107, Piccadilly

This is a late 19th-century cotton manufacturers’ showroom and warehouse, now partly an amusement shop and partly a showroom. Built in 1899, it was likely designed by Charles Heathcote for Horrocks Crewdson & Co. The building is constructed with an iron frame and concrete floors, faced with red sandstone and red brick, and has slate and glass roofs. It is a rectangular block, linked by a gang bridge to a rear block on Lena Street.

The building is in a Jacobean-baroque style, with a basement, five storeys, and an attic. It’s characterized by an elaborate design featuring a banded ground floor, string courses to the upper floors, and a three-bay Ionic colonnaded centre on the third and fourth floors, topped by a tall decorated gable and flanked by extruded turrets. A corbelled corner turret is on the right. The first bay has a wide round-headed entrance arch with a run-out banded surround and ornamented wrought-iron gates. Above the entrance is a stepped transomed window with a swan-neck pediment and an aedicule bearing the inscription “Founded 1848”. The ground floor openings have been altered, while the first and third floors have various semicircular and transomed windows. The second and fourth floors have mullioned windows; the top-floor mullions are blocked. The corner turret rises from a corbel with finely carved brackets depicting two children displaying a shield, and all turrets have domed caps. The right-hand return wall, facing Lena Street, has sloped basement windows protected by Art Nouveau railings, a four-bay Ionic pilastrade on the third and fourth floors and a shaped gable dated 1899. The rear of the building includes a rebuilt gang bridge linking with the Lena Street warehouse block at the first to fourth floors.

The interior features a porch and entrance hall with decorated glazed tiled pilasters and arcades. A staircase has wrought-iron Art Nouveau balusters on the second floor and wooden Jacobean-style balusters above. The first-floor showroom has decorated tiled pillars, moulded pilaster beams, and dentilled cornices. A ladies’ room is fitted with Art Nouveau stained glass windows. On the upper floors, there are cast-iron columns and wrought-iron beams, white glazed tiled walls and built-in counters below all windows. The roof has light steel trusses with tension rods and large skylights. It is a fine example of its type, though it was unoccupied above the first floor at the time of survey.