London Offices
London's offices began to ascend higher in the Victorian epoch, but never really took off to the sky-scraping heights of those in New York, though today there are more an more office towers sprouting. There are a number of noteworthy examples of Art Deco offices in London; perhaps not surprisingly the majority are to be found within the centre.
Unilever House – Blackfriars
Headquarters of the Unilever Group, Unilever House has a prominent location on the North side of the Thames, overlooking Blackfriars Bridge. This interior of this Anglo-Dutch company's headquarters was renovated in the early 1980s in a sympathetic contemporary Art Deco look. Primarily a neo-Classical building, this headquarters was constructed 1930-32, and was designed by Burnet Tait & Partners, principally their architect J Lomax Simpson. There are many superb Art Deco sculptures around this building, including two magnificent equestrian groups by William Reid Dick.
The Daily Telegraph – Fleet Street
Elcock, Sutcliffe & Tait’s 1929-30 Daily Telegraph building, at 135-141 Fleet Street, is known as Peterborough House. Fundamentally a dressed up neo-Classical façade in Portland stone, it has a row of columns for its most prominent feature. True, the columns are a stylised Egyptian, rather than ancient Greco-Roman, but the arrangement of monumental columns above the entrance has nothing of the Nile about it.
Far above a large rectangular clock is suspended out from the building. Its two dials have a blue dish surrounded by a polychrome sunburst. Figures of larks punctuate the interstices between the columns. The Portland stone façade is covered with much geometric pleating and filleting.
Daily Telegraph Detail
Below, along the exterior ground floor level is a tour-de-force of pure Art Deco: octagonal windows, and bronze metalwork featuring spirals and fountain motifs.
The Daily Express – Fleet Street
In contrast to the Daily Telegraph, let's look at its close
neighbour, Daily Express building, 1930-1932 at 121-128 Fleet Street. No exterior
sculpture here, and no chevrons either, just a sleek shiny curving black monolith
in glass, steel and vitriolite. Aside from the red metal letters spelling “
Daily Express” the exterior is totally void of decoration.
Architects Ellis and Clarke worked with engineer turned designer Sir Owen Williams
(1890-1969) to resolve the spatial issues that ultimately dictated the dimensions
of this pioneering newspaper building. Ultimately, the building is a huge reinforced
concrete box, its powerful dimensions blended smoothly with the sleek, black
grace of Britain’s first curtain wall exterior.
Looking inside, however, we can marvel at the interior of the entrance, designed by Robert Frank Atkinson (1871-1923), which is one of the great masterpieces of Art Deco design, a symphony of textures and shapes in metal and other materials to take your breath away. On either side magnificent reliefs by Eric Aumonier chronicle the progress of the modern world, and the empire that was sustaining it. The roof is a jagged sun-blast, and the carpet an ocean wave.
Ibex House – Tower Hill
A nine-storey office block built in 1937 features what were once the longest curtain walls windows in Britain. Architects Fuller, Hall and Foulsham gave it a continuous facing of yellow ceramic tiles. Located near Tower Hill, it has curves galore, including two stairwells that climb the height of the building in spectacular soaring walls of curved glass that ascend high to a sort of observation deck.
Commonwealth House – Holborn
From where it sits at 1 New Oxford Street, astride a major intersection that gives it a long, tapering lot, this 1939-40 Art Deco office block rises with a series of curving curtain windows to a clock tower at its apex. The architects who designed Commonwealth House were HP Cart de Lafontaine, WA Lewis & Partners.
Cinemas, Factories, Hoover Factory, Underground, Artists