HippCast: Episode 15

Visitors to HippFest will remember that the Bo’ness Fair Queen, who is crowned each year at the fair, has joined us on several occasions at our HippFest Closing Night Gala to award prizes. The Bo’ness Children’s Fair Festival, to give it its official name, was founded in 1897 and continues to be a major cultural event in Scotland, beloved by Bonessians at home, and further afield.

Louis Dixon, the original proprietor of the Hippodrome, produced local topicals for the cinema, making films documenting the fair from as early as 1912 right through to his death in 1960. So to get in the spirit of the fair, and of Louis Dixon himself, We thought it would be fitting to share with you an adapted version of the walking tour led by local historian and archaeologist Geoff Bailey about the Hippodrome architect Matthew Steele!

Architect of the Hippodrome (1911), Matthew Steele has a lasting legacy in the streets of Bo’ness. His practice lasted from 1905-37 and in that time he created many private homes and public buildings in the town, in the Arts and Crafts, and later art deco moderne style. Born in Bo’ness and trained in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Steele worked mainly in Bo’ness throughout his life and his designs are often very recognisable. Adapted from our online video tour released as part of HippFest 2021, this audio production hosted by Geoff Bailey will guide you through Bo’ness to discover the buildings created by this influential architect.

So spend the afternoon in Bo’ness strolling from one building to the other as you listen along; or if you’re tuning in from overseas and are curious about a building, you can do the exact same using Google Maps.

Happy Fair Day to all who celebrate!⁠

• 00:03:57 | Hippodrome Cinema (10 Hope Street Bo’ness EH51 0AA)
• 00:08:07 | South Street (11 South St, Bo’ness EH51 0EA)
• 00:09:41 | Corvi’s and the old Station Hotel (5-7 Seaview Place, Bo’ness EH51 0AJ)
• 00:12:37 | The Star Cinema (17 Corbiehall, Bo’ness, EH51 0AW)
• 00:16:00 | ‘Coffin Close’ (63 Corbiehall, Bo’ness EH51 0AX)
• 00:17:59 | ‘St Mary’s Buildings’ (195 Corbiehall, Bo’ness EH51 OAX)
• 00:19:26 | Seaforth (43 Linlithgow Road, Bo’ness, EH51 0DW)
• 00:21:28 | Matt Steele’s cottages (Dean Road, Bo’ness, EH51 9BH)
• 00:22:42 | The ‘Venetian Houses‘ (Cadzow Cres, Bo’ness EH51 9AY)
• 00:23:45 | Duchess Nina Nurses’ Home (Where Cadzow Crescent and Cadzow Lane connect, Bo’ness, EH51 9AY)
• 00:25:29 | Matt Steele’s bungalows (Cadzow Crescent, Bo’ness, EH51 9AZ)
• 00:26:11 | Masonic Hall (Stewart Avenue, Bo’ness, EH51 9NJ)
• 00:28:03 | Commission Street flats (Main St, Bo’ness EH51 9NG)
• 00:29:29 | Matty Steele Building (South St, Bo’ness EH51 9NF)

Please note that this transcript is generated with the assistance of AI technology and therefore may contain some errors.

 [00:00:00]

Alison Strauss: Hi there folks, and welcome to HippCast Episode 15. We’re recording this episode at the end of June, just two days before an important date in the Bo’ness calendar, the Bo’ness Fair. Visitors to HippFest will remember that the Bo’ness Fair Queen, who is crowned each year at the fair has joined us on several occasions at our HippFest Closing Night Gala to award prizes. The Bo’ness Children’s Fair Festival, to give it its official name, was founded in 1897 and continues to be a major cultural event in Scotland, beloved by Bonessians at home, and further afield. Louis Dixon, the original proprietor of the Hippodrome, produced local topicals for the cinema, making films documenting the fair from as early as 1912 right through to his death in 1960.

Louis would [00:01:00] film the fair processions, the crowds and all the pageantry, and then have the footage developed in double quick time, ready to project in his brand new cinema, designed by local architect Matthew Steele, to packed houses of fee paying local people eager to see themselves on the big screen in Dixon’s new Picture Palace.

He was very canny that way. Many of these Fair films are still preserved in the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive, and we have screened some of them during HippFest much to everyone’s delight. Some of the footage includes the Hippodrome, and it really is quite thrilling to see the cinema in use nearly a century ago.

To get in the spirit of the fair, and of Louis Dixon himself, We thought it would be fitting to share with you an adapted version of the walking tour led by local historian and archaeologist Geoff Bailey about the Hippodrome architect Matthew Steele. The guided walking tour was originally scheduled for the [00:02:00] 10th edition of HippFest, which was cancelled due to Covid but later re-enacted and recorded for our online edition in 2021, and finally staged in real life in 2022.

It was terrific in both these formats and well worth revisiting with us now via the medium of podcast. Matthew Steele has a lasting legacy in the streets of his hometown, Bo’ness. His practice lasted from 1905 to 1937 and in that time he created many private homes and public buildings. If you’d like to explore Matt Steele’s legacy in Bo’ness for yourself at any time, Digital Content Manager Christina Weber has helpfully included location markers next to the corresponding time codes in the episode transcript and show notes.

This means that you can spend the afternoon in Bo’ness and stroll from one building to the other as you listen along. Or if you’re tuning in from overseas and are curious [00:03:00] about a building, never fear, you can do the exact same using Google Maps. Christina has been ambling about on Google Street View and assures me that each building is visible in digital form too.

So, enough from me. Happy Fair Day to all those who celebrate the best day of the year and fingers crossed for good weather. We hope you enjoy the excellent picture of Bo’ness conjured up in words by our tour guide Geoff, starting of course with our festival home, the Hippodrome. Do let us know how you get on and try to drop into your conversation somewhere some of the amazing architecture language Geoff uses in this episode, I’m thinking bungaloid growth, triangular gablets, dormer pediments, and swept skews. Take care.

Geoff Bailey: What better [00:04:00] place to start a tour of the Matt Steele buildings of Bo’ness than here at the Hippodrome? The Hippodrome was commissioned by Louis Dixon, who was a local cinematographic entrepreneur. He came from Edinburgh in 1909 and set up the Electric Theatre, over at the Drill Hall. But by 1911 it became very apparent that cinemas were here to stay and it was not just a passing fad.

So he purchased the site from Bo’ness Town Council. It was an area of slum clearance. When he came to build on the site, of course, there was a slight problem because this whole area is actually reclaimed from the Forth estuary. So the foundations had to be six foot deep of concrete. He commissioned Matt Steele to design something iconic, something very modern, something that reflected the time.

This was a time when electricity was new. [00:05:00] Airplanes, telephones, there was a lot of new technology around. And cinema was seen very much as an international sign of that modern culture. And what Matt Steele came up with was a magnificent building with a central circular massive drum with tiny small drums at each of the four corners.

 At the top of the building, you will see that the drum is actually, originally got a flat roof, very simple wall head and then there’s an offset, and set around the offset a whole series of squares in relief, which are called pastilles. And it’s often said that this reflects the idea of a film reel with the sprockets and cogs set around it.

And then you’ve got the vertical elements coming up the way which are like the stays which guide the film within the motion. And it’s that juxtaposition that we have between the circular and the square. So we have a square straight base with square [00:06:00] accommodation blocks at periods intermixed with the circular, which makes this building so strange.

The mass is emphasised by the fact that there’s very few apertures in the circular drum. But of course, part of the reason for that is because of its function as a cinema. You don’t want too much light in a building like this. The other, of course, reason for choosing this particular material, which is brick covered by a render, is that it’s cheaper than using stone cladding.

When the plans came in front of the Dean of Guild, the Dean of Guild asked for the whole of the facade at this side to be clad with stone. Matt Steele said, first of all, that it would be inappropriate for building of this style but it would significantly increase the cost of the building. As a result of that, the only stone cladding that you see on the facade are the lower three courses which were a SOP to the local council.

The verticality [00:07:00] of the building is emphasized by the narrow windows and the arrangement of the space within those. Matt Steele’s original design was very stark and it provided a huge contrast between the different elements of the building. But as time went on, of course, the flat roof technology wasn’t working properly.

So within five years, he was back putting a slightly sloped roof on. And then in 1966, 36, sorry, John Taylor was commissioned to put this extension on above the ticket office. The extension is pretty well designed to marry into the original work. So you’ve got the pastilles, you’ve got the inset, and you’ve even got a corner drum now with a dome on top of it.

So again, he’s matched the straight with the circular elements of the building. It’s often said that the new extension made it look like a seaside building. But then again, [00:08:00] Bo’ness is a seaside resort!

Geoff Bailey: So here we are in South Street and of course we’re now in 1907 in terms of Matt Steele’s work. He was commissioned by John Paris who had a baker’s shop here to fill in this quite narrow site and he designed this beautiful arch that you see here. But of course it was slightly ahead of its time and the client decided that it was too modern for him and just put a conventional frontage on it.

What you see now was put in 1984 when Falkirk Council were renovating the town centre and William Cadell resurrected the original design. Above the arch we have a conventional harled building. So you’ve got a contrast here between the stone first floor and the harling above that.

And then at the apex, you have a square central dormer with four [00:09:00] windows. And this is typical of Matt Steele’s work. We’ll see when we go to Dean Road that it’s the very first building in, Bo’ness also had that central dormer feature. It’s set between oversailing coved eaves which are covered with pantiles.

Pantiles, of course, a traditional material for the coast of, this part of the world along the Forth. So he’s marrying new concepts like the art nouveau arch with the traditional Scottish harling and the East coast design of the pantiles with a slight element of Baltic material here as well.

So he’s come up with a very unique design for an unusual site.

Geoff Bailey: In 1936, Matt Steele changed his style. And this is great thing about the chameleon is that he was able to choose different styles for different clients. 1936, he was asked to design a hotel, a chip shop, [00:10:00] and a set of flats for Bo’ness Town Council on the site behind me here.

The site was opposite the station and so it was one of the first things that people arriving at the town saw. And what he came up with was a very unusual design. Perhaps the most striking element is the coloured blocks. So we have cream, pre formed cast concrete blocks with green lines running through it along the base.

The mass of the building is emphasised by the fact that all the rainwater pipes are hidden inside the building, so it gives a very clean cut finish. And on the corner of Providence Brae and Seaview Place, we have this very tight angular turn on the corner, with the main entrance to what was the hotel, above which are these three horizontal concrete [00:11:00] ridges, with little cutouts out of them, which nowadays we tend to think of as art deco decoration but the verticality is of course emphasized by having the window above extended through with a panel between.

The flats occupy the central part of the building and the far end, and the main entrance to those is actually up the steps up Providence Brae. Providence Brae, of course, is named from the fact that when Bo’ness was a seafaring town, it’s where the wives and the family used to go to watch to see if the ships were coming back safely from the extended voyages, particularly for the whaling fleet themselves.

The chip shop was designed for Corvi’s and it’s interesting to see, of course, that the family still own the shop itself. The overall massing of the building is such that at either end you’ve got [00:12:00] a three storey tower with a two storey block down the center and again it’s a very shallow pitched roof so it emphasizes the walls.

Here, unlike the Hippodrome, you’ve got the horizontal element emphasized so the fenestration is along the horizontal. And originally, of course, the astragals would also have created that horizontal appearance. So, we’ve come just a stone’s throw now from the Station Hotel of 1936 to that very modern style building,

through to what was the Star Cinema.

Geoff Bailey: It actually started life in the 17th century as the parish church. So the big rectangular building at the back is part of the original parish church. The parish church, of course, moved up to the Brae at the top there in the 1880s. And the old building was taken over by the Episcopalians until 1919, when it [00:13:00] was sold.

And typically, of course, it was then converted into use as a cinema. So that’s one of the big differences, of course, between the Hippodrome here, which was purpose built as a cinema and the vast majority of cinemas at that time, which were converted buildings. And what they did in 1919 is they simply put a new facade on the front of the old rectangular building.

Initially, that was a single story in height. And then in 1921, Matt Steele was commissioned to design a new facade, a whole new frontage to hide the old building. And he came up with this again, very modern style building, which you think of as typical as the 1920s and 30s. It’s made of brick, rendered with a nice smooth cement, and you can see there are square panels that set into that.

And then there are recessed vertical panels. The one on the left, you can see from the difference in the heights of the ground floor [00:14:00] windows, contains the stair, which would take people from the entrance foyer up to the new steel frame balcony. And of course a building like this would seat about 800 people when it was in use as a cinema.

So again, Matt Steele has come up with a unique design, because you can see you’ve got loads of bays which are set back or brought forward, you’ve got inset panels, and you’ve also got pantiles again on the roof, this time forming a very strange capping to the balcony. The functionality of the building, however, is partly emphasised by, on the east gable, you can see the operators room there sticking out on those steel brackets which are just left exposed.

Very modern, I mean, you think of that today as something you would see in the City of London, where they’re trying to show exactly what is happening inside the building. But there’s a good reason for that, [00:15:00] of course, and that is that cinemas are inherently dangerous, fire risks. And by having the operator’s box totally separate it keeps it away from the audience.

And in point of fact, this particular building got consumed by fire in February 1945. The roof collapsed the balconies were totally burnt out, and it was left as a, basically, a shell. 1945 was not a good year to try and rebuild a cinema because there was a shortage of materials, and it was 1947 before it reopened.

Of course, that was then a Glasgow architect who redesigned the interior but he left Matt Steele’s façade there on the outside. Nowadays it’s used as a furniture removal business. So what they’ve done is they have taken out the original three door entrance with the part of the windows there and installed a roller shutter system so that the removal van can actually go inside the building.[00:16:00]

Geoff Bailey: Matt Steele did a lot of work for Bo’ness Town Council. This was a time when the council were building a lot of new accommodation. And that usually meant flats in order to get the density required. On this particular site there’s a slight hill slope going up towards the south. And so what he did was he put three storey flats at the front of the development and two storey at the back.

And the whole thing is centered around this little spur road coming off Corbiehall with a two storey building at the far end centered on a central doorway. And then the flats to either side are arranged symmetrically around that. And again, he has chosen a whole set of different styles. So what we see is a wee bit of art deco, particularly in the vertical chimney breasts with the canted tops and the fluted concrete design on the front of those.

At the top, you can see there’s a kind of fake castellation through there, harking back to the early [00:17:00] medieval period. But by and large, it’s, again the smooth concrete that gives you, um, the massing of the whole building and he’s contrasted that with the brick base here. And the brick is deliberately a mixture of red and white bricks to give a kind of a speckled appearance.

And this is very much again a kind of Baltic appearance. Cause Matt Steele did go across to Scandinavia occasionally and got some of his ideas from there. But that’s the most significant feature, the canting of the tops of the chimney breasts, but also the stir windows and the entrance doors.

The doors are hidden at the bottom of the chimney breasts, and because they’ve got a chamfered top like that they resemble coffins. And of course, in Bo’ness, you can’t do that without the locals noticing. And this whole development was a long time called Coffin Close. Which is frowned upon apparently.

Geoff Bailey: So, just [00:18:00] along from Coffin Close, we have the Queen Mary buildings, also built in 1932. And like Coffin Close, Queen Mary buildings is not the official name. It’s the local nickname because of its resemblance to the ocean liner in style. The ocean liner have been built to launch just previously to this. It’s a longer set of buildings. It’s flats for Bo’ness town council, 25 bays, very straight, very symmetrical. And what he’s done here is to advance five of the bays forward, in order to break up the relief. And in those five advanced bays are the entrances. Again with recesses which are chamfered on the sides.

And with a protruding door piece. So he’s used a lot of the angularity here of insets in order to break up the relief. And the two end advanced bays. Bays have little small pediments on them. There’s again, a lot of fluting here on the [00:19:00] concrete to give it an art deco feel. So it’s a very straightforward, very plain building with the relief broken by just adjusting the line of the front wall slightly.

So within a very tight budget, he’s created something which is unusual. And because of the backdrop here on the old escarpment, it fits in nicely. Oversailed of course, by the old parish church at the back.

Geoff Bailey: For anyone driving through Bo’ness on the high road, this building is the Matt Steele building that most of them will notice.

It was built in 1909, so it’s quite early on in Matt Steele’s career. At a time when this was largely a rural area at the corner of the crossroads, Richmond Corner, and you can see basic symmetry about the whole buildings. It’s called Seaforth uh, because you can see wonderful views across the estuary here in the background.

It’s got a [00:20:00] canted end so it’s chamfered and articulates around the corner site. Now normally when given a corner site like this, most architects would have put a tower on the corner or made some kind of feature there. By having a blank facade there with a flat rooftop it’s far more noticeable.

It actually draws your attention more. So what we have is a couple of recessed bays on either corner with these steep external staircases, which are typical of Bo’ness at the time. And they turn through a corner up onto the recessed balcony. The balcony is emphasised by the massive timbers, both the straight timbers and the curved timbers with a canopy over the top, and that canopy allows the flat wall head to continue right around the building.

The render is Dorset pea grit and it’s contrasted with the just [00:21:00] rough cut stonework on the quoins and the corners. But you’ll notice there are no sills by getting rid of the sills and the lintels and just emphasizing the sides of the windows, Matt Steele here is emphasizing again the horizontal element of the building.

And it’s a very characterful building, you know, something that you will notice as you’re going past. It was designed for four flatted tenants by the client in this case was Grace Simpson.

Geoff Bailey: So we’re now at Dean Road, and this is the furthest point in the walk. Within a few hundred yards of here, there’s several matte steel buildings, but we’ll be going down Cadzow Road momentarily.

But behind me is the first building that we know that Matt Steele designed in the town. And it dates to 1905. It was commissioned by the Gardner family. Basically it’s just two cottages. And as you can see, it’s one and a half storeys in height. And he’s got a very simple [00:22:00] commission here.

The client has asked a conventional house, but he’s added minor touches which give it a character of its own. Most noticeable, I think, are the concave lead roofs to the bay windows with the scalloped edges at the top. And above those are dormer pediments with triangular gablets and swept skews to either side.

In the center between the two dormers you’ll notice there’s a flat dormer, which is an echo of the one that we saw earlier on in South Street for John Paris. So a very straightforward building, but very much part of Matt Steele’s future work.

Geoff Bailey: So the next set..