Exhibitions- Shouldn’t Throw Stones –The View of a Night Watchman at Alexander Park- St. Helens.
I was very excited to see this exhibition as more than anything I wanted to see inside ex Pilkington’s what was Head Office. I went there quite a bit when I was little as there was a glass museum and the lake had a fountain and carp that ate bread. It is one of those places that has always been there and looms for miles over the horizon.
Information about the exhibition can be found HERE and HERE.
A bit about Pilkingtons from Historic England.
'Pilkington Brothers was founded in St Helens in 1826 by William Pilkington, the son of a doctor. The company quickly grew in size due to the building boom stimulated by the Industrial Revolution, and also due to Pilkingtons' research and development into improving its window glass, which later led to it expanding into other glass products. At the height of its success in the mid-C20, Pilkingtons was one of the biggest producers of flat glass in the world, employing 25,000 people in various countries. It is this success that led to the construction of the company's HQ at Borough Road in 1959-63.
In the late-1940s/early-1950s Pilkingtons realised that the company's growth meant that it had outgrown its HQ and other offices in the centre of St Helens, and it required a single consolidated site. A 16 acre valley site next to the company's Ravenhead Works, just outside the town centre, was chosen. Edwin Maxwell Fry (1899-1987) of Fry, Drew and Partners of London was appointed as the architect for the new complex. Fry had been trained at the Liverpool School of Architecture under Professor Charles Reilly and had been a partner to Walter Gropius in the 1930s, before Gropius' emigration to the United States. Fry had also, along with his wife and partner Jane Drew, designed the Punjab capital of Chandigarh with Le Corbusier in the early-1950s. Fry's connection to Pilkingtons stemmed back to 1937 when he was one of a group of young architects chosen by the company to predict the use of glass in buildings of the future.
Fry first visited the new site in 1956 and immediately suggested creating a landscaped setting for the new headquarters, including forming a 3-acre lake with a concrete bridge linking the headquarters with the neighbouring works. His design also included constructing a series of buildings along the lakeside, grouped like a college. Part of the brief was to create buildings in which glass would be 'used to the furthest limits imposed by taste and sense' and to showcase Pilkingtons' products, including Armourclad and Vitrolite. Construction started in 1959 with Ove Arup & Partners as consulting engineers, Holland & Hannen and Cubitts as the contractors for the main parts of the scheme, including the lake, roads and landscaping, and J Gerrard & Sons Ltd of Swinton as the contractors for the headquarters' canteen block. The site remained as the headquarters of Pilkingtons until 2005 when the company was acquired by Nippon Sheet Glass (NSG), whose headquarters is based in Tokyo. The site is still partly occupied by Pilkingtons.'
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1259806
Accessed 21st May 2018
Grade II listed the outside has lots of special things to see and you can read about the listing HERE.
