Lancashire Lantern

Paley and Austin - Epilogue

 

 

Like March, the firm had come in like a lion in the shape of the vigorous young Edmund Sharpe, Lancaster's Renaissance man.

Like a lamb, the fire departed from the life of Lancaster when Harry Paley retired in 1940. The firm had apparently outlived its usefulness, and the memory of its activities on Castle Park very quietly died.

The original offices, with their attached drawing office, became first the HQ of the Air Raid Wardens and then, at the end of the war, were turned into flats.

The greatest loss due to the transformation from office to other uses was the destruction of the firm's records.

When 24 Castle Park was cleared in 1944 some were sold, some chopped up, like the huge panels for the Liverpool Cathedral scheme, some taken for waste paper, but much was just burned on the tip!

The final years are full of ‘what if' questions.

What if Harry Paley had taken a young energetic partner?

What if the records had survived instead of the small caches of photographs and drawings at Lancaster Library, the Record Office and scattered in the hands of the owners of various buildings?

All one can say is that the life cycle of the firm from youth to old age had been completed and that their like would not be seen again without architecture in Lancaster.

It is only with growing awareness and re-evaluation of Victorian architecture since 1945 that interest has been revived in the work of this important regional firm.