Waring And Gillow'S Showrooms

LANCASTER

SD4761NE NORTH ROAD 1685-1/7/215 (South side) 27/11/89 Nos.1-23 (Odd) Waring and Gillow's Showrooms

II

Furniture showrooms and offices. 1882, altered C20. Probably by Paley and Austin. For Gillow's, whose name appears on the lintel of the internal doorway. Coursed dressed sandstone with ashlar dressings. Slate roofs with tall, twin-flue chimney stacks on either side of the entrance bays. The 18-bay facade in a free Elizabethan style has 3 storeys plus cellars and attics. The facade is articulated by 4 approximately equally spaced shallow 2-bay projections which terminate in coped and finialed gables, with 3-light or 2-light attic windows. The doorway is in the second projection; its jambs are flanked by narrow windows and project forward like consoles to support a 2-storey canted bay with paired windows on each floor. On the first floor these are cross-windows, flanked by a narrow window, and have a sliding sash below the transom; on the second floor they are simply 2-light windows with sliding sashes. On the ground floor the windows in bays 1-6 & 9-10 have been widened to form shop windows, but the other windows are like those on the first floor. INTERIOR: on either side of the staircase are tall, well-lit showrooms, their moulded ceiling beams are supported by a single row of cast-iron columns with a fluted shaft and studded band. The staircase is Imperial in form, with heavy newel posts and balusters like inverted obelisks; it rises against a large 21-light mullioned and transomed window. The showrooms, once linked to the large 5-storey factory on St Leonardgate (qv), are an integral and imposing part of the centralised premises of the Gillow company, one of the major provincial furniture makers in the C18 and C19 centuries, which was active here until its closure in 1962.

Listing NGR: SD4789561956