street scene. Chimneys and smoke are the characteristics of all. Round Manchester there used to be, and perhaps are yet, some few homesteads of interest, but the majority of them are swept away. Speke Hall, near Liverpool, is quite an exceptionally fine building, but though it was for long a farm-house, and cattle were in rooms that adorn Nash’s Mansions, it is now again made into a residence. There is an old black-and-white house at Kenyon, formerly the residence of the Lord Chief-Justice Kenyon, but now empty; and perhaps, excepting another at Newton Junction, that must be familiar to all travellers between Manchester and Liverpool, there is nothing that can be regarded as very interesting.
The Isle of Man stands so near Lancashire that it is often called a part of it, though indeed it is under a rule different from the rest of England, and does not return a member to Parliament, which of course, gives it the privilege of ruling its own finances. It has a Parliament of its own, and on the 5th of July, the acts they have passed are publicly read out on Tynwald Hill, about three miles to the east of Peel.
Castleton is the seat of the governor of this singular island, and derives its name from an old fortress called Castle Rushen, which stands in the middle of the town, and is said, though with uncertain accuracy, to have been built by a Danish chief in the tenth century. Peel is a small seaport, and formerly was of much more importance than it now is. On a sort of small rocky island here is situated the celebrated Peel Castle that Scott has alluded to in his novel of “Peveril of the Peak,” a novel which has been of some little service in the present work, from the exceeding care and accuracy of its topographical detail.
In concluding the present series of sketches of our ancient cities and homesteads, one is met by the question—Is it not possible in future buildings to adopt more of the old spirit, and relieve our streets from monotony? In reply to which it may readily be answered, that it is not only possible, but it would add greatly to the convenience and mercantile value of a street if such a course were adopted.
The dreary rows of square-headed windows at even distances in long brick walls govern the rooms inside, and imperatively domineer over the convenience of the arrangement. A French writer, speaking of the palace of Versailles, at the time it was built, and regretting that a style had been adopted which demanded this precisely even fenestration, said that it caused a footman’s pantry to be lit by a huge window which had perforce to correspond with a row in a drawing-room on the same front, and perhaps had to be cut in two by a partition, to let the other half do duty for another minor apartment.
On the ground of economy and fitness alone our humbler streets call aloud for improvement; and if it is said that England is now a nation of shopkeepers, it must be remembered that Venice was too, and that in the days of its greatest architectural grandeur.
Indeed, when she began to decay, her arts declined too. Mr. Beresford Hope, in some admirable remarks delivered at the Town Hall, Hanley, said “he wished to show them that the world’s debt to art was one in which they all had a share. It was a joint-stock company, in which every man, woman, and child, had a share, which he or she might pay up with a perfect certainty of ample return. By art he meant the science of beauty in material things,—that art which was something for the artist and something for the people themselves—which stood in no need of being separated from the everyday wear and bustle of common life—which had to do with buying and selling, with marrying and giving in marriage, with lying down and getting up, with buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market, with all the wear and tear of everyday life,—instead of being something separate from this. Art is beauty, but it is also economy and appropriateness. Art is the faculty of being able with the greatest economy of material, of colour, and invention, to be able to produce the brightest effects.”
“In Kent,” he further on says, “there is a traditionary way of building chimneys, by a simple variation in the management of common bricks, but the effects produced are most picturesque; any common labourer could do it, but it is true art.” Mr. Hope then takes a row of houses in Birmingham, or Manchester, or Bradford. They were so many houses put up—no outline or skyline,—“The same dread, dreary, uniform, colourless square block, the same square doors, brass knockers and door plates, the same sash windows, the same stone slab under the windows, the same chimneys, and when they went inside, the same rhubarb-coloured oilcloth on the passage, the same rooms with the same paper on the walls, and the same chimney-piece.” This is truly and well said. It is almost impossible to feel otherwise than weary and dull on the brightest summer’s day in Liverpool. Architectural dreariness is carried to the highest pitch of which it is capable in this town, though some parts of Birkenhead rival it. Now, as has been already remarked, Chester is not only a delightful city to walk in, a city which it is a pleasure to have any business to transact in, but its arrangement and the unstudied variety of its houses make it serviceable and economical. The shifting, broken skyline, and the gables of the houses projecting as it were in amicable rivalry into the street, are always pleasant and cheerful to behold. If it is asked whether such a style of building would seriously be recommended in a practical point of view, I would say again and again it should. The Chester architects have quite adopted the indigenous style, and, to do them justice,
they have adapted it too. There is no lack of convenience in their recent erections. The buildings which have an exterior made to fit them are quite as likely to be convenient and serviceable as those which are made to fit a dreary square exterior; and as for utility and popular appreciation, a test is ready. Build one street in the square style Mr. Hope has so graphically described, and another in picturesque outline, and see which brings in the best return for the money, supposing of course all other things are equal, such as site and accommodation; the pleasant architectural appearance and expression of the one street will always leave the other in the distance.