Clifford Chambers (Number 4)

Range of shops and offices including the entrance and foyer to a former music hall, now the Grand Opera House. Built around 1900, with the shopfront to Number 10 altered around 1920 and Number 8 (the former music hall entrance and foyer) remodelled in 1989.

The building is constructed of orange-red brick in English garden wall bond with shopfronts of sandstone ashlar. Brick pilasters are banded with ashlar on the ground floor. The ground floor and eaves feature moulded sandstone cornices with a terracotta corbel table to the eaves. The brick parapet has moulded stone coping, with other dressings of sandstone ashlar and terracotta. The roof is slate.

The exterior presents a three-storey front of five unequal bays, with curved corner bays at each end. The front is articulated by giant pilasters carrying an eaves cornice over a moulded corbel table, surmounted by a pierced parapet breaking forward over the pilasters as panelled pedestals. The ground floor cornice is moulded, and pilasters are broken at ground floor level by gabled capitals containing relief carved floral and foliate motifs.

The entrance to Clifford Chambers (Number 4) is approached by steps within a round arch on short side shafts with foliate capitals. The arch features ballflower mouldings in sunk roundels to the archivolt, moulded foliage trails to the soffit, and a hood of stylised beakhead and pellet mouldings. Above the arch, a frieze panel contains the name "Clifford Chambers" carved in low relief. The arch is closed by wrought-iron double gates in front of a panelled door in a glazed and panelled screen.

The entrance to Number 8 is segment-arched and contains an arched doorcase on squat shafts, detailed as for Number 4. Recessed paired double doors, beneath a small-pane overlight, are half glazed and panelled with renewed glazing and curvilinear glazing bars.

The shopfronts are framed in moulded shouldered arches on squat shafts, raised on high pedestals with moulded bases, annulets and carved capitals. Arch spandrels beneath a plain fascia contain sunk roundels with floral or foliar motifs carved in relief. Plate glass shop windows with moulded stone sills are contained in fluted colonnettes with leaf and Ionic capitals. Original glazed and panelled shop doors in shouldered arched openings survive in the corner entrance bay to Number 2 and to Number 6; the door and windows to Number 10 have been altered.

The first floor windows are round-headed single-pane sashes, either single, paired or tripled, with stone sills on moulded brackets, set back in gauged brick arches on short shafts like those on the ground floor, beneath a continuous hoodmould. The second floor has flat-headed sashes with moulded lintels and sills on moulded brackets.

The right and left returns to King Street and Cumberland Street repeat the detail of the main front.

The interior staircase to Clifford Chambers is an open string design with turned bobbin balusters (two to a tread), a broad moulded handrail and turned grooved newels with carved ball finials.

Numbers 2-6 and Number 10 are new additions to the list.