Worried about Wakefield

Two names connected up in my consciousness this week: Barbara Hepworth, the sculptor, and John Lewis, the retailer. The latter came up in conversation with a friend for whom the department store is a preferred destination. The former featured a couple of days later when I travelled to Wakefield to visit the newly-built art gallery, devoted to and named for the famous daughter of that city. It was there that the dots were joined up and I ‘discovered’ what many people already know: that Barbara was commissioned, in 1962, to create a sculpture to adorn the face of John’s shop in Oxford Street. It’s still there – although I admit to having never noticed it.

I’ve always liked Barbara Hepworth’s work, more especially since visiting her wonderfully evocative studio in St. Ives some years ago, and although Wakefield did not promise the romantic or artistic allure of the North Cornwall fishing port, I had decided that it is close enough to home for an easy excursion. But if, like me, you had Wakefield stereotyped as a run-down Northern backwater then arriving by train at Kirkgate station would perfectly confirm your prejudice: desolate, derelict and downright dangerous it is incredible – but for the fact of the matter - that this unmanned station is in daily use in the centre of an English city.

The walk from Kirkgate to the Hepworth gallery, though short, is unpleasant because it requires the crossing of complex, busy trunk roads. But the destination, a bend in the river, is attractive and well chosen and the new building, despite its profusion of blank, sharply angled, blue-grey concrete walls, manages to look at home, nestled cosily in the bosom of nature.

It was a school holiday when I visited so, once inside, my bleak, edge-of-town experience was quickly displaced by the cheerful hubbub of visiting families. The gallery itself is beautifully fit-for-purpose and the exhibits are intelligently displayed so as to present their most dramatic faces. The whole is undoubtedly a collection of world-class art housed in an appropriately magnificent setting – just as I had expected.

The walk back to the station, however, revealed something I had not expected. I took a more considered look at the surroundings and went a little out of the way, crossing busy traffic routes, so as to get close to the mediaeval Chantry Chapel. This fabulously ornate jewel of a building is isolated on a now disused bridge over the river. There were no visiting families admiring the intricate stone carvings. There was not even one passer-by. It was closed-up but for a notice pinned to the door advertising occasional services of worship. This building is a spectacular reminder not only of the former prosperity of Wakefield but also of the cultural shifts that have occurred since. Now it stands neglected and vulnerable to vandalism.

Approaching the station on foot was another revelation. The elegantly symmetrical, stone-faced station building dates back to 1845 and was listed (in 1979) as historically important. Although much damage has been done to it before and since, the grandeur of the architecture still proclaims its former significance as it clings, along with its later spawn of scruffy industrial sheds, to the commanding hillside position where it once served as a lynchpin of the regional economy. Its present owners afford it no respect.

The very small slice of Wakefield that I walked through contains important mediaeval, Victorian and contemporary heritage landmarks; yet all the money and attention has been lavished on just one of them. The new gallery is certainly a ‘destination’ but it is only the latest milestone in Wakefield’s history; as a newcomer it has no right to elbow the others into obscurity. And the City is, more than ever before, accessible at the centre of a network of canals, motorways and railways: Kirkgate station is a stop on the main rail line to and from London. Someone in the City Council should be thinking about joining up the dots.

Seen in a Different Light

When the sun shines brightly over Manchester it affords an opportunity to appreciate some of the finer qualities of its ornate, Victorian buildings. So did it shine one recent morning as I walked to the city’s main art gallery to see the newly-opened exhibition of the works of Ford Maddox Brown: the rays hit the buildings acutely, lighting up their decorative features and bringing into sharp relief the intricate detailing of stone, brick and terra-cotta. My eyes were drawn, for the first time, to three words embossed above the second storey windows of a grand, commercial, red-brick edifice: HONESTY, PRUDENCE and PERSEVERANCE. A little further up the road one of the Gallery’s buildings, the classical, Italianate stone-built Athenaeum, competed for the moral high ground with its own inscription, carved around the frieze: FOR THE ADVANCEMENT AND DIFFUSION OF KNOWLEDGE. The buildings on this street could not be described as ambivalent.

Nor is ambivalence a feature of the work of Ford Madox Brown. Now recognised as an innovative, pioneering painter his work created a new style which profoundly influenced the young Pre-Raphaelites. He was also an original partner in the firm founded by William Morris in 1861, for which he designed stained-glass windows, textiles, wallpapers and even furniture. But, despite this diversity, the exhibition of multi-faceted art created by him is much more than the display of visual splendour we might expect.

The passionate colours of his painting and the haunting qualities of its subjects may be what first command attention but closer inspection reveals layers of social and political comment implicit in the imagery- an approach which was unique at the time. Two of his most famous paintings, Work and The Last of England, demonstrate this quality most conspicuously but it is to be found in many of his other works as well. In the latter part of his career he worked - and lived for some years - in Manchester where he had been commissioned to create murals for the Town Hall. During this time he participated actively with the life of the city, leaving traces which we may now delight in detecting through the work he left behind and the ways in which it intertwines with local history. As an example, a five-minute walk from the Gallery, there is a statue of President Lincoln. It is there to commemorate his gratitude to the mill-workers of Lancashire for the stand they took against slavery despite their consequent loss of livelihood due to the ensuing blockade of cotton from the southern states. Back in the exhibition hangs a painting which Brown donated to raise funds for the relief of those workers.

The location of the exhibition, placed in a building dedicated to art and craft, in a city built out of monumental social change, reinforces the sense that Brown’s creativity is engaged not only in his art but in design, politics and society as well. On leaving the Gallery I looked up again, respectfully, at the motto on the frieze. A little more knowledge had been advanced in my direction and I felt inspired to play a small part in its diffusion.

The sunlight lasted into that evening, reflecting soft hues of deep, dusky pink from the monumental, 19^th century red brick buildings, bouncing back from the 20^th century glass towers and soaking into the honey-coloured stone of the classical-themed fantasies to display a tableau of urban development and social change in one great, unstructured son et lumiere. I thought about the inscribed pledge of honesty, prudence and perseverance which proclaimed the values of the incumbent business of an earlier age and compared it with modern-day, bland ‘mission statements’ about customer satisfaction. I began to dream of persuading banks to resurrect the old values and to post them proudly on their web-sites. But then I remembered one of the last works in the exhibition: a portrait of St. Jude – the patron saint of hopeless causes.