the midland hotel
morecambe
Morecambe Bay, April 2008
the midland hotel photographs
Simon Webb Sarah Hall
8 text pieces
Michael Bracewell introduction
Litfest / dewi lewis publishing
Funders/Acknowledgements
Litfest (Lancaster and District Festival Ltd) is supported by Arts Council England Lancaster City Council Lancashire County Council
Simon Webb would like to thank: Deborah Chan and Laura Hutchinson Andy Darby and Catherine Sadler at Litfest Pete Courtie and Euan Smith at Lancaster City Council Kieran Gardener, Paul Huett, Gary Falkingham, Luke Birch, Paul Jones and Bill Maynard at Urban Splash And all those who helped while I photographed on site
First published in the UK by Litfest and Dewi Lewis Publishing Litfest P.O Box 751 Lancaster la1 9aj www.litfest.org Dewi Lewis Publishing 8 Broomfield Road Heaton Moor Stockport sk4 4nd www.dewilewispublishing.com Š 2008 For the photographs: Simon Webb For the texts: Sarah Hall, Michael Bracewell, Catherine Sadler For this edition: Litfest & Dewi Lewis Publishing All rights reserved ISBN: 9781904587613 Editor: Catherine Sadler Design and Layout: Alan Ward, Axis Graphic Design Print: EBS, Verona, Italy
Foreword
This book reflects the Midland Hotel project as a whole. It imagines something differently, opens up, renews and reveals a building that has been a private and decaying one for many years. Like its subject matter, it is an inventive endeavour, and of historical and architectural A disused doorbell, peeling layers of wallpaper, a cocktail bar, broken glass. A wedding night,
importance. Anyone with an affection and fascination for the hotel, and for Morecambe
postcards, the view to Morecambe Bay. All are here in The Midland Hotel.
itself, will be delighted by this book.
Derelict spaces are potent spaces, their past has a hold on the imagination. What did this place look like? What happened here? Who was here? For a place once as grand
Catherine Sadler
as Morecambe’s Midland Hotel, but until recently a derelict reminder of the heyday of
Projects Manager, Litfest
Britain’s seaside resorts, this is particularly so. Simon Webb has been photographing the Hotel since 2004 and in collaboration with Sarah Hall, who has written new work for this book, has captured it at a key point in its history – being transformed into a functioning hotel again. This unique collection of photographs and text sheds light on places for the most part unseen or untouched for years, and reveals what has been (and what might have been) going on behind closed doors. It offers us remnants, incidents, encounters, entertainments, hotel guests – animal and ethereal – and takes us from the complex thrill often evoked by the neglected space to the simple excitement of seeing a building heaving into life again. The photographs show the tensions between, and convergence of, past, present and future, inside and outside, light and darkness, stillness and movement. The text imagines who may have been there, what may have happened, even what they may have eaten, and offers a reassurance – “Midland, we’ve not forgotten you…” Litfest has a history of commissioning innovative literary work and The Midland Hotel is about creating an opportunity for a writer and photographer to work together. It has been interesting and exciting to be part of this work, to see how each artist has often articulated the intent of the other – occasionally by chance – and how the project has given them the room to experiment. I’d like to thank Michael Bracewell for wonderfully setting the scene in his introduction. Thanks also to Arts Council England and Lancaster City Council for funding the project, and to the sponsors of the book, Urban Splash.
Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection
Dell & Wainwright / RIBA Library Photographs Collection
The Midland Hotel: A Modern Romance Michael Bracewell A century before, Turner and Ruskin had made artistic responses to the high romanticism of this coastal gateway to the Cumbrian hills and lakes; and so in 1932, Oliver Hill, and the artists and designers with whom he worked to make the environment of the Midland a Oyster, bronze, azure, vermilion, silver, grey... Colours and hues of such height, complexity
total modern experience, were likewise engaging with a new conception of Morecambe’s
and audacious sophistication that the mind cannot anticipate their scale and brilliance.
stunning location. Rather than the sublime, Hill and his colleagues were engaging with a cult
Anyone who has walked the shoreline at Morecambe is aware of the monumental
of youth and coastal ozone; to the new fashions for sunbathing and calisthenics (imported
splendour of its vista; and as the vast half circle of the promenade commands its northerly
from the south of France); to cocktails, dark glasses, high dives and dinner suits; to chic and
view towards the Cumbrian hills, so one of Morecambe’s earliest titles – ‘The Naples of
gloss and acceleration. The Midland Hotel was a temple to all of these new ideals for living.
the North’ – remains an apt description of this sweeping, dazzling curve in the coastal landscape. In common with many of Britain’s seaside resorts, it was Morecambe’s exotic location
The railway company had requested of Hill, “A building of international quality in the modern style”; and Hill himself wrote, “you have here the a unique opportunity of building the first really modern hotel in the country...” Later, a guest staying at the hotel
which first proposed its popular identity as a place of wholly restorative charm: ‘Beauty
would write, “Everything here is equally modern...” And as such, within the hotel, all the
Surrounds, Health Abounds’, ran the town’s irresistible motto – still to be found
equipment of living – from chairs to bath plugs to carpets – were designed as modern art.
emblazoned beneath the civic coats of arms on the railinged gates to Happy Mount Park.
The list of contributing artists and designers were all first division modernist chic. With its
Morecambe is above all a richly romantic location – against the backdrop of its legendary
famous carved reliefs by Eric Gill and Eric Ravilious, furnishings by Duncan Grant and rugs
sunsets, the place is an accumulation of fantastical glamour. As the ceremonial portal to the
by Marion Dorn, this was a hotel as not just a work of art, but a statement of modern
Lake District, so celebrated by Victorian cults of the sublime in nature; as a playground for
aesthetics – to a sun-drenched cult of newness on the north west coast, in which the latest
holidaymakers, dizzy with shows and amusements and distraction; and as one of the first
in fabrics, materials, design and colour was brilliantly conflated with modernist ideals in art
exuberant sites of modern popular culture – of pop groups and beauty queens, television
and craft. Its surface was treated with crushed blue glass, the underside of the windows
stars and gauzy, gaudy souvenirs. (A Tommy Steele charm bracelet; cuff-links in the shape
glazed green, the outside of the hotel electrically polished – a modern mirror for the
of electric guitars; George Formby presented by The Mayor with a ukulele made out of
ageless sunsets.
flowers, for all the world like some surrealist sculpture.)
The Midland Hotel, famously, was proclaimed during the Depression of the 1930s to be “an
Unsurprisingly, at the turn of the twentieth century, Morecambe prospered as a popular
extravagant gesture of hope at a time of great uncertainty.” And in many ways this uplifting,
holiday resort. Postcards show parades and lights and novelties – including the somewhat
muscular phrase has proved prophetic of the hotel’s triumphant survival: reinvented for
formal cutting of the biggest Christmas pudding in the British Empire. And a Midland hotel
new generations, Hill’s “first really modern hotel in the country” has rekindled as a beacon
had existed since 1848 – grey, Georgian in style, utterly respectable. This was replaced
of slick, exuberant, and coolly romantic modernity.
in the most spectacular fashion, however, by a new hotel commissioned by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway Company in 1932, to be designed by a smart young architect whose interest in buildings was holistic and multi-allusive, Oliver Hill. The most important word in the (continuing) history of Oliver Hill’s Midland is singularly and emphatically ‘modern’. The Midland Hotel is one of the great statements, internationally, about the nature of both modernism (a pan-cultural movement across the arts, from verse to ceramics), and modernity – as an attitude to living and lifestyle.
Hotel – western aspect, January 2005 following spread
Corridor – first floor, September 2004 Room – first floor, October 2004
the last guest
Such as it is, the place is hers. The corridors and grand halls, the cellar vaults and patchy catacombs, where once there were bedrooms and guests, suitcases opened and closed, bellboys, and waitresses with cocktail spoons, meetings and instructions, telephone calls and welcomes. Now the space is empty, she’s taken over the hull of dirty calcium tiles, as if it were a shell. Crab or snail or seacuckoo, she borrows what isn’t used. She moves close to the walls, trying to take them with her where she goes. Invertebrate. Soft-muscled. Housed. Some days her register is almost human. Cello of weathers. Flautist of punctures and holes. Murderess, she says. Spy, spinster, maid of the asylum. The games she plays. The deco dolls, with their inarticulate limbs, flake on the plasterboards. Often she inhabits splendidly, gracing the centre of rooms, descending the spiral staircase. A belle of the ball. Grand dame of the mansion gone mad, fecund with loneliness, hosting herself. Remembering dances, laughter – the building’s heyday. The building is a corset, whaleboned, ribboned with guano. The building fades like a dress, reeks of mothballs. She remembers casual invitations, when the windows were open, gowns hung to air. She remembers touching lace, remembers silk, how it should be worn, powder in the bust. Before that, wool, and before that, fur. At the first floor bar the gentlemen waited. A side door opened. She flirted, put out their matches. Tossed off their hats. They bored her, tried to explain her occupation. Took her measure. Gave her limits. Always there was work to do – mills and sails, balloons and ships. It never made sense. How she hates consistency. If angry, she slams doors, forces the nails out of shutters. If considerate, she treads softly, pauses. No one knows she is there unless she announces it. Ghost-song and breakages. She doesn’t breathe, has no lungs or gills. She tests the litmus of bare skin. A shiver. A sigh. Today she has company. Someone is working a lens. A man disappointed by light. A man overjoyed by shadow. He’s been here before. She stalls to watch him and the plastic sheets flutter and fall against the doorframes. What is he doing?
If she fills the gaps left by wardrobes, dressers, cupboards, and card tables, if she sweeps dust off the floors and freshens the hallways, it is because she has turned domestic for a day. She is tired of outside – the tide gardens and salt meadows, her vast traffic, shifting debris in the town, rounding the chimneys, the slate calculations, corners, her wire instruments, fretworks, factories, towns, cities, mountains, all places at once, the orchestral agoraphobia. The sky. The endlessness. Too much. Such as it is, this is her home. Extraordinary warehouse. Hangar. Lair, burrow, warren, den, shelter. The birds part company when she comes in, preen the damp from their wings. The birds own nothing between the rafters that is not hers to loan. The old mirrors and the broken glasses try to get a good look at her. Such contrary beauty. All scent and kinetics. Street worker. Perfume of her last client. All nothingness. All talk. No atoms, no organs, not even a corpse to catch her. Murderess. In winter-time the homeless wake from death to imagine sirens, jail, men coming to bulldoze, men coming to arrest, men cursing their own curses. What couldn’t she tell them about aggravation and dismay? What couldn’t she tell them of vagrancy, loss, and destitution? They share newspapers, the songs of disuse and the bottle tops. Bedrooms. The kitchen. Reception. Temporary dependence. They have nothing to say to each other. The temperature drops. She’s immune. She’s up and about long before them, climbing over their grey faces, their red eyes, removing the stale spirit from their breath. The paint flakes. She strips it. The foundation shifts – she shores it. Caretaker. Squatter. Sea-cuckoo. She is not employed here. She has not been asked to leave. No one has sealed the walls, though the men dream hermetic dreams. She goes, comes back. Stirs the dust. In the windless building she is sitting perfectly still, pretending not to exist.
Stairs from basement into rotunda area, September 2004
Hotel – eastern aspect, September 2005
Spiral cantilever staircase – ground floor, October 2004 following spread
Room – second floor, February 2005 Cocktail Bar – ground floor, February 2005
Basement, September 2004
honeymoon suite
All I kept thinking was, this is just like being at sea. Him on top rocking away. Salt water, fever and coal: that’s how my husband smelled. And those tight black knots across his chest. And the white linen sheets sailing onto the floor. I didn’t know what was expected of me, nobody really explained. Mam had had a go, talking about the birds and the bees. She made it sound like a day out in the country. My maiden voyage: that’s what dad said it would be. Dad had been in the Navy, and gone all round the world. He was in the war and then he worked for Blue Flue. The stories he used to tell my mother and me, about pineapple trees and rum, the ports where you could buy anything imaginable – thimbles, pipes of ivory, and the tiny heads of tribesmen lacquered so they wouldn’t turn nasty. But he never brought any of those home for us to see, so we weren’t sure what he was making up and what was real. When I was six, I knew the names of all the oceans and my Beaufort scale. Even when he retired he used to listen to the shipping forecast. He said it let him unwind and he liked to be in the know. He always kept a little piece of hazel-wood in his pocket, for luck. A pocket nub. Lots of sailors were superstitious that way. Some of them had pictures of pigs and cocks. Barnyard animals don’t like getting wet, you see. But anyway, that’s what he gave me on my wedding day – the hazel. He slipped it into my hand as he was giving me away. I was still holding on tight to it when my husband came to put on the ring. Salt water, fever and coal. The ups and downs were like being on a boat. When I looked out of the window I could see the bay too, and I thought 11 to 16 knots, moderate, white-caps in the Irish Sea. The truth is I didn’t mind it at all, so we had a few goes, and later on there were stars.
Room – second floor, November 2004 following spread
Doorbell, September 2004 Spiral cantilever staircase to roof, October 2004