Forbes' Buildings

Forbes' Buildings is a bakery with shops and offices, built between 1899 and 1900 by R. Lofthouse & Sons in Middlesbrough for John Forbes. It is now used as a shopping arcade. The building is constructed of brick in English garden wall bond, with terracotta dressings. The roofs are of late 20th-century concrete tiles, and there is a glazed roof over the arcades.

The front is asymmetrical and features a mix of Classical and Gothic styles. It is two and three stories high with an eight-bay entrance front. The fourth bay has a round-headed vehicle entrance, complete with a fanlight, imposts, and an archivolt adorned with enriched key blocks and roundels in the spandrels. Above this entrance is a deep frieze with the applied lettering "FORBES' BUILDINGS" and a cornice. The other bays have late 20th-century shop fronts that are framed by the original pilasters and cornice.

Each bay has three sash windows on the upper floors, which are either surrounded by quoin or grouped with pilasters. There are Venetian windows on the second floors of the first and sixth bays, as well as on the first floor of the second, fifth, and seventh bays. The windows have bracketed sills and plain lintel bands. Each bay features a shaped gable with paired trefoil-headed attic windows under floating cornices in the third, fourth, and eighth bays. There are blind round-headed niches between the bays.

A round turret, which has blind round arcading and a bracketed trumpet-shaped copper roof, rises from the curved left corner. The right return has a similar two-bay design, while the ten-bay left return shows a similar but more restrained treatment. A rebuilt late 20th-century service area on the north-west part of the site is not of special interest.