Patrick Comerford
As I was walking up Upper John Street in Lichfield last week, setting out in search of Borrowcop Hill and Borrowcop Gazebo, I stopped once again to look at the sad state of decay and neglect of Davidson House at 67 Upper Saint John Street. This Regency-era house, built ca 1810, is more than 200 years old. It faces a prominent corner at Davidson Road and is just a few metres south of Lichfield City train station, and north of both King Edward VI School and Holy Cross Church.
Back in 2015, I had written about the sad neglect of this fine house, which had once been a museum and, before that, the home of a distinguished Lichfield architect. But in the 10 years since then, the house has decayed even further and lost more of its key architectural features.
According to the local history group, Lichfield Discovered, and the local historian Kate Gomez, this house is part of Lichfield’s ‘at-risk’ heritage. Yet, despite its important place in the heritage of Lichfield, it looks forlorn and abandoned, and is rapidly becoming an eyesore on the landscape of Lichfield.
The windows in this once elegant house are boarded up, the stonework and façade are crumbling, and there is a sad air of abandonment about the whole site.
Davidson House was once the home of the Old Comrades Association of the South Staffordshire Regiment and the collection of the Regimental Museum from 1938 until 1963, when it moved to Whittington. But Davidson House is also of architectural interest because it was once the home of the Lichfield architect Thomas Johnson (1795-1865), who lived there for over 30 years, from 1834 until he died in 1865.
Thomas Johnson trained as a pupil of the Lichfield architect Joseph Potter (1756–1842) and was influenced by his method. Potter, who had a large practice in Staffordshire and the neighbouring counties in the late 18th and early 19th century, lived in Pipehill, south-west of Lichfield, but had his office in Saint John Street.
Apart from restorations to Lichfield Cathedral, Potter’s work included Newton’s College (1800-1802), the Causeway Bridge, Bird Street (1816), Freeford Hall, which he enlarged for William Dyott (1826-1827), and Holy Cross Church, Upper Saint John Street (1835), and his son designed the Guildhall (1846-1848).
By 1814, the Potter practice was run from a house on the north side of Saint John’s Hospital. Later it was continued by his son, Joseph Potter, who died in 1875.
Meanwhile, Thomas Johnson went on to work as a junior partner with the prolific Staffordshire architect James Trubshaw (1777-1853) of Little Haywood, near Colwich. Soon, Johnson married Trubshaw’s eldest daughter, Mary.
Johnson and Potter worked on the nave of Saint Mary’s Church (Church of England) in Uttoxeter in 1828. But a year later, in 1829, Johnson set up his own practice as an architect in Tamworth Street, Lichfield, and he continued to design churches, including the very large Saint James’s in Longton (1832-1834). By 1834, he was living in the house that later became Davidson House in Upper Saint John Street.
Around this time, Johnson fell under the influence of the Cambridge Camden Society, which was strongly influenced by AWN Pugin. The early members included Canon James Thomas Law (1790-1876), a prebendary and chancellor of Lichfield Cathedral and a former Master of Saint John’s Hospital (1821-1826).
Both Law and Johnson were founding members in 1841 of the Lichfield Society for the Encouragement of Ecclesiastical Architecture, and both were active committee members. Canon William Gresley (1801-1876) of Saint Mary’s, a leading Tractarian and former curate of Saint Chad’s, was the first chairman, and the committee met in Canon Law’s house in Market Street. Other committee members included the antiquarian and lawyer, William Salt of Stafford, and the Revd Richard Rawle (1812-1889), who was the Vicar of Tamworth in 1869-1872 and later the Bishop of Trinidad and Tobago (1872-1888).
Johnson also began working on the restoration of Saint Chad’s Church, Lichfield, in 1841, and he did further work there in 1848-1849.
He worked with the London-born architect Sydney Smirke, who also designed the Hinkley family home at Beacon Place, in the controversial restoration of Saint Michael’s Church, Lichfield, in 1842-1843. During that work, the original memorial stone commissioned by Samuel Johnson for his family was removed as Saint Michael’s was repaved, and much of the mediaeval fabric of the church was lost. But Johnson’s restoration work is a remarkable example of the strong influence of Pugin’s ideas on his work, and the historian of Staffordshire Gothic architecture, the Revd Michael J Fisher, says it is a surprisingly god example of Gothic for its time.
Johnson designed Saint Mary’s Church, Great Wyrley, two miles south of Cannock, in the Gothic style in 1844-1845.
Johnson completed his rebuilding of All Saints’ Church, Leigh, two miles off the A522 between Cheadle and Uttoxeter, in 1846. Michael Fisher, in his book Staffordshire and the Gothic Revival, describes this as ‘one of the most remarkable of Staffordshire’s Victorian churches’, and he laments that the importance of this church has not been fully recognised. This work was funded mainly by Richard Bagot of Blithfield, Bishop of Oxford and later Bishop of Bath and Wells, and a former rector of All Saints’.
The bishop’s son, the Revd Lewis Bagot, was the incumbent at the time of Johnson’s rebuilding, while the bishop’s nephew, the Revd Hervey Bagot was Rector of Blithfield and an active member of the Lichfield Society with Johnson. The chancel furnishings and floor tiles at Leigh have been attributed to Pugin and were donated by Herbert Minton, who also donated the reredos.
Johnson was also the architect for Christ Church, Lichfield, which was built in 1846-1847 on Christchurch Lane, just off Walsall Road. The church was designed in the Victorian Gothic Revival style and was built of sandstone quarried in Lichfield. It was consecrated on 26 October 1847 by the Bishop of Lichfield, John Lonsdale.
Christ Church was endowed by Ellen Jane Hinckley, daughter of John Chappel Woodhouse, Dean of Lichfield. She married her third husband, Richard Hinckley, a Lichfield solicitor, in 1835 and they lived in Beacon Place. Ellen had suffered tragic family losses: her first husband was the Revd William Robinson, and they were the parents of two daughters who died in childhood and are commemorated in the memorial known as Chantry’s ‘Sleeping Children’ in Lichfield Cathedral.
Johnson’s other works in Lichfield include a wing, school room and front wall built ca 1849 at the former Lichfield Grammar School on Saint John Street.
As I recalled in my posting on Borrowcop Hill yesterday, the school moved south to a site at Borrowcop Lane, off Upper Saint John Street in 1903. Johnson’s part of the old school now includes the council chambers of Lichfield District Council, while other parts of the school are being transformed by Lichfield Discovered since last February.
Johnson also designed the railway bridge crossing Upper Saint John Street which leads trains to and from Lichfield City Station, and which I once described in a feature in the Lichfield Gazette.
The bridge, close to Davidson House, was built in 1849 for the South Staffordshire Railway Company. In his design, Johnson tried to evoke a city gate, with battlements, heraldic decoration, and side towers containing multi-arched pedestrian ways. Bishop Lonsdale, who consecrated Christ Church a few years earlier, and the Bagot family are among the Lichfield notables he singled out for commemoration in the heraldic images on the bridge next to his home in Upper John Street, as well as a depiction of the 16th century seal of Lichfield, drawing on images of the three legendary kings said to have been slain in the third century and buried on Borrowcop Hill.
The Corn Exchange in Conduit Street was designed by Johnson in a Tudor style. It was built by a company formed for the purpose and was opened in 1850. The arcaded ground floor was a market hall, and the upper floor, with an octagonal north end, housed the corn exchange. A savings bank in the same style was built at the Bore Street end of the building.
Thomas Johnson of Saint John Street was 70 when he died in 1865, and he was buried at Saint Michael’s on 11 May 1865. He left an estate of less than £5,000 and his will was proved on 18 August. He was succeeded by his son, also Thomas Johnson, and the work of the two sons is sometimes confused.
Davudson House takes its name from Brigadier General Charles Steer Davidson. He donated the building to he South Staffordshire Regimental Museum, which was located in the house from 1938 to 1963.
Davidson House is a three-storey, three-window range house built ca 1810. It is a brick building with ashlar dressings, a hipped slate roof with two large brick stacks, a gable facing, with a front to the left. There is an ashlar plinth, with sill bands and a top modillioned cornice with a blocking course.
The central entrance once had an architrave and an overlight to paired three-panel doors, and there was a porch with slender Tuscan columns. But both the doors, porch and Tuscan pillars have long disappeared through negligence or vandalism or have been purloined.
The bay window to the left had a cornice, while the windows had pilasters, friezes and cornices. A tripartite bay window had colonnettes and 8:12:8-pane sashes, but these too have now been lost. A similar window to the right had brick piers and a central open pediment.
There were two similar tripartite windows on the first floor and these had colonnettes and central open pediments. They flanked a window with an open pediment over a 12-pane sash. The second floor windows had architraves to six-pane sashes that can still be seen.
The terrace to the right end has steps to the street level and there are plain iron railings, though these too are sadly neglected.
The street façade has similar details. You can see a high plinth, tripartite windows to ground and first floors, and the plinth to the ground floor has brick piers. At the rear there is a two-storey gabled service range. The right return has a cogged brick cornice and varied fenestration, and at one time the windows inside had shutters, although this is impossible to verify today.
In recent years, Davidson House was divided into offices. But given its past association with one of Lichfield’s architectural giants, it is sad to consider the continuing neglect of this architectural gem.
Without immediate intervention and attention, this part of Lichfield’s architectural heritage is in danger of being beyond restoration and may be lost forever.
