Langley Buildings

MANCHESTER

SJ8498SE DALE STREET 698-1/29/87 (East side) Nos.53 AND 55 Langley Buildings

GV II

Includes: No.36 HILTON STREET. Home trade and mail-order warehouse and newspaper printing office, now mail-order warehouses. 1908, for J.D.Williams & Co. Steel columns and girders, concrete floors, with cladding of brown and red faience and red brick, slate roof with skylights. Long narrow rectangular plan filling plot bounded on other sides by China Lane, Back China Lane, and Hilton Street, with entrance blocks at both ends and warehousing between. Baroque style. Basement, 2+3 storeys and attic, with 3-bay facade. Very ornate treatment includes channelled rustication in brown faience at the lower level, a moulded cornice to 1st floor arched over a curved oriel in the centre, giant composite pilasters to the upper level with a decorated cornice and a semi-circular pediment over the centre; splayed corner doorways under 3-sided 1st-floor oriels; a central round-headed arch to the 2nd and 3rd floors containing 3-light sashed windows and a panel between them with a banner lettered "LANGLEY BUILDINGS", and in the flanking bays round-arched 3-light windows at 2nd floor and 2-light windows on the floors above, all with pilastered surrounds and those at the top floor round-headed with keystones. Chimney to left of pediment; mansard roof. The left side wall of this block has, inter alia, staggered stairwindows. The rear facade (36 Hilton Street), mostly brick with some brown faience, is 4 narrow bays, in similar but much simpler style, including giant pilasters, coupled doorways in the centre with faience surrounds and spanned by a Diocletian window with a similar surround which runs out over elliptical-headed windows in the flanking bays, the keystones of these forming brackets to curved 3-light oriels in the same material; staggered stairwindows in the 2 centre bays with stained glass in Venetian-style joinery; and a semicircular pediment over the centre bays. The side walls of the intermediate warehouse range are 15 bays with brick pilasters and iron-mullion tripartite sashed windows. INTERIOR: tiled entrance lobby and doors with Art Nouveau handles; tiled open-well staircases at both ends (that in the front block mounting round a lift), both with cast-iron tuning-fork balusters containing wrought-iron foliation in Art Nouveau style; stained glass incorporating red dragon of Wales. HISTORY: occupied in 1913 by J.D.Williams & Co and by Daily News Printing Office.

Listing NGR: SJ8469198254