News & Views

Edgar Wood and J. Henry Sellers had met up in 1903 and quickly began working on a new type of ‘cubic’ architecture using reinforced concrete and to create buildings not possible with traditional roofs.

Elm Street School (now Elm Wood School) was designed as a ‘Board School’. However, it was radically different to the other schools of this type and is celebrated as a high point of Wood’s and Sellers’ Arts & Crafts modernism. It was one of just a handful of joint designs by the two architects, despite having worked together on the new style. Edgar Wood was extremely busy in 1908 and most likely he asked Sellers to help him with the design which he had recieved after much lobbying of the Middleton Education Committee.

Elm Street School is a symmetrical building using a motif of a rectangle and semicircle to shape a substantial garden at its centre. The rectangle and semicircle also shapes the architectural detailing and the constant reuse of these two shapes bestows a quiet unity to the design.

The semicircle is expressed as a concave single-storey limestone façade facing the garden and behind rises an impressive brick school hall with nine round-headed windows and short limestone-capped towers at each end. The height of the hall windows, which makes the interior so bright, is only possible  because flat concrete roofs are used on the surrounding classrooms. The main hall has a fine plaster ceiling decorated with a large rectangle and two semicircles in blue and yellow/orange, the original colours.

Two sides of the garden are enclosed by passageways with semicircular openings, which connect the school entrances to the road and provide shelter for the children. The garden is a safe place for young children to play and, like the garden at Long Street Methodist School, it shows that Edgar Wood wanted children to experience the beauty of nature.

Compare Elm Street School with the Long Street Methodist School? They look completely different yet are based on the same idea of a school set around an Arts & Crafts garden.

Elm Street School is still used as a school today. It has been renamed Elm Wood School in honour of its designer. The buildings are owned by Rochdale Council which, with the school, has carried out conservation work in recent years, including restoring the original windows.

Elm Street School is listed Outstanding Grade II* by English Heritage

Visit Elm Wood School web site

When Redcroft (left) and Fencegate (right) were built in 1891, they were the most modern pair of ‘semis’ in the country. They began a new phase of Arts & Crafts design which reworked the humble features of  farmhouses and cottages into new sophisticated architecture. Edgar Wood’s buildings had been hinting at this vernacular inspired style for several years. The problem was that few wealthy Victorian businessmen wanted their new home to look like a crumbling old cottage! Wood could only introduce a few features here and there so as not to be overruled by his clients.

However, with Redcroft and Fencegate, Edgar was both the client and the designer. He was free to design the house as he wished, save for the views of his supportive father who was paying for it as Edgar and Annie Wood’s wedding present – they were married that year. Edgar and Annie lived at Redcroft while the manager of his father’s mill, Mr. Wiggins, lived at Fencegate.

When building Redcroft, Edgar looked up at the just plastered ceiling and a large piece of wet plaster fell into his face. Plaster is extremely alkaline and he lost an eye in the accident. Had Edgar lost both eyes, his career would have ended immediately and the appearance of buildings fifty years hence might have looked rather different.

51 & 53 Rochdale Road are well preserved example of Arts and Crafts domestic architecture.  A picturesque quality is obtained through sensitive use of materials rather than irregular form. The form is blocky and efficient, with a grid-like arrangement of elements on the main facade.

Asymmetry is created simply by raising the bay window on the left hand side, so that it breaks the eaves.  Wood’s later designs, for example 36 Mellalieu Street nearby do a similar thing and both are examples of Wood changing his architectural expression from irregular forms to one where materials and formality increasingly play the dominant role.

The building is one of the first polite architect-designed house designs to use common bricks to define the front elevation, something which, again, looked towards the future. Another interesting feature is the design of the two front doors, which anticipate Art Deco by some 25 years!

Check out Andy Marshall’s Photos of Hopwood Hall

Hopwood Hall is one of the truly great buildings of Middleton but one which has sadly been left to rot under the custodianship of Rochdale M.B.C.  Recently, the Council has tried to make amends by providing security and undertaking urgent repairs. There is some hope, with the leadership of Hopwood Hall College and a host of volunteers, plans are being tentatively drawn up to save the building. Great credit should go to Mr. Bob Wall for his constant efforts on behalf of the building, to Andy Marshall, for his amazing photos and to conservation expert Alan Gardner whose advice and direction have been critical to saving the building.

Hopwood Hall is remembered by students of the old De La Salle art college of the 1980s – the chapel to the college is also a listed building but of a very different type, a modernist creation of the 1960s – famous for being Liverpool R.C. Cathedral in miniature.

Hopwood Hall is a building of many ages where the work of the medieval carpenter sits next to that of the modern builder. Its history is long and complex and the buildings ‘ramble’ like no other. Edgar Wood was a fan and around 1910 carried out a sensitive restoration which, in turn, complemented the characterful work by the architect Geoge Shaw of Saddleworth half a century earlier.  The interiors are rich in Jacobean panelling and plaster work but currently the floors are simply too rotten and dangerous to walk on. However, you can get a good view from Andy Marshall’s photos.

Visit conservation expert Alan Gardner’s web site

Listed Outstanding Grade II* by English Heritage