Discover the Welsh architect behind the Memorial Hall and the Costain Building
Following the restorations of the Osborn Hall, a Grade II Listed building, we have been thinking a lot about the other beautiful buildings we have in school, among them the Memorial Hall and the Costain Building.
Sidney Colwyn Foulkes
Both the Memorial Hall and Costain are also Grade II Listed and were designed by Sidney Colwyn Foulkes, architect of many other buildings in Colwyn Bay, from the Colwyn Bay Community Hospital to the art deco ‘White House’ on Rhos-on-Sea prom. Sidney was born and bred in Colwyn Bay, and today we are telling his story!
Sidney’s father, Edward Foulkes, was a builder who moved to Colwyn Bay in 1880. By the time he ceased to trade in 1900 he had built, according to Colwyn Bay Heritage Online, ‘a third of the early Colwyn Bay’ – including St John’s Methodist Church, now under the stewardship of Rydal Penrhos.
Completed in 1888, the church is now also a Grade II Listed building. It cost over £7,000 at the time, equivalent to about a million in today’s money, and the National Monuments Record of Wales (RCAHMW) calls it ‘one of the most elaborate gothic chapels in Wales’, mentioning its ‘soaring stone-built tower and spire’ and ‘fine memorial stained-glass windows’ in the apse. What RCAHMW doesn’t mention is that these stained glass windows, dating from the 1930s, memorialise two people closely connected with the history of this School, Rosa Hovey, Principal of Penrhos between 1894 and 1928, and Thomas Osborn, founding headmaster of Rydal.
Sidney Colwyn Foulkes was born the same year the church was completed. According to Colwyn Bay Heritage, whose report draws from interviews with Sidney’s son Ralph, the first minister of the church suggested to Edward Foulkes that it would be a good idea if the firstborn of the church’s builder was christened there. The family agreed. Apparently, the following incident occurred during the christening:
When the baby was taken up to the minister, he asked the mother what his name was and she said, ‘Sidney.' He said, ‘What’s his other name?’ and she replied, ‘He hasn’t got another name.' He responded, ‘Oh, you must have another name, you can’t call him Sidney Foulkes.’ ‘Well, I haven’t got one.' ‘Well, we’ll call him Colwyn,’ and the name has stuck (Colwyn Bay Heritage).
RCAHMW mentions the church’s ‘soaring stone-built tower and spire’
Rydal boys in the early days of the school referred to Colwyn Bay as ‘the Vill’ (village) and in Rydal School 1885–1935 James Wood remembers ‘waving trees and country playing-fields’. But during Sidney's childhood, Colwyn Bay was emerging as a town. Its population was growing at pace, doubling between 1891 and 1901, and between 1901 and 1911 nearly doubling again, and since 1902 the area had been lit by gas.
Edward Foulkes died in 1904, leaving Sidney, at sixteen, the sole breadwinner for a family of seven.
Sidney continued working as a joiner and builder. In 1910, having just seen the first moving pictures in a tent in Abergele, he came up with a scheme to convert a stables on the high street into a cinema. This became the ‘Cosy Cinema’ – the first covered cinema in North Wales. Then,
Sidney wrote to Mr Jones, [the owner of the stables], suggesting that he would do all the architectural work to convert the first and second floors to offices provided he could occupy half of them, rent free, for twelve months and thereafter pay a rent of £50 per annum. Mr Jones was so delighted with the returns he got on his investment that he gave Sidney the first and second floors rent free for the rest of his life (Colwyn Bay Heritage).
In 1912, Foulkes obtained a scholarship to study architecture at Liverpool. He continued working in Colwyn Bay – ‘early each morning he would go to the various jobs, catch a train to Liverpool and be back in the evening to make a further round of the jobs’ (Colwyn Bay Heritage).
In 1916, Foulkes qualified as an architect and immediately joined the Royal Navy Air Service, the air arm of the Royal Navy, which later merged with the British Army’s Royal Flying Corps to form the Royal Air Force. Foulkes became Chief Petty Officer in the Aircraft Design Department.
While in the service, Foulkes attended, part-time, University College, London (UCL), studying in the Town Planning Institute, of which he was one of the first members. At that time, town planning as an academic discipline was in its infancy. Georges-Eugène Hausmann’s sweeping reconstructions of Paris in the 1850s had set the stage for increasingly ambitious urban renovation across Europe, driven by industrialisation and concerns about the health and control of urban populations, but it was only around the turn of the century that town planning had emerged as a distinctive area of professional expertise.
In Britain, the Liverpool School of Architecture had been influential in this shift. The architecture syllabus at the university placed unprecedented importance on urban design, and in 1909 the university had offered the first academic course on town planning. At both UCL and Liverpool, Foulkes would have been exposed to the developing discipline. Stanley Adshead, the first Professor of Town Planning at UCL, under whom he studied, had previously been the first Professor of Civic Design at Liverpool.
Foulkes perhaps carried some lessons with him when he returned from London to Colwyn Bay to found his own practice.
In the early 1800s, the area of land in Colwyn Bay extending from Nant-y-Glyn road in the east to Conway Road in the west, and southwards up to the Old Highway, had been known as the Pwllycrochan Estate – Pwllycrochan meaning cauldron pool and reflecting the fast-flowing stream passing through the estate. In 1865, the current owners of the land, the Erskine family, decided to sell. The sale comprised the Pwllycrochan mansion, its gardens and farm buildings, and the surrounding 700 acres of land.
The Pwllycrochan mansion
The new owner, a Manchester businessman called John Pender, intended to develop Colwyn Bay into a resort town, hoping to attract ‘the affluent classes of Manchester and Liverpool’ (Colwyn Bay Heritage).
In 1875, after business troubles, Pender sold the land to a consortium of businessmen who formed the Colwyn Bay and Pwllycrochan Estate Company. The company sold off the land in plots whose uses it controlled, still aiming to develop the town into a fashionable seaside resort. Developments include the former Imperial hotel on Station Road and the Hydropathic Hotel, a property that would later be bought by Penrhos College.
This sale of the estate also released the Pwllycrochan building itself, which was bought by a John Porter. Porter had worked under Pender to convert the former mansion into a hotel in 1866. The property would remain in the Porter family until 1938, when it was acquired by Rydal – in 1953, it would close as a hotel, and Rydal Prep School would move to the site.
From 1886, Porter’s son J. M. Porter, an architect, worked for the Colwyn Bay and Pwllycrochan Estate Company as its local agent. He formed a partnership with the company’s other agents, and by 1904 their firm was known as J. M. Porter & Co. Sidney Colwyn Foulkes had come across the firm around this time, when he had applied to the firm about the possibility of becoming an apprentice architect. He had been put off by the premium the firm would have charged, as well as by the limits it would have placed on his activities.
By 1920, when Foulkes returned to Colwyn Bay, the majority of the town’s land was still under the control of the Colwyn Bay and Pwllycrochan Estate Company. In particular, ‘the company had spent much money on laying out roads and constructing a sewage system’ (Colwyn Bay Heritage) Foulkes’ options were limited, by the company on the one hand, and on the other by the fact that as a qualified architect, he was now bound by the rules and regulations of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
His big break came in designing the Colwyn Bay Hospital in Hesketh Road, which incorporated some American innovations in its layout. Rydal School was next. Foulkes’ connection with the school was already established: not only had Edward Foulkes, his father, built St John’s Methodist Church, where Sidney was christened and given his middle name – Edward had also built parts of what is now Old House. Foulkes’ first project was the Costain Building, completed in 1930. Ten years after the end of WWII, in 1955, the Memorial Hall followed, its name commemorating the ninety nine Old Boys who died in both World Wars.
The Costain Building is named after A. J. Costain, Headmaster of Rydal at the time. The sandstone for the building was quarried in Yorkshire and amazingly, the quarry was reopened for the building of the Memorial Hall between 1955 and 1957.
In The Buildings of Wales, Edward Hubbard describes the Costain Building as ‘thoroughly collegiate’. David Birch, on the Colwyn Bay Heritage website, notes that the windows on the building’s first floor as not quite as tall as those on the ground floor. ‘This apparently minor detail is important,’ he writes, ‘as it contributes to the very pleasing proportions of the building’.
View of Costain from Queens Gardens
Hubbard describes the Memorial Hall as ‘lighter and more fanciful than the earlier work’. The masonry, he notes, ‘is still of fine quality’. ‘Inside is a coffered ceiling with coloured patterning in the panels.’
A coffered ceiling with coloured patterning in the panels
From the 1960s onwards, the Memorial Hall was used daily by Rydal for morning service, as well as for dramatic and musical performances and prize giving. It retains most of these functions in the present day at Rydal Penrhos, while Costain still houses science labs. The Hall is also home to two of the beautiful sets of stained glass windows from the Penrhos site, the West Central Window, picturing beauty, song, and rhythm, and the East Central Window, picturing health, truth, and research.
Today, we are glad to count as a member of our community Foulke’s daughter-in-law, Elizabeth, by whose presence we were delighted at the Residents’ Coffee Morning on Thursday 21 October. •
Description of 'J. M. Porter and Co. Manuscripts, 1864–1972. Archifau Sir Ddinbych / Denbighshire Archives. GB 209 DD/PO' on the Archives Hub website, [https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/data/gb209-dd/po], (accessed: 29/10/2021)
David Birch, ‘Rydal School – Costain Building and Memorial Hall’ on the Colwyn Bay Heritage Online website, [https://colwynbayheritage.org.uk/rydal-school-costain-building-and-memorial-hall/], (accessed: 29/10/2021)
‘J M Porter Collection - Pwllycrochan Estate’ on the Denbighshire Archives website, [https://denbighshirearchives.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/j-m-porter-collection-pwllycrochan-estate/], (accessed: 29/10/2021)
‘Sidney Colwyn Foulkes (1884-1971) – Life Story’ on the Colwyn Bay Heritage Online website, [https://colwynbayheritage.org.uk/sidney-colwyn-foulkes-1884-1971-life-story/], (accessed: 29/10/2021)
Edward Hubbard, The Buildings of Wales – Clwyd (Denbighshire and Flintshire) (Penguin UK, 1999)
The East Central Window in the foyer of the Memorial Hall
