Moorlands House

LEEDS

SE3033NW ALBION STREET 714-1/76/12 (East side) 19/03/70 No.48 Moorlands House

GV II

Formerly known as: No.48 Premises of Leek and Westbourne Building Society ALBION STREET. Premises of the Leeds and West Yorkshire Assurance Company, now offices. 1852-55, altered C20. By WB Gingell, sculptor Robert Mawer. Richly modelled Venetian palazzo style. Ashlar, wrought-iron balconies, roof not visible. Square plan, on corner site with Commercial Street (right return). 2 storeys with attic and basement. 3 bays. Vermiculated rustication to ground floor with more heavily rusticated plinth, rusticated round-arch doorway with carved tympanum and flanking Venetian windows in round-arched recesses with continuous moulded impost and carved head keyblocks. Retractable metal shutters to ground-floor windows ran in tracks behind the piers to each window arch. Heavy dentilled cornice over ground floor with projecting balconies to 1st-floor windows. First floor: giant paired Corinthian three-quarter columns supporting heavy entablature with festoons and masks in the frieze, the entablature breaks forward over the columns. The 1st floor has 3 tall windows with segmental pediments on console brackets. 3 attic windows above with paired pilasters between, cornice and balustered parapet with urns. Left and right returns similar but single (not paired) columns on first floor. INTERIOR: good quality contemporary interiors including Classical plaster doorcases, pilasters and moulded entablature. HISTORICAL NOTE: W Bruce Gingell was the chief commercial architect in Bristol, responsible for banks, warehouses in the massive 'High Victorian' manner. Millstone grit from 3 different quarries was used in the construction: Bramley Fall for the heavily vermiculated plinth, Pool Bank for the finely rusticated ground floor and Venetian windows, and Rawdon Hill for the 2 upper storeys, columns, entablature and pedimented window heads. This building predates Gingell's Bristol work and is one of the first of the new-style commercial buildings in Leeds; it is noteworthy that it pre-dates the Town Hall. (Linstrum, D: West Yorkshire Architects and Architecture: 1978-: 20; The Builder, 10 July 1858: 466-467).

Listing NGR: SE3007133556