'rocket' – officially known as Derwent Tower – will be replaced with new, mostly family homes, along with a doctor's surgery, chemist, supermarket, other shops and accommodation for the elderly. It should have disappeared fully by the autumn, 44 years after the first bucket of concrete was poured.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
-
Forget Scotland and England; Berwick-upon-Tweed is pondering going global
The handsome border town may bid to be the UK's next World Heritage Site
While the England vs Scotland issue continues to occupy many in Berwick-upon-Tweed, forward-looking souls in the border town have set their sites higher: on global status.
Listing its wealth of ancient buildings and remarkably intact fortifications, enthusiasts for the handsome place are urging an attempt to be one of the UK's future UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
This is an ambitious thing to do but I can see from where I'm tapping this out, a smaller but highly successful example. People mocked when the late Jonathan Silver and others claimed that Saltaire near Bradford was worthy to rank with the Pyramids and ancient Rome. But now it does.
Berwick's counterparts of Silver & Co have just held a seminar on running a similar campaign and emerged with a mixture of optimism and caution. They have encouragingly nearby examples – Hadrian's Wall and Durham, where the castle and cathedral form two separate World Heritage Sites which, appropriately for the north, stand back to back.
The Government is also putting forward the twin monasteries of Jarrow and Monkwearmouth as its 2012 candidate to join the UK's 28 existing sites. But in Berwick, a great deal of cleaning, sprucing and blossing-up would be required.
One of the event's organisers, Bernard Shaw, takes the cautious line, saying that the sense of the meeting was that a bid in the near future would probably be unrealistic. He isn't against the idea but says:
There may be better ways to take Berwick forward, rather than something which may not be achievable. Maybe the time isn't right for the investment of time and money to invest in an objective which we might not achieve. It could be that the benefits that could come our way could be achieved more cheaply and realistically.
But the town's mayor Alan Bowlas is a more hopeful; a little. He says:
It may not be achievable, but we should probably pursue World Heritage status because I think we would pick up quite a lot of pointers on the way. It would certainly put us on the international market and improve our tourist offer in Northumberland.
Stouter hearts will be needed if the idea does go any further, but Berwick has a tradition of rising to a challenge. As well as changing hands between England and Scotland 13 times between 1482, it famously appeared as a separate party in Britain's declaration of war on Russia over the Crimea (but not in the peace treaty, to the delight of school history pupils ever since).
The meeting also heard of preliminary work on a claim to artistic fame, with Salford's L S Lowry often visiting and leaving one highly-rated painting, of Dewar's Lane.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
-
Vikings in Shetland – in pictures
Up Helly Aa celebrates the influence of the Scandinavian Vikings in the Shetland Islands and culminates with up to 1,000 'guizers' (men in costume) throwing flaming torches into a longboat
-
Brontë museum faces closure because of council budget cuts
Supporters launch appeal to save the Red House in West Yorkshire, home of one of Charlotte Brontë's closest friends
One of the major shrines to the Brontë family is facing closure and sale because of budget cuts and recession – a combination that almost did for its wealthy owner in the days of Charlotte, Emily and Anne.
The Red House in Gomersal, in West Yorkshire's "heavy woollen district", is targeted in provisional savings drawn up by Kirklees district council, which is having to find savings of £64m in what councillors describe as "the most difficult financial landscape in living memory".
The proposal has triggered uproar led by the Brontë Society which is appealing for supporters to lobby the council to change its mind. The Red House, a handsome early Georgian mansion built of brick in the largely millstone grit area between Huddersfield, Dewsbury and Bradford, played a significant part in Charlotte Brontë's youth.
She described visits to the rich but radical family of Joshua Taylor as "one of the most rousing pleasures I have ever known", and modelled her classic Yorkshireman Hiram Yorke in Shirley on the textile manufacturer and banker. Taylor's daughter Mary was one of her closest friends and a robustly feminist critic. When Charlotte became famous and appeared to argue that only unmarried women should seek work, Mary, who had emigrated to run a successful shop in New Zealand, rounded on her as "a coward and a traitor".
The director of the Brontë Parsonage at Haworth, Andrew McCarthy, said the proposal had come as a shock, along with other suggested cuts including reduced hours at Oakwell Hall, another Kirklees museum that plays an important part in Shirley.
"We appreciate the challenges faced by local authorities in terms of balancing the budgets at the moment but this does seem a pretty drastic step that can be made in haste and repented at leisure," he said. "There are very few buildings which combine Brontë history and Brontë fiction in the way Red House does. It would be a huge loss."
A petition has also been launched to present to the council, which is not controlled by any one party and has seen cross-party negotiations over the coming budget. Kirklees's wellbeing and communities directorate, whose portfolio includes museums, has to make 19% savings from £129m spent last year to £105m. Councillors will decide the issue on 22 February.
Closure of the Red House in September would make a full-year saving of £116,000 with sale of the site an additional, one-off capital receipt, probably of around £750,000. The museum has won a raft of prizes, from Sandford educational awards to Loo of the Year, but drew only 28,602 visitors last year and fewer than 1,000 children in school parties.
Taylor almost lost the house himself in 1826 when his private bank went under without any hope of a government buyout to help it. He recovered by dint of his own efforts and a reputation, also ascribed to Yorke in Shirley, for helping his own workers find alternatives when his mill was forced into lay-offs during a recession.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
-
Chinese developers demolish home of revered architects
Demolition of house where Liang Sicheng and his wife Lin Huiyin once worked has horrified heritage experts
Their appreciation of China's ancient buildings and their devotion to preserving its heritage made them two of the country's most revered architects.
But now the home in Beijing where Liang Sicheng and his wife Lin Huiyin once worked lies in rubble – having fallen prey to the development they feared would destroy their city's ancient streets.
The demolition has horrified heritage experts. Liang is known as the father of modern Chinese architecture, and much of his and Lin's most important work was carried out while they were living in the courtyard house in Beizongbu Hutong in the 1930s.
It was knocked down by developers over the lunar New Year, despite the fact it is rare for labourers to work during the festival, raising suspicions that the company hoped to avoid publicity.
A Beijing official told state news agency Xinhua the firm wanted to prevent the residence being harmed during last week's holiday, apparently referring to the fireworks which are let off.
Other Chinese media quoted an unidentified developer as saying that the demolition was "in preparation for maintaining the heritage site" because the buildings were in bad condition.
But heritage protection activist Zeng Yizhi – who alerted city officials to the demolition – said they should have repaired the buildings.
"Liang and Lin made such a great contribution to the protection of Chinese ancient buildings. If their home can be torn down, then developers can do the same thing to hundreds of other ancient houses in the country," he told China Daily.
He Shuzhong, founder of the Beijing Cultural Heritage centre, said the early 20th century building was the intersection between the study and preservation of cultural relics, as pioneered by the couple, and the dangers posed by rapid urban development.
Last year, China's top cultural heritage official warned that high speed development had been a disaster for conservation.
Experts and campaigners are also angry because they hoped they had staved off the threat to Liang and Lin's home in 2009, when the district government approved its destruction and it was partially knocked down.
Following a public outcry, the state administration of cultural heritage intervened and the site was designated a permanent cultural relic, meaning official approval was required for demolition.
He said the one positive aspect of the affair was that it had roused an unprecedented level of public interest, debate and civic participation.
Liang and Lin wrote a seminal work on Chinese architecture, listed relics in need of protection during wartime, designed the national emblem of the People's Republic of China and worked on the Monument to the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square.
Liang and his colleague Chen Zhanxiang urged the Communist government to build an entirely new city when it decided to make Beijing the capital of the new republic. He believed it was the best way to preserve its ancient buildings.
But officials rejected that plan and most of the old city has vanished forever.
According to journalist and heritage expert Wang Jun, China had 7,000 hutong – lanes of old-fashioned low-rise homes – in 1949 and 3,000 in the 1980s. Since the late 1990s they have vanished at a rate of about 600 a year.
Chinese media named the developers of the Beizongbu site as Fuheng Real Estate, a subsidiary of state-owned China Resources.
An employee at the China Resources Group said it was a holding company and the matter should be raised with the China Resources Land Company. A staff member at the subsidiary said she would call back but did not do so.
The city administration of cultural heritage said it would not comment as the Dongcheng district cultural committee was responsible for the case. Officials there did not answer calls.
But district heritage officials admitted that the demolition had not been approved by the city-level authorities, Xinhua reported.
Dongcheng officials told reporters they had ordered developers to rebuild the house – a measure dismissed by campaigners as meaningless.
"Building a replica only makes things worse. So I suggest that the government build a monument or a park on the original site in memory of Liang and Lin," Chen Zhihua, a professor at Tsinghua University's school of architecture and a former student of the couple, told China Daily.
Lin died in 1955 after an illness. Liang was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and died in 1972.
His second wife Lin Zhu said she was very sorry to hear of the demolition.
"I don't think his contribution and work is being properly valued and respected," she said, adding that Liang's later home on the Tsinghua University campus was also worth preserving but was in poor condition at present.
Additional research by Han Cheng
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
-
English Heritage buys Great Barn at Harmondsworth
Medieval building dubbed 'the cathedral of Middlesex' bought for £20,000 and will open to public in spring after repair work
An extraordinary medieval barn once dubbed "the cathedral of Middlesex" by Sir John Betjeman has been bought by English Heritage in a move to save it from decay, it is announced on Monday.
Just beyond today's sprawl of Heathrow, between the roaring M25 and M4 motorways and the straggling warehouses and industrial estates around the airport perimeter, the Great Barn at Harmondsworth has stood since 1426.
It has long been famous among building historians and admired by the poet and conservation campaigner Betjeman. Repair work is now being carried out – including to its huge roof – and it will open to the public regularly for the first time this spring.
"This is the best preserved medieval barn in England, probably in Europe, and the ninth largest ever built in England. For its size, and its state of preservation, it is unique," said Michael Dunn, an English Heritage historic buildings expert, of the 60 metres long, 12 metres wide and 11 metres high timber structure.
Justine Bayley, an archaeologist who lives in Harmondsworth village and secretary of the group that has acted as guardians for the barn, said: "If we had a pound for everyone who walks in here and says 'wow!' we could have re-roofed the building twice over. It's really the only appropriate response."
English Heritage took the rare step of buying the building after a Gibraltar-based company, which acquired it for £1 from the receivers for the previous owners, ignored demands to repair the barn, which should have the highest protection as a Grade I listed building and a scheduled ancient monument.
The barn went on the buildings at risk register and its plight was publicised in 2009 when Cornerstone, the journal of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings founded by William Morris, revealed that rain was pouring through gaping holes in the roof, with every gust of wind lifting more tiles.
There was probably a barn at the site before the Norman conquest, when King Harold owned the rich farmland, famous well into the 20th century for arable crops and orchards. In the late 14th century the estate was bought by the bishop of Winchester William of Wykeham; Winchester college records show carpenters in 1398 sent to repair a barn at Harmondsworth.
In 1426 the master carpenter William Kypping was sent to choose oak trees from the forest at Kingston and raise the mighty new barn.
Through civil war, plague, agricultural reforms and urban development, which changed the face of the countryside, it remained an agricultural barn for almost 700 years – a flying bomb that flattened a nearby modern barn just cost it a few roof tiles. In the early 1970s Roy Barwick, who still farms locally, gathered in the last harvest to the barn with his son. "It's a wonderful thing, it was nice to work in it and think how many farmers were there before us," said Barwick.
English Heritage stepped in to carry out emergency repairs, before deciding to buy the building. It only cost £20,000, but will cost many times that each year in maintenance.
Simon Thurley, chief executive of EH, said: "Harmondsworth Barn is one of the greatest medieval buildings in Britain, built by the same skilled carpenters who worked on our magnificent medieval cathedrals. Its rescue is at the heart of what English Heritage does."
The friends of Harmondsworth Barn who will now run it, opening it free to the public two Sundays each month from April, include a local historian, teachers, and a number of airport workers.
• This article was amended on 30 January 2012 to clarify a sentence that originally read: Just beyond the sprawl of Heathrow, the Great Barn at Harmondsworth has stood between the roaring M25 and M4 motorways and the straggling warehouses and industrial estates around the airport perimeter since 1426.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
-
Maori heads returned to New Zealand after 200 years - video
Twenty tattooed Maori heads have been repatriated from France to New Zealand after more than 200 years. A team from Wellington's Te Papa museum plans to trace the origin of the heads and return them to their communities. More than 500 heads of Maori ancestors remain in collections around the world
-
Liverpool's world heritage waterfront faces 'irreversible damage', report says
Unesco delegation says skyscraper proposal will result in 'serious loss of historic authenticity'
Liverpool's world heritage site waterfront will be "irreversibly damaged" unless urgent modifications are made to a multibillion-pound skyscraper scheme, a delegation from Unesco has warned.
The delegation said the skyscraper proposal would result in "a serious loss of historic authenticity".
The Unesco inspectors praised the "more or less symmetrical profile" of the city's waterfront, with the Three Graces – the Port of Liverpool and the Liver and Cunard buildings – at centre stage and historical docklands to the north complementing those to the south.
The Graces were "at the heart of the shipping and harbour operations during the height of [Liverpool's] glory, surrounded by dockyards and port structures", they said.
But they warned that if the £5.5bn Peel Holdings development, including tall buildings such as the Shanghai Tower, went ahead, this profile would be shifted to the north by introducing a secondary cluster of high-rises, with towers three times the size of the Three Graces.
They would "[relegate] the Three Graces to playing second violin", the inspectors found, "thereby losing an important visual and historical reference to the city's glorious past".
The Unesco report said the views of the Three Graces from Kings Dock would disappear amid the supertowers.
The report urged Peel Holdings, Liverpool city council and English Heritage to find a compromise on the Liverpool Waters scheme to regenerate the city's northern docklands.
But it did not spell out what would happen to the city's world heritage status if no changes were made to the project. It had been feared the report could recommend removing the status if the scheme was given planning permission, but it did not go that far.
The report said: "The mission concludes that, if the proposed Liverpool Waters scheme as outlined during the mission would be implemented, the world heritage property would be irreversibly damaged, due to a serious deterioration of its architectural and town planning coherence, a serious loss of historical authenticity, and an important loss of cultural significance."
Unesco, which oversees world heritage sites, dispatched inspectors to the city last November over concerns that the huge project, which falls within the world heritage site, would damage its "outstanding universal value".
Ron van Oers and Patricia Alberth, from Unesco, and Giancarlo Barbato, an Italian conservation architect from the International Committee on Monuments and Statues, conducted a three-day visit. Their findings will be considered by its World Heritage Committee in the summer.
Liverpool Waters features 9,000 flats, hundreds of offices, hotels, bars and a cruise terminal, as well as the 55-storey Shanghai Tower and other skyscrapers. It involves two clusters of tall buildings, one near the city centre and a second further north.
Peel Holdings has previously agreed to scale down the height of the Shanghai Tower to address heritage concerns.
Liverpool City council's leader, Joe Anderson, said he welcomed the findings of the report, adding that it was "really encouraging they are pressing for a compromise which would enable Liverpool Waters to go ahead".
He said: "I have always believed there is a way forward which will allow us to redevelop the North Liverpool Docks and secure the massive investment and badly needed new jobs, and to also preserve our world heritage status. Peel have already made significant alterations to their proposals since drawing up the original plans."
Anderson said the £6bn plans were vital for the future of what is one of the poorest parts of the country, and the investment is vital to Liverpool's future prosperity. "However, we are mindful of the need to build a better future for our city in a careful and sensitive way," he added.
The delegation, he added, found the conservation of the world heritage site had improved since its last visit in 2006, with new developments at the Pier Head, Liverpool One shopping and the Ropewalks area.
Anderson said he was pressing English Heritage, Peel and the city council to redouble their efforts to reach an agreement on the best way forward.
The council's chief executive, Ged Fitzgerald, said a public consultation was under way and discussions would continue before the planning committee decides on the application in March. "We will work in collaboration with English Heritage and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to respond to the mission and its report," he said.
English Heritage said the mission report identified a number of significant concerns about the impact the Liverpool Waters development on the world heritage site and advised that it should work with the city council and Peel to resolve the concerns.
"As a statutory advisor to Liverpool city council, we will be very willing to do so if invited," English Heritage said.
"We believe that a revised scheme for the central docks could reduce the amount of harm to the world heritage site and deliver long-term benefits which include jobs and growth but also the repair and reuse of historic buildings."
Peel Holdings declined to comment.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
.jpg)