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| New Street in 1901 by George White. Held at Birmingham Archive. |
This little snippet of New Street, taken shortly after the death of Queen Victoria, contains the elegant silhouette of a Victorian gas lamp, the Georgian frontage of the Theatre Royal in the far ground, and an unassuming row of four or five shabby-looking shops.
The stretch of New Street was not always so shabby, though. In the early 1800s it was the site of Bisset's Museum, but the remnants seen in the photograph were from a later iteration constructed in about 1828. These were the extravagantly built home and offices of one of the town's native architects, John Fallows, who had a very distinct and sometimes eccentric way of interpreting the Greek revival and Egyptian influences of the time.** The property on New Street was described in 1830:
The drawing of the entire front consists of a centre and two wings, the right wing next [to the] theatre is the residence, and the left the offices of the architect, the centre forms a screen to the back premises, and consists of a carriage entrance with folding gates, piers rusticated with frise [sic], supported by enriched trusses, cornice and blocking terminating with elegant tripods or lamps. On each side is a continued screen wall having at each end a doorway which forms the access to the house, offices and premises; these walls are also rusticated in the most peculiar manner, the openings of the doorways are finished with enriched keystones, and the whole is of such novel and elegant design that it does credit to the architect, who has displayed such a cultivated taste.*
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| No source information. |
This was a flamboyant architectural undertaking, probably designed as an advertisement for the architects skill. It seems, though, that Fallows was as flamboyant in his everyday spending as he was in his architectural endeavours as he declared himself bankrupt only four years after the completion of his house and offices on New Street. Some of Fallows work still survives, predominantly in Edgbaston (see all Fallows posts here), and the similarities can be seen with these standing buildings, predominantly with the use of friezes and the Graeco-Egyptian stylings. By the time the photograph (top of post) was taken in 1901 the buildings had been altered beyond recognition.
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| John Fallows' house next to the Theatre Royal, c.1830. |
After bankruptcy, Fallows moved to Northfield, then a village on the outskirts of Birmingham.
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| From Birmingham Gazette, 3 September 1832. The sale/lease of Fallows' New Street property after bankruptcy. |
Details from the Photograph
NOTES
*William West, The History, Topography and Directory of Warwickshire (Birmingham: 1830), p. 210.
Image courtesy of Birmingham Library and Archive Services (665).
Find out more about John Fallows here.
To find out more click on the labels below.
*William West, The History, Topography and Directory of Warwickshire (Birmingham: 1830), p. 210.
Image courtesy of Birmingham Library and Archive Services (665).
Find out more about John Fallows here.
To find out more click on the labels below.