A Day Trip to Derby - Part 1

The portico at Derby Council House

On the second weekend of the Heritage Open Days festival in 2019, having led a field trip in Sheffield during the week with the Sheffield U3A Geology Group, I planned to investigate a couple more churches; however, with very fine weather forecast, I took advantage of this to have a day out to the city of Derby on the Friday. 

My exploration of Derby

It had been more than 25 years since I had visited, when living in Bakewell, to take photographs of post-war architectural sculpture for the RCHME (Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England) and to see the White Watson tablets at Derby Museum and Art Gallery. 

The Comet in Chesterfield

On this occasion, the main reason for my visit was to see the tomb of Bess of Hardwick in Derby Cathedral, in preparation for a talk that I had been asked to give at St. Peter’s church in Edensor in a few months’ time. 

A monolith sculpture outside the bus station

With three bus journeys each way and travel time constituting the bulk of my day out, I had to make the most of the four hours that I had available in Derby. Arriving on the Comet from Chesterfield at about 12:20 pm, the first thing that I saw when leaving the bus station was a large monolithic sculpture made of Derbyshire gritstone. 

A view along Morledge from the bus station

When I visited in 1994, the bus station was a brick structure built in the 1930’s, with some nice Art Deco features and, looking around me, I couldn’t see any landmarks that looked familiar to me and so I headed off in the general direction of the cathedral, passing the QUAD arts centre that is clad in Derbyshire gritstone, with reddened slabs being used to create stripes on the facade. 

A general view of the Council House

I stopped briefly outside the Council House to look at the sawn sandstone paving from the Pennine region of Lancashire, where Extinction Rebellion had made their mark, and to look at the inscription on the clock before the road was occupied by protesters who were on the march. 

Sandstone paving outside the Council House

The building dates from 1941 and is described by Pevsner as “a poor design in an C18 style. Brick and stone dressings, with giant portico facing the roundabout”, with the pediment containing a large sculpted crest with elaborate foliage cut into the pale uniformly coloured gritstone. 

The clock outside the Council House

Derby is set by the River Derwent on the Triassic Mercia Mudstone Group, which is not generally known for its building stones except for local use but, upstream, the river passes through the area between Stanton Moor and Darley Dale, north of Matlock, which are long established sources of top quality gritty sandstone from the Ashover Grit. 

The geology around Derby

It was therefore not a surprise to discover that very many of the historic buildings of all ages, which I subsequently encountered, made extensive use of sandstones from this area – for whole structures or as elaborately carved dressings.

Derby Council House