Brodrick, Cuthbert

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

[br]

b. 1822 Hull, Yorkshire, England

d. 2 March 1905 Jersey, C.I.

[br]

English architect whose best-known buildings—Leeds Town Hall (1853–8) and the Grand Hotel in Scarborough (1863–7)—were of powerful baroque design.

[br]

Like a number of his contemporaries, Brodrick experimented with ferrovitreous construction, which by the second half of the nineteenth century was the favoured method of handling immense roofing spans of structures such as railway stations, shopping arcades and large exhibition and functional halls in England and America. The pattern for this had been set in 1851 with Sir Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London.

Brodrick's ferrovitreous venture was the Leeds Corn Exchange (1861–3). This is an oval building with its exterior severely rusticated in fifteenth-century Florentine-palace manner, but inside is a two-storeyed ring of offices, bounded by ironwork galleries surrounding a large, central area roofed by an iron and glass roof. This listed building was recently in poor condition but has now been rescued and restored for use as a shopping centre; however, the local traders still retain their right, according to the bye-laws, to trade there, and once a week a section of the hall is cleared so that corn trading can take place.

[br]

Further Reading

D.Lindstrom, 1967, Architecture of Cuthbert Brodrick, Country Life.

—1978, West Yorkshire: Architects and Architecture, Lund Humphries.

DY