THIS WEEK: Cuthbert Brodrick: architect of The Grand
BORN IN 1821, the sixth son of the ten children of John Brodrick, a Hull merchant and shipowner, from 1837 until 1843 Cuthbert was articled to Henry Francis Lockwood, subsequently architect of the Saltaire estate and Scarborough’s Congregational church on Ramshill and Albemarle Baptist church. After completing his articles, he spent a year touring England, France and Italy examining and drawing their finest buildings. But when he returned to Hull in 1845 he refused a partnership with Lockwood and set up his own practice.
During the 1850s Brodrick won national fame and fortune designing some of the most ambitious public buildings in Yorkshire. In 1853 he won the design in open competition for Leeds Town Hall (1853-8), which became the model for many other majestic civic buildings, such as those at Bolton, Portsmouth and Morley. Several more outstanding buildings in Leeds followed, mos t notably the Corn Exchange (1861). In 1860 he had been elected Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
However, Brodrick’s design of a hotel on the seaward side of St Nicholas Cliff for the Scarborough Cliff Hotel Company proved too vast and expensive for the building contractor. After two years, when £90,000 had already been spent, the contractor defaulted and the Company went bankrupt. In 1865 the Grand Hotel company bought the unfinished works for a mere £43,000 and hired a new building contactor. Brodrick’s Grand Hotel was finally opened in July 1867. Brodrick’s original design, consisting of four roof domes, 12 floors, 52 chimneys and 365 rooms, representing the seasons, months, weeks and days of the year, was almost entirely fulfilled. Using more than six million bricks and 40,000 cubic feet of stone, the Grand was the largest building of its kind in Europe. Altogether it had cost nearly £200,000 and the lives of three workmen.
Even today, nearly 150 years later, the scale, mass and ornamental decoration of the Grand are awe-inspiring. St Nicholas Cliff was too unstable to carry such a weight of masonry, so the hotel was built into and deep down inside it. In effect, the building replaced the natural cliff. In a V-shaped main block pointing south there were two levels below ground for offices, kitchens and cellars and a third for billiard and sitting rooms. Above them, there was a ground floor for entrance lobby, ballroom, dining, coffee and sitting rooms and six more storeys for 300 bedrooms. To buttress the seacliff face, Brodrick designed a three-storey block with sitting rooms and garden terrace overlooking the foreshore. No expense was spared for the exterior inland facade of yellow brick ornamented with red brick jambs and decorated with a variety of sculptural features such as caryatids, supporting pillars in female form. Though Brodrick neglected to provide the Grand with a front portico, his main entrance sported rose-coloured Italian marble pillars supporting a Romanesque arch. The style of the whole, usually described as French Renaissance or Second Empire, resembled that of the new Louvre in Paris. Nikolaus Pevsner, the distinguished architectural historian, described Brodrick’s masterpiece as a “wondrous ... High Victorian gesture of assertion and confidence”.
Inside, the Grand was as grand as its exterior. A domed entrance hall with a gigantic gardiniere in the centre led to a magnificent staircase which split in two to reach the first balconied landing. The dining room seated 300 and the coffee lounge, also on the ground floor, another 150. The 300 bedrooms above had hot and cold sea water and hot and cold fresh water taps. The hotel paid Scarborough Corporation a shilling a year to pipe salt water from South Bay.
All rooms had electric bells, a novelty in those days. Speaking tubes connected every floor with downstairs reception and the manager’s office. A narrow gauge railway in the basement conveyed the mountain of daily washing by truck to the underground laundry. As for guests, they could use “the hydraulic room for passengers” (the lift), which operated by rope and counter-weight. During the winter months, public rooms were heated through air vents and private rooms had coal fires which cost the occupants 3/6 (17p) a day. The Grand was not just the biggest, it was also the most modern and comfortable. The floors everywhere were covered by 11 miles of carpet. Full board was 10 shillings (50p) a day.
Brodrick even painted a picture of his creation in all its glory. It was accepted by the Royal Academy for its exhibition of 1867. A copy of it hangs on the wall of the Scarborough Room in Vernon Road public library.
Brodrick’s splendid gift to Scarborough was his last major work. In 1869 abruptly he abandoned both profession and native country and went to live in Paris. There he built his own house in the suburbs and spent his early retirement painting and gardening. Thirty years later he rented a house in Jersey where he died and was buried in 1905. He had married late to a widow and left no children, only a personal estate worth £7,490 9s 1d.