Former Warehouse

Former Warehouse

A warehouse of 1911, designed by T E Smith and Son of Bolton with engineers L G Mouchel and partners.

The building is constructed with a reinforced-concrete frame and ferro-concrete wall panels and roof, with rendered brick infill to the side returns. It is planned with a basement, a piano-nobile, and two storeys above, becoming progressively shallower at the rear of the upper floors, and comprises four bays in width.

The warehouse stands prominently on the north side of Richmond Street with no adjacent buildings. The south front is painted light grey and presents a regular grid of five concrete columns treated as pilasters with plinth, first-floor band, second-floor beam, cornice and parapet. The outer columns are wider and feature hollow-angled plaques at the corners running from first to second floor. Above ground floor all columns are hollow-chamfered with tapering stops to each floor, and at street level each column has a very slightly larger square base. The first-floor band and cornice are both continuous cavetto mouldings, punctuated by tapering capitals to each column and, at cornice level only, integrated keystones to each window opening. The parapet is recessed slightly in bays 1 and 4 from the left, with a central segmental arch spanning bays 2 and 3 bearing the date 1911.

The entrance is located in bay 1, comprising a wide fielded door with glazed panels to the right (now boarded), with a slight horizontal canopy overhead and a semi-circular arched window opening above, now blocked with two inserted square timber windows. The other ground-floor windows are inserted timber horizontal centre-pivot windows with infilled arches above. Steel windows at first and second floor are all 16-paned, with segmental-arched heads at second-floor level. Ferro-concrete wall panels sit below the windows. Basement windows are flat-headed timber casements.

The left and right returns, both painted, display the structural frame with rendered brick infill. From the top of the ground floor the tops of the side elevations slope upwards from the rear wall towards the front; on the left elevation this slope meets the vertical rear wall of the second floor approximately 3 metres from the front elevation, while on the right it continues through the second floor, reaching roof level 1 metre from the front elevation.

At the rear, basement windows are blocked and the ground floor has full-height 20-pane steel windows. The rear wall of the first floor is a sloping roof with bitumen applied, the upper half glazed between the concrete beams. On the left this continues to roof level, but in the three bays to the right the second-floor rear wall is vertical with unpainted concrete frame and wall panels above and below 8-pane windows.

Interior spaces feature an exposed grid of concrete beams and ceilings showing shuttering marks, and exposed brick infill to side walls. The ground floor has a slope below the rear windows allowing the basement to borrow light. The basement contains a cross-corridor but is otherwise open in plan, with the exception of the stair in the south-west corner.

The 20th-century external fire escape is excluded from the listing as it is not of special architectural or historic interest.