C O N T E N T S Editorial 2 From the Chairman 6 New Members 8 The latest Blue Plaquery: 8 Alice Wheeldon 9 Percival Willoughby, MD 9 Joseph Pickford 10 William Duesbury the elder 11 Revd. Thomas Gisborne & William Strutt FRS 11 John Whitehurst FRS 13 Derby’s Grade II Listed Buildings 30: Darley Hall Stables 15 Darley Hall Stables Conversion Plans 17 Darley Abbey’s New Fish Pass 18 DCMS Consultation on the Future of English Heritage 19 Derby Museums; Maker Fair 20 Derby Museum Friends 21 Biographical Dictionary of Derbyshire Architects to 1945: W – Y 22 Coming Society events 47 North Lees Hall 48 * 1 E D I T O R I A L First of all, I would like to wish all readers a happy New Year for 2014. Secondly, I would like to offer our most hearty congratulations to Richard Blunt for his exemplary restoration of St. Helen’s House and for winning the Georgian Group’s prestigious award for it. It can only encourage others, and we must hope that the County Council, after 13 years of incompetent dithering, will swiftly grant him a lease of Elvaston Castle and let him get on with that, too. I know he would do an absolutely terrific job. Our rise in membership, rightly highlighted by Alan Grimadell, our new chair- man, is a most encouraging aspect of the recent past and something we would wish to build upon. Added to that, we have acquired two corporate members, some-thing we have not had in any numbers since Carole and I first joined in around 1980. I rather hope we might consider putting together a mailing shot to a select group of local firms inviting them to follow suit. Plenty of members and corporate members can only help to increase our clout, and in these rapidly changing times, clout is something we shall need in spades. With signs of the economy 2 beginning to stir for the first time since the fiduciary disasters of 2008, we shall need great vigilance to monitor development s like Wilson Bowden’s on Full Street and the creep of new housing is all those green fragments of land still left around the fringes of the City, which we have been defending for years, with mixed success. Furthermore, whilst there are threats to these outer suburbs, there are plenty of brown field sites crying out for re-development, most noteworthy of which are Duckworth Square and Friar Gate station. Full Street has been fallow since a little before the recession, and the impression given was that Wilson Bowden, the owners, had rather given up on it. Indeed, I must say I thought they were on the brink of doing a Metro-Holst = the developers of the ’Bus Station and Open Market who fell by the wayside in mid-flight and whose rescuer gave us the truly horrible Riverlights building, a gross gimcrack pile in tasteful battleship grey. But in fact, they were merely sitting on the plot until better times came, and, with a healthy cash injection from the Council, this has now come to pass. Recently, we were treated to an architect’s projection of the replacement building, which I append. Readers will readily observe that this is just the first thing their computer CAD produced when the client’s requirement s were punched in. The applicants will be hoping that the planning committee will nod it through as it stands, but this is a conservation area, and the building will be seen across Cathedral Green in the context of the Cathedral (LGI), The College (LGII), and the Silk Mill (LGII). The site is also adjacent to the World Heritage Site, and anything to be built on it needs to be of terrific quality. What we have now is if anything worse that the old Police Station, which was at least built of brick. 3 Furthermore, I understand that the firm’s custodianship of the listed Magistrates’ Courts and old police station (the work of Herbert Aslin, 1933) has been less than perfect. The beautiful wrought bronze balustrade of the staircase inside has been hacked out and at least one of the bronze lamp holders which flanked the grand entrance has gone. Decorative metalwork was one of Aslin’s specialities, although we are not entirely sure which craftsman made it, although one suspects it was done by the local firm of Taylor, Whiting and Taylor. I have photographs of the external metal work and I can only hope that the internal metalwork was photographically recorded too, so that replicas can be fully re-instated, as the law requires. With regard to Duckworth Square, the news that a scheme to regenerate it is in the pipeline is welcome. When I was on the board of Cityscape (our Urban Regeneration Company [URC] of blessed memory, rightly abolished in short order by the present government) we spent some time pursuing schemes to do something about Duckworth Square. The stumbling block was that this relatively modest space was divided amongst five freeholders, all of whom had completely unrealistic expectations of the value of their particular moiety, making the re-unification of the site virtually impossible. My view at the time was that one should try and create incentives for the freeholders by somehow involving them in any proposed development. One presumes that this problem has been overcome, perhaps by this very method. Any development may well involve the future of the former Debenhams store (originally Ranby’s) and the United Reform Chapel, both of which we placed on the Local List as being of no small merit, despite their early 1960s modernist appearance. They are currently owned by Westfield, acquired get Debenhams to move and to prevent competition with the eponymous shopping arcade, which we hear is now to be sold. Debenhams especially follows the street line in a noble sweep, just like the Technical College did on Normanton Road before Wheatcrofts were allowed to level it (to no particular purpose) a decade or so ago. Again, the key issue here will be the form and purpose of whatever is intended to go there, bearing in mind that the conservation area we managed to get set up by the Council around Green Lane lies on its south side. The Friar Gate GNR station site is linked to the problem of the Handyside railway bridge of 1876 (above). Clowes Investments has owned the site for decades, and there 4 have been at least three major schemes granted planning consent for it. None have been built, and the site continues to lie empty, generating accumulated value. The last scheme, to include a superstore by a major national retailer in the listed Bonded Warehouse was quite a good one, too. With a scheme there actually being built, there would be a much great incentive to do something positive about the bridge. Readers will recall that we were led to believe, through a dexterous piece of salesmanship on the party of Lowbridge, the developers of the site opposite, that the bridge would be somehow incorporated, but of course, this never happened. The small print reminded us that it was up to the Council to undertake that part (some hope!). Driving past the copperclad monstrosity that they put up in our premier conservation area, one quickly reaches the conclusion that there are no takers for all this space that the Council, the Chamber of Trade and the Forkinistas claimed was ‘desperately needed as an essential spur to growth of a vibrant business community’ in this part of the City. Thus we may be waiting some time before the second block of this development gets built, which can only be a good thing. What is there now is meretricious enough; doubling it in size can only magnify the blight. The Ford Street Horror: a half-completed empty vessel. This of course, reminds us that, by the same token, the grisly Jury’s Inn development is only half built as well. A tower of apartments was granted planning consent adjacent and could still go up, further harming the setting of Pugin’s fine St. Marie’s church (to employ its original spelling) and compromising the City’s ravaged skyline. The contribution of the Council to assist Wilson Bowden in re-developing the Full Street site was linked to the wholly laudable plan to re-locate the Derby Local Studies Library to the former Magistrates’ Court. What a pity that costs preclude the Council from exercising its right to be an archive repository and seeking to repatriate the City’s MS collections to Derby at the new site. Leaving these in the custodianship of 5 the grim junta who now run the County Council, makes me at least, uneasy; I can remember what befell the County’s once fine Museum service, its collections and respected officers in the 1980s. One must also worry about the future of the former County Council HQ where the Local Studies Library is presently based. Infill housing seems likely, but we must press for the retention of this splendid building by G. H. Widdows (see Biographical Dictionary, below). A final thought: Dame Helen Ghosh, the career bureaucrat who now heads up the executive arm of the National Trust, has recently argued that the British are not as sentimental about heritage as many another nations. We were very un-reverential in the post-war period. We wanted to build a new nation in the image of the Festival of Britain: ‘Let’s knock everything down and build an Arndale Centre.’ Whereas in continental Europe they reconstructed what they had before.