Guided tours of Nottingham
Tickets are now available for two new dates for the Debbie Bryan Edition of the Watson Fothergill Walk. The new dates are both Sunday mornings, with a 10am start on 28th April 2019 and 26th May 2019. Tickets are £12 each and include tea or coffee and cake at Debbie Bryan in the Lace Market at the conclusion of the walk.
I hope to add more dates and try out some other walks in the coming year, please sign up to the mailing list for the latest news.
Starting from Sherwood, I went for a wander to find some of the buildings designed by Lawrence George Summers which are still standing in Nottingham. Around the corner from the larger blocks of Fothergill houses on Mansfield Road is a small house on Bingham Road which has characteristics easily mistaken for Fothergill, a decorative turret and a vernacular gable with brick nogging in distinctive red bricks with black timber.
This garage is actually the work of Geoff Jordan who lives in a house by Summers next door! (Correction 2021 – LB)
The house on Bingham Road (LGS25) was built for Thomas M. Basnett, a retired plumber’s merchant in 1921. See my Carrington Crawl walk for more details.
A further foray into Carrington and eventually I find the next house on my list, on Herbert Road (LGS12). Little seems to be known about this, other than plans were approved in 1897 and the client was Mr J B Hughes.
The next house on the trail was on Central Avenue (LGS22), not far away. This was built for Gilbert L Summers, LG’s nephew, in 1914. Summers marked his name on the application with “ARIBA”. After Fothergill retired LG signs off with his qualification. In the 1911 census Gilbert was living at 44 Central Avenue with his widowed father Frederick (LG’s brother), his sister Evelyn and his niece (LG’s sister Lola’s daughter) Clara Richardson lived-in as their housekeeper. (It was common practice that an unmarried female member of the extended family would live-in to provide domestic help to unmarried or widowed male relatives.)
Gilbert Lawrence Summers is listed in the 1911 census as a Sewing Machine Mechanic. Perhaps he was working in the family lace firm in New Basford. By 1939, when a register was taken, Gilbert appears to be living in Wiverton Road (around the corner from other Summers buildings in Berridge Road) with his wife Lily.
Many of Lawrence Summers’s buildings (at least the ones he signs off himself) were for members of his extended family in the New Basford area.
Over on Duke Street, a little further up the street from the site of the house where LG was born, are “Two Cottages” (LGS15). Built in 1899, these three storey houses stand out in a street that is now mostly light industrial buildings and modern additions.
At the time, Summers was signing himself as “Architect of Corporation Oaks”. In 1881 various members of the Summers family were living on Duke Street. The numbering of the houses has changed and perhaps the old family home was demolished. His sister Lola, Mrs Richardson, and her family were living at 2 Duke Street, and his father George Summers with second wife Louisa, plus Lawrence’s younger brothers Frederick and Alexander were next door at number 4. In the 1891 census LG is living with his brother Frederick and his family at number 4, while their father, George, is at number 2 with Louisa and their 9 year old son William. Did they subsequently move up Duke Street to the new cottages that LG designed with himself as the client? In 1910, Summers applied to extend the Duke Street houses into shops (LGS21), again he himself was the client, which suggested that members of the Summers family were indeed living in the cottages. As far as I can tell these are now the adjacent property which has been turned back into dwellings. The shape of the shop fronts remain, albeit much altered.
Lawrence’s youngest brother Alexander was still living in New Basford in 1901 and is listed on the census as a Pork Butcher and Shopkeeper, so perhaps the shop was his?
Following the road, past what are now mostly motor garages in older industrial buildings, some dated 1840s and some 1870s, an indication that this area was already industrial at the time the Summers family lived here when Lawrence was a child. His father’s lace business was almost certainly here.
Down at the bottom on Northgate, it is just possible to recognise the small two storey factory (LGS3), that Summers designed for James Allen in 1882.
At this time Summers is signing himself as “Architect, 11 South Parade Nottingham” (South Parade makes up the side of the Market Square that runs up the opposite side to Long Row). Summers was admitted to RIBA in 1881 but isn’t using letters after his name at this point. It is assumed he was in the Clinton Street office with Fothergill from around 1879, having also been articled as a pupil to Issac Charles Gilbert from 1869. (His studies at the Mechanics Institute and Nottingham School of Art were running concurrently).
Look out for the next installment of my blog as I carry on into Mapperley Park on the trial of LG Summers…
I hope to organise a walk featuring some of Fothergill and Summers buildings in and around Sherwood, Sherwood Rise and Mapperley Park later this year – sign up to my mailing list for the latest news or “like” the Facebook page.
I’ve been using some online archives to see if there is anything else out there about Lawrence G. Summers and after some digging I think I’ve come up with a few clues.
Starting with Ancestry.com (which is available to use for free in Nottinghamshire Libraries and is an invaluable starting point if you enjoy a bit of basic historical sleuthing), I found Summers in the census and tried to make a few dates add up. The problem with online research is that often transcription of handwriting (the speedy pen of the census taker, the scratchy hand of the baptismal registrar) is full of errors. I eventually tracked Summers down in the 1861 census – at age 6, living with his parents, brother and sister at 80 Duke Street, New Basford. (Later in his career Summers will be responsible for several building projects in Duke Street, more on these in the next blog.)
By 1871, the Summers family address has become 83 Duke Street, 16 year old Lawrence is already noted as an “architects clerk” and he has gained another younger brother. I’ve not had much luck with the 1881 census and finding L.G. in 1891 was a little harder as his name has been transcribed as “Laurence”, but he turns up living with his younger brother Frederick and his family, still on Duke Street. L.G. is 35 by now and is still noted as an architects clerk. His brother (and his father, who lives next door) are both listed as “Lace Warpers”. In a trade listing from 1899 Summers seems at last to have moved out and he is listed as “Architect’s Assistant” living at 8 Corporation Oaks (while brother Fred is now of “Summers and Son” and is still at Duke Street).
All this tallies with what Darren Turner has compiled in his book. But what of Summers the man? Who was his wife? And why does he show up as living alone as a single man aged 56 in the Gresham Hotel on Carrington Street in the 1911 census? (This one was a challenge as the whole page has been very poorly transcribed with New Basford transposed to “New Brentford” and architect read as “servant”, making it look like Summers worked in the hotel.)
To find out about a life, you often have to read about a person’s death, and so it is with Summers, the most that was ever written about him was after his funeral. When Summers died in September 1940, his death made the front pages of the local papers. The notices list the mourners (articles can be found on The British Newspaper Archive – also free to use inside Nottinghamshire Libraries) and from here I was able to narrow down the search. Summers’ wife is only ever refered to as “the widow” which seems to have been standard practice at the time. But luckily the familial relationships of the other people present were noted, so we can discover that Summers’ brother in law was a Mr Lewis Byng. More plugging away at Ancestry eventually stumps up the jackpot. Mrs Summers, nee Louise Martha Byng was married to Lawrence George Summers in 1927, when she was 56 and he was 73. This was a year after the death of her father, Joseph Tussaud Byng a banker with 12 children, and just a short time before the death of Watson Fothergill.
Lawrence and Louise appear again in the 1939 register now living together at 59 Edwards Lane. Lawrence died the following year, in November 1940 and Louise lived on until 1955, until the age of 84.
Looking at the Ancestry entries for the Byng family, one name stood out as it had also come up in searches of the Newspaper Archive with reference to the theatre… one of Louise Byng’s younger (half-) brothers was Douglas Coy Byng and as it turns out he was on the stage… in fact he was a celebrated Pantomime Dame, singer, cabaret star and female impersonator famed for his double entrendres! Here he is talking about the panto dame tradition in 1982:
And here is a performance of a comic song!
Summers’ Brother in Law Douglas Byng had a long and illustrious show biz career, both he and L.G. Summers were at J.T. Byng’s funeral so perhaps they met?
Next time… more about L.G. Summers’ buildings in Nottingham. If you think you might be related to the Summers family who lived in New Basford it would be great to hear from you! The family turn up in a few family trees on Ancestry, so some cousins a few times removed might be out there…
For instance, the top returned result in a Google search for L.G. Summers, Watson Fothergill’s assistant and the man who carried on working at the George Street office after Fothergill retired, is a page at the Watson Fothergill website* that hasn’t been updated in a while. There’s lots of tantalising nuggets of information there, but to the researcher looking to dig deeper there is a frustrating lack of citations and references to sources.
I’ve been looking for more information on Summers, looking for more about the man who seems to have been somewhat in the professional shadow of the more flamboyant Fothergill.
As I become more emersed in searching for all things to do with Nottingham architecture, I find myself running names through different search engines and websites. After finding a coffee cup that seems to be from The Black Boy Hotel on eBay (see previous blogpost) I check back from time to time to see what else might be out there. A while ago, a search for Lawrence G. Summers and a few variations on his name, threw up a link to some pictures that I hadn’t seen before. They were prints that were for sale and eventually I tracked them down to an online print gallery.
Further variations on Summers’ name (L.G., Lawrence C. etc) returned more results and I couldn’t quite believe my luck. Compelled by curiosity and reasonable prices, I bought the prints. It turns out that they are lithograph pages from the trade publication The Building News and they are not copies.
On receipt of the lithographs I realised they were actually pages from the magazine and I was able to look up the accompanying articles. Archives of some of the issues are online. It turns out the designs were Summers’ winning entries in competitions.
Tracing the lithographs to the relevent issues of The Building News in online archives reveals that Summers won the “National Silver Medal Prize” for his Church design, “The highest award in the kingdom”.
The town hall, also gained the Silver Medal in a prize from Kensington (from where architecture qualifications were dispensed). This appears to have been while Summers was a student at the Nottingham School of Art.
Excited about my finds, I did another search and discovered that the other lithograph in the set had been bought by someone (who I found on Twitter) who I think works at Nottingham Trent University, (perhaps even in the Nottingham School of Art building.)
More on Summers in the next blog…
Meanwhile I treated myself to having the lithographs framed:
*If this is your site, please get in touch!
I’ll be coming back with more walks in 2019 – I’m hoping to start around March and then do walks on Sunday mornings a least once a month. I will also be planning some early evening walks when the nights are light enough. I hope to try out a walk featuring the buildings of Nottingham’s other star Victorian Architect, Thomas Chambers Hine.
Meanwhile I’m doing a bit more research.. including a visit to The University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections Reading Room where they hold a copy (on microform) of Fothergill’s notebooks… Difficult to read in places… but here’s the point where he marks his name change…
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Thanks to everyone who came to Beeston Library for my “Virtual” Watson Fothergill Walk. I had some great feedback on the talk and I really enjoyed it. I hope I can do some more talks in this format as it’s a good way to experience part of the tour without the walking (and I get to wear a head-mic and pretend I’m a stand-up or Madonna… wish I had a photo!)
A few folks on Facebook expressed an interest in a Sunday edition of the Beauty In The Details Lace Market Walk so I’ve added a date on 9 December 2018. The walk will be a short exploration of St Mary’s Gate starting at Debbie Bryan at 2pm. After a look around the area we will finish up at Debbie Bryan for a drink and a warm mince pie. Plus there’s 10% off other menu items in the tea room.
Get your tickets for £10 each here on Eventbrite.
There are still tickets for the Friday walk 7 December 2018 HERE.
After a good look around in Sherwood, I went for a further wander and caught a bus to Carlton to see if I could find the Brewery at Mar Hill (A71). Away from the bus route, deep into Carlton, I found the building. It was originally built for Mr Vickers, in 1899. It was convereted to residential use around 2005.
From what I can find online, the Carlton Brewery was a relatively short lived enterprised. The Vickers family held the licence at The Black’s Head pub close by in Carlton in the late 1800s.
“Brewing in Nottinghamshire” has an older picture of the building and states that the Carlton Brewery was short lived. With Mrs Vickers there in 1902 and Willam (her son?) there between 1904-1906. It was sold in 1904, 1906 and 1909. It became a laundry, then a print works and then it was used as a dye works owned by the Ilkeston Hosiery Finishing Company. The sequence of these changes is not entirely clear.
Along Primrose Street are also a series of 16 terraced houses built for brewery workers. It has been suggested that Fothergill also designed these but Darren Turner refutes this: The drawings survive in Nottinghamshire Archives but there is no stylistic evidence in the design, not documentary evidence on the surviving drawings to substansiate this rumour.
For more about buildings around Carlton, there is a U3A trail to follow, with some pictures of the other buildings.
The other industrial building of Fothergill’s that survives in Nottingham is down on Castle Boulevard. I was down that way a few weeks ago, but because of the road it’s quite tricky to photograph. The Paper Warehouse (A59), on what was then Lenton Boulevard was built for Simons and Pickard, in 1893-94, the date stone reads 1894.
The rear of the building is on the canal side and has a more conventional warehouse look. This was one of the buildings for which Fothergill commissioned photographs from Bedford Lemere, and some of these can be found on Historic England’s website. There is another photo, taken from above, attached to the listing.
My next walk will be a little look around the Lace Market on 7 December 2018. Tickets are available here on Eventbrite.
If you’d like to keep in touch and hear about future walks, starting again in 2019, please sign up to my email mailing list.
I took the opportunity to have another look at the Ukrainian Centre (A.K.A. Clawson Lodge A43) as the Sherwood Christmas Craft Fair was taking place. Not only did I see some charming work by local artists Corinna Rothwell and Eloise Renouf (among others), I also ate a nice little sour-dough pie from Small Food Bakery.
Mainly, I took a few more photos of Fothergill’s work on the house he built for Mr Doubleday (as mentioned in my earlier blog about Carrington.)
Inside was rather busy and has been significantly altered, the two downstairs rooms were full of crafy goings on so a bit difficult to see, but apart from the windows there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of original features. The house has been significantly extended and converted so, as with so many of these buildings, it remains the exterior that retains its original character.
Heading back towards Sherwood shops, I took the chance to photograph the terrace of four, three-storey houses on the corner of Bingham Road (A77). These are virtually the last project that Fothergill put his name to before he retired. They were built in 1906 with Fothergill as the client as he had previously bought up the land (next to some earlier houses he built on Mansfield Road. A46)
The timber clad gables are quite different to the earlier houses and look at lot more like the work that assistant architect Lawrence George Summers would continue to work on after Fothergill had left the office (see his later work in New Basford which is erroneously credited to Fothergill on Picture The Past etc.)
Back in Sherwood, I went down Burlington Road to look for some slightly elusive, domestic Fothergills. This part of Nottingham is refered to as Cavendish Hill in the planning applications. The earlier Elberton House (A53) was built for Mr Gallimore, a clerk to Smith and Co’s Bank in 1890. Fothergill had worked on a branch of the bank in Long Eaton in 1889. Additions were made to the villa dated 1911, and these are the last known (minor) works for a private client to be signed off under Fothergill’s own name.
Close by is the Burlington Towers built in 1892 as a three-storey villa for Mr Lindley (A54) it has now been made into flats. UPDATE 18/11/18: I just received an email from the present owner of Burlington Towers, who has turned it back into one whole house. Apparently they were able to work from Fothergill’s drawings to get back to the original layout. There is a photo in the Bedford Lemere archive* from 1897 on Historic England’s website. (Elberton House also makes an appearance.)
*It turns out this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of period photos of Fothergill buildings on the Historic England site, I will keep digging for more, but so far Fothergill’s own family home at Mapperely Road and the Sherwood Rise properties have been identified.
If you would like to engage my services for a walk or a talk about my Fothergill research please contact me. Meanwhile I’m leading a short walk in the Lace Market on 7 Decemeber with Debbie Bryan providing tea and mince pies post-tour. Tickets available from her website.
I’m planning to do some more of my short walks in the Lace Market with Debbie Bryan in December. The walk takes place at 2pm on 7th December, with a look at the architecture and history of St Mary’s Gate. These tours will be similar to the Heritage Open Days tours that took place in September but this time will include tea or coffee and a warm mince pie at Debbie Bryan. You will also receive 10% off any other tea room orders on your visit.
There will be a look at the Adams Building and other Thomas Chambers Hine work in the area, as well as Watson Fothergill’s Milbie House on Pilcher Gate. The whole thing should take around 45 minutes with time for tea and mince pies (and perhaps some creative Christmas Shopping) afterwards.
If this first one is popular we may add more dates in December.
Tickets are £10 each, available here from Debbie Bryan, or call into her shop on St Mary’s Gate.
A visit to London and I pulled in quite a few Victorian landmarks including Thomas Carlyle’s House, using the last couple of days on my Art Fund Card (highly recommended if you visit a lot of museums).
Carlyle’s House features a bust of the writer on the front of the building, the portrait sculpted by Creswick after a design by C.F.A. Voysey.
Benjamin Creswick, as you will remember if you’ve been on the Watson Fothergill Walk or if you read my earlier blog, sculpted the terracottas on two of Watson Fothergill’s Nottingham Buildings. His masterpiece however is the fantastic frieze that resides on the front of the Worshipful Company of Cutler’s Hall near St Paul’s Cathedral. I took a detour after an excellent walking tour of the Square Mile of the City of London with London Walks to have a look, and it did not disappoint.
The Watson Fothergill Walks will be back in Spring 2019 – sign up to the mailing list for all the latest news HERE.