Ruskin Rooms is a building, designed by Richard Harding Watt and named after John Ruskin, located on Drury Lane in Knutsford.
The Place:
Ruskin Rooms is a Grade II listed building that was erected in 1902. The description given by British Listed Buildings reads as follows;
"KNUTSFORD
SJ7478 DRURY LANE
792-1/3/22 (South side)
12/10/71 Ruskin Rooms
GV II
Reading rooms and fire station, now offices. c1900. By
Fairhurst, completed by Walter Aston. For Richard Harding
Watt. Render with stone dressings and randomly projecting
blocks. Red pantiled roof. Eclectic style, drawing heavily on
Italianate sources.
EXTERIOR: 3-storeyed, with corner tower projecting at angle
and housing entrance to upper floors. Former fire-station in
west elevation, an irregular 3-window range. Wide
segmental-arched entrance at angle with tower to left now
glazed in, with paired tall windows to right. Tall single and
2-light windows above, all with flat stone lintels. Inscribed
stone over entrance. Low upper storey stressed with continuous
sill band and cornice, 3-light mullioned windows, paired to
right and a single window to left all with segmentally-arched
heads, the mullions and transoms of the lower sections forming
a continuous pattern of balustrading. Stacks to right break
the roof line between the windows. Angled tower projects from
corner, with oriel window over long windows of 1 and 2-lights.
Paired round-arched lights above.
Subsidiary octagonal tower in angle with main range with
round-arched window in each face and terminating in green
scallop-tiled dome. Stone steps against north return of tower
give access to stair doorway of rusticated stone beneath
projecting pantile-roofed porch. Irregular fenestration to
this angled return wall, then return wall of main range with
oriel window to second floor, and casements with margin lights
to ground and first floor with flanking narrow windows. Stack
on rear wall. Heavy wood brackets carry ornate wrought-iron
frame of 'Ruskin Rooms' sign projecting from the tower, and
the stone alongside the entrance steps is inscribed 'The
Ruskin Recreation Rooms'.
INTERIOR: not inspected.
Part of a remarkable development in Free Style built under the
patronage of Richard Harding Watt.
Listing NGR: SJ7521478932" SOURCE: (
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A plaque by the Rotary Club of Knutsford mounted on the building gives the following information;
RUSKIN ROOMS
THIS BUILDING WAS ERECTED BY RICHARD HARDING WATT
IN HIS USUAL MEDITERRANEAN STYLE IN 1902
AS A RECREATION AND READING ROOM FOR THE TOWNS PEOPLE
THE ARCHITECT WAS WALTER ASTON.
AMONG THE VARIOUS USES TO WHICH THE BUILDING HAS BEEN PUT
IS AS A FIRE STATION AND AS THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE BRITISH LEGION
IT WAS SUBSTANTIALLY RENOVATED IN 1977.
THE ROTARY CLUB SIGN
ERECTED BY THE ROTARY CLUB OF KNUTSFORD
TO MARK THE 75th ANNIVERSARY OF ROTARY INTERATIONALThe building was designed by Richard Harding Watt who was a local philanthropist and idealist with a passion for designing buildings. He made his fortune from glove making in Manchester.
The Ruskin Rooms are built in eclectic Free Style under Harding Watt’s patronage. The use of white-painted render, curved windows, heavy stone lintels and door surrounds and clay pantiled roofs, provide this group of buildings with its special character. The Rooms were built as reading rooms social club for the laundry works that he had already built on Drury Lane.
Watt was a fan of John Ruskin and admired his philosophies so when it came naming the building it was originally called The Ruskin Recreation Rooms and bares the following quote from the works of Ruskin.
'Let every dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of life,
and every setting sun be to you as its close'
(from Ruskin’s Lectures on Art 1870)In 1944 a Welcome Club for officers of the American Third Army was opened in the building by General Patton."
The building has also been used as a fire station and is now used as offices.
The Person:
"John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, as well as an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, philosopher, prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.
Ruskin was the only child of John James Ruskin (1785–1864) who was a sherry and wine importer, and Margaret Cock (1781–1871),who was the daughter of a publican in Croydon.
Ruskin was born on 8 February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London south of St Pancras railway station. His childhood was shaped by the contrasting influences of his father and mother, both of whom were fiercely ambitious for him.
John James Ruskin helped to develop his son's Romanticism. They shared a passion for the works of Byron, Shakespeare and especially Walter Scott.
Margaret Ruskin, an evangelical Christian, more cautious and restrained than her husband, taught young John to read the Bible from beginning to end, and then to start all over again, committing large portions to memory. Its language, imagery and parables had a profound and lasting effect on his writing.
He was educated at home by his parents and private tutors, and from 1834 to 1835 he attended the school in Peckham run by the progressive evangelical Thomas Dale (1797–1870). Ruskin heard Dale lecture in 1836 at King's College, London, where Dale was the first Professor of English Literature. Ruskin went on to enrol and complete his studies at King's College, where he prepared for Oxford under Dale's tutelage.
The writing styles and literary forms of Ruskin were varied. He wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, architectural structures and ornamentation.
The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art gave way in time to plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.
He was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft."
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