Charles Rennie Mackintosh is one of Britain's best-loved designers. More specifically he's one of Scotland's best-loved designers, which means examples of his work south of the border are fairly sparse. He undertook only one domestic commission outside his home country and that was in 1916, in Northampton. Local entrepreneur W J Bassett-Lowke hadn't able to build the marital house of his dreams because there was a war on, so invited Mackintosh to redesign a narrow terraced house on the edge of town. This Charles did, with warm geometric precision, and the newlywed couple moved in the following year.
Bassett-Lowke ran a model trainbusiness with a rosy future (and a toyshop in High Holborn that's now a McDonalds). 78 Derngate was his home for nearly ten years, after which he commissioned and moved into a ground-breaking modernisthouse on the Wellingborough Road. That's now in private hands, whereas number 78 ended up under the control of Northampton High School who used it as offices and for lessons. Hence much of Mackintosh's handiwork survived, ready to be rescued when a group of volunteers took the place over. That was a mammoth job, although more of a re-creation than a restoration because so much of the original design existed only in photographs. They've done a marvellousjob, including taking over the two houses nextdoor to build a visitors centre and restaurant. If nothing else makes you consider Northampton as a tourist destination, this place should.
No, you don't enter through the front door. It's rather a stunningfrontdoor, jet black with triangular motifs, and in sharp contrast to the rest of the street. You enter via number 82, which has been gutted to create a modern glass atrium, and where they'll take £6.20 off your hands. Time your visit right and you can join a 1¼hr guided tour. Don't time it wrong, because the volunteers are excellent and a self-guided tour just wouldn't be the same. [virtual tour]
The most impressive room in Bassett-Lowke's house is the hall/lounge, located on the other side of the front door. It's ever-so black, partly because they have to keep the curtains closed, but mostly because that's the colour it was painted. Black walls, with yellow stencilled triangles intended to resemble treetops. Black ceiling, with an unusual chequerboard panel holding up a faux-medieval candelabrum. Black fittings, like the hinged box in the fireplace designed to hide tobacco from view. And a black lattice screen across the stairs, inlaid with further yellow triangles in leaded glass. Mrs Bassett-Lowke lived with the gloom for five years before having the whole room repainted in much lighter tones, but the conservationists have gone back to the original design to great effect.
The rear of the house has a more pleasant aspect, and here are the dining room and bedrooms. Renovation work has concentrated more on Mackintosh's design than Bassett-Lowke's furniture, so some of the rooms look a little empty. Concentrate instead on the walls and fixtures, and the ahead-of-their time fitted carpets. Those are Mackintosh lanterns above the dining room fireplace, and the hinged coal scuttle hidden alongside also bears his mark. But it's the guest bedroom that's the most striking, with miniature chairs and a bold ultramarine and white colour scheme. Wake here in the morning, as George Bernard Shaw once did, and your eyes would have faced the optical illusion of a precisely-striped ceiling. The Bassett-Lowkes had an eye on making a splash in interior design magazines such as Ideal Home, and rooms such as this ensured they succeeded.
I'll not give away any of the other secrets in the house (those mosaic tiles in the bathroom are what?) because Mackintosh designed it to surprise. But I will recommend, ladies, that you wear flat-soled shoes because you're going to be asked to don blue plastic slippers before setting foot inside. Make sure you hang around to read all the background information in the stairwell display area, and check out the gallery space alongside. Maybe stay fora meal if you want to make a day of it - any restaurant that serves twice-cooked chunky chips can't be bad. And before you go, return to the backgarden to remind yourself how compact number 78 actually is. It doesn't take a lot of space to create a home of beauty, just a dash of Scots genius.
Between 19th February and 6th March, London Midland are offering return rail tickets anywhere on their network for £10. Euston to Liverpool, Shrewsbury or Hereford, or vice versa, or any point inbetween. Download a voucher and check conditions here. And go on, how about Northampton?
Day Out:Northampton It's one of the largest towns in Britain that isn't a city. Its a county town on the edge of the East Midlands. It made its fortune from the shoe industry. It boasted one of the country's most important castles (now buried beneath the railway station). It's only an hour from London by train. And it's absolutely not somewhere you might think to go for a February day out. So I did.
Visiting...Northampton Museum and Art Gallery Some county town museums are a bit pants. This one's mostly shoes, and all the better for it. The entire downstairs is given over to displays of footwear, and also to the art of cobbling for which the town is duly famous. Somebody's been very very busy collecting shoes of all shapes and types, from medieval leather wraps to 1970s disco wedges. Some are small and dainty, others large and clompy (there's even a massive pair of Doc Martens as originally worn by Elton John, circa Pinball Wizard). There are more ladies' than men's, just as the shoe rack might be in your house, but also a special red-lined cupboard of fetish boots for the gentleman who can't quite make up his mind. A gallery at the back reminds visitors that shoemaking required considerable human skill across a wide range of hard-to-mechanise processes. Much of the labour intensive work has long since drifted abroad, but Church's still handmake Oxfords and brogues in their factory up St James Road. For those with more contemporary tastes, the museum's currently hosting a special exhibition devoted to the history of training shoes. The story kicks off with green Dunlops and those black plimsolls we all wore in 70s gym lessons, but focuses mainly on the top international manufacturers and their rubber-soled creations. Sneakerobsessives will have read all the facts before, but will no doubt lust after all the retro trainers boxed up from the first time around. Adidas Superstars, Air Jordans, New Balance 600-and-somethings... your Heritage Lottery money helped to assemble this lot, and it's attracting a younger audience than normal. Upstairs, yes, a history of Northampton and a lot of old porcelain. But it's the shoes you'll remember. (Sport to Street - 15 January to 3 July 2011, admission free)
Visiting...Greyfriars Bus Station Whoever designed this cavernous 1970s bus station must have hated Northampton. It regularly tops lists of the most hatedbuildings in Britain, and it's very easy to see why. A Brutalist hybrid of bus station, office block and carpark, it sits astride the ringroad like two conjoined aircraft hangars [photo]. The waiting area's sandwiched between two very long undercover bus lanes, so to get inside you'll have to enter from underneath along a dystopiansubway[photo]. Long, off-white and featureless, you can imagine it might have featured in A Clockwork Orange if only the film hadn't been shot quite so early. Once in the heart of the beast you first enter a concrete vault of dismal proportions, where there's one of the least enticing cafeterias you'll ever set eyes upon. A few small tables spaced out beneath striplights, a red-tiled kitchen area which'll do you a £3 breakfast until 1pm, and a ragbag of customers who look ready to give up on life. Head up the escalators into the bus station proper and things don't really improve. The building's so long that no daylight seeps inside, just the occasional bus headlamp flashing past. Rows of wooden benches stretch off into the far distance, where a population of lost souls sits and waits until their chosen service comes to spirit them away. If the economy improves, there are plans to demolish the whole of Greyfriars bus station and build a shopping mall in its place. Normally I'd baulk at the idea but here, sorry Northampton, bring it on.
Visiting...The National Lift Tower Well, you've got to test a lift somewhere, haven't you? And they used to be tested here, in this 127m-high tower on a Northampton trading estate [photo][photo]. To give you some idea of scale, that's about five metres taller than the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, which is what's made the tower a truelandmark for many miles around. It belonged to the Express Lift Company, who knocked it up over a few weeks in the summer of 1980 and then brought the Queen round to open it. There are six shafts inside, none of them from the very top to the very bottom, but enabling a wide range of elevator mechanisms to be duly assessed. All went well until the company was taken over by Otis Elevators, who swiftly closed down all operations in 1997. A hasty Grade-II listing prevented the tower from being demolished, and the surrounding land's since been redeveloped as a fairly ordinary housing estate [photo]. That's good if you want to get up close because there's now public access to the base, or at least to the modern roundabout surrounding it [photo]. It must be odd living in the shadow of such a tall and slender tower, but the folk I saw out mending their cars and lugging the shopping home seemed barely to notice it. Good news - the building's operational again. It's been snapped up by a private company who now operate it as a research, development and lift testing facility. If all goes to plan they'd also like to install a scenic elevator on the outside of the tower and turn it into a tourist attraction, although I'd say the business case for that sounds somewhat shaky. In the meantime there's an abseil planned for the May bank holiday weekend, should you have an impeccable head for heights and a desire to see all of Northampton laid out beneath you.
And also... • Northampton Guildhall - an ostentatious Gothic pile built on the site of the old Town Hall [photo] • Market Square - a historic shopping area that's not as fine and dandy as it once was • CarlsbergBrewery - a photogenic (but smelly) collection of pipes and silos on the banks of the Nene [photo] • That other place you absolutely have to visit in Northampton (of which more tomorrow)
Charles Rennie Mackintosh is one of Britain's best-loved designers. More specifically he's one of Scotland's best-loved designers, which means examples of his work south of the border are fairly sparse. He undertook only one domestic commission outside his home country and that was in 1916, in Northampton. Local entrepreneur W J Bassett-Lowke hadn't able to build the marital house of his dreams because there was a war on, so invited Mackintosh to redesign a narrow terraced house on the edge of town. This Charles did, with warm geometric precision, and the newlywed couple moved in the following year.
No, you don't enter through the front door. It's rather a stunning front door, jet black with triangular motifs, and in sharp contrast to the rest of the street. You enter via number 82, which has been gutted to create a modern glass atrium, and where they'll take £6.20 off your hands. Time your visit right and you can join a 1¼hr guided tour. Don't time it wrong, because the volunteers are excellent and a self-guided tour just wouldn't be the same. [virtual tour]
The rear of the house has a more pleasant aspect, and here are the dining room and bedrooms. Renovation work has concentrated more on Mackintosh's design than Bassett-Lowke's furniture, so some of the rooms look a little empty. Concentrate instead on the walls and fixtures, and the ahead-of-their time fitted carpets. Those are Mackintosh lanterns above the dining room fireplace, and the hinged coal scuttle hidden alongside also bears his mark. But it's the guest bedroom that's the most striking, with miniature chairs and a bold ultramarine and white colour scheme. Wake here in the morning, as George Bernard Shaw once did, and your eyes would have faced the optical illusion of a precisely-striped ceiling. The Bassett-Lowkes had an eye on making a splash in interior design magazines such as Ideal Home, and rooms such as this ensured they succeeded.
Some county town museums are a bit pants. This one's mostly shoes, and all the better for it. The entire downstairs is given over to displays of footwear, and also to the art of cobbling for which the town is duly famous. Somebody's been very very busy collecting shoes of all shapes and types, from medieval leather wraps to 1970s disco wedges. Some are small and dainty, others large and clompy (there's even a massive pair of Doc Martens as originally worn by Elton John, circa Pinball Wizard). There are more ladies' than men's, just as the shoe rack might be in your house, but also a special red-lined cupboard of fetish boots for the gentleman who can't quite make up his mind. A gallery at the back reminds visitors that shoemaking required considerable human skill across a wide range of hard-to-mechanise processes. Much of the labour intensive work has long since drifted abroad, but Church's still handmake Oxfords and brogues in their factory up St James Road. For those with more contemporary tastes, the museum's currently hosting a special exhibition devoted to the history of training shoes. The story kicks off with green Dunlops and those black plimsolls we all wore in 70s gym lessons, but focuses mainly on the top international manufacturers and their rubber-soled creations. Sneaker obsessives will have read all the facts before, but will no doubt lust after all the retro trainers boxed up from the first time around. Adidas Superstars, Air Jordans, New Balance 600-and-somethings... your Heritage Lottery money helped to assemble this lot, and it's attracting a younger audience than normal. Upstairs, yes, a history of Northampton and a lot of old porcelain. But it's the shoes you'll remember.
Whoever designed this cavernous 1970s bus station must have hated Northampton. It regularly tops lists of the most hated buildings in Britain, and it's very easy to see why. A Brutalist hybrid of bus station, office block and carpark, it sits astride the ringroad like two conjoined aircraft hangars [photo]. The waiting area's sandwiched between two very long undercover bus lanes, so to get inside you'll have to enter from underneath along a dystopian subway [photo]. Long, off-white and featureless, you can imagine it might have featured in A Clockwork Orange if only the film hadn't been shot quite so early. Once in the heart of the beast you first enter a concrete vault of dismal proportions, where there's one of the least enticing cafeterias you'll ever set eyes upon. A few small tables spaced out beneath striplights, a red-tiled kitchen area which'll do you a £3 breakfast until 1pm, and a ragbag of customers who look ready to give up on life. Head up the escalators into the bus station proper and things don't really improve. The building's so long that no daylight seeps inside, just the occasional bus headlamp flashing past. Rows of wooden benches stretch off into the far distance, where a population of lost souls sits and waits until their chosen service comes to spirit them away. If the economy improves, there are plans to demolish the whole of Greyfriars bus station and build a shopping mall in its place. Normally I'd baulk at the idea but here, sorry Northampton, bring it on.
Well, you've got to test a lift somewhere, haven't you? And they used to be tested here, in this 127m-high tower on a Northampton trading estate [photo] [photo]. To give you some idea of scale, that's about five metres taller than the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, which is what's made the tower a true landmark for many miles around. It belonged to the Express Lift Company, who knocked it up over a few weeks in the summer of 1980 and then brought the Queen round to open it. There are six shafts inside, none of them from the very top to the very bottom, but enabling a wide range of elevator mechanisms to be duly assessed. All went well until the company was taken over by Otis Elevators, who swiftly closed down all operations in 1997. A hasty Grade-II listing prevented the tower from being demolished, and the surrounding land's since been redeveloped as a fairly ordinary housing estate [photo]. That's good if you want to get up close because there's now public access to the base, or at least to the modern roundabout surrounding it [photo]. It must be odd living in the shadow of such a tall and slender tower, but the folk I saw out mending their cars and lugging the shopping home seemed barely to notice it. Good news - the building's operational again. It's been snapped up by a private company who now operate it as a research, development and lift testing facility. If all goes to plan they'd also like to install a scenic elevator on the outside of the tower and turn it into a tourist attraction, although I'd say the business case for that sounds somewhat shaky. In the meantime there's an abseil planned for the May bank holiday weekend, should you have an impeccable head for heights and a desire to see all of Northampton laid out beneath you.
