23-27, COOKRIDGE STREET (See details for further address information)

Shops, offices and warehouses at the corner of Cookridge Street and Great George Street, Leeds. Built between 1840 and 1847 with later additions and alterations around 1898, and restored in 1993–94.

The building is constructed of pinkish-red brick laid in Flemish bond on the Cookridge Street and Great George Street frontages, with English garden wall bond elsewhere. Stone ashlar dressings are employed throughout, and the roof is not visible from ground level.

The building occupies a prominent corner site and comprises three storeys with basement on the main frontages, rising to four storeys at the rear. The Cookridge Street elevation features 14 first-floor windows linked by a recessed bowed corner bay to 13 windows on Great George Street. The ground and first floors are finished with rusticated ashlar, moulded strings, frieze and blocking course. On Great George Street, the semi-subterranean basement windows are protected by iron railings. The ground floor contains a central six-panel double door and a part-blocked doorway to No. 21, with deep embrasures for windows featuring arches of incised voussoirs. The corner doorway has a similar arch and is fitted with a four-panel double door with overlight, flanked by shop windows divided by moulded columns.

On Cookridge Street, early twentieth-century shop fronts display panelled pilasters, slender columns and curvilinear tops to the shop windows, deep friezes and dentilled cornices. The door to No. 29 formerly gave access to the rear, while doors to Nos. 31 and 33 are set back. No. 35 has a six-panel door beneath a large eight-pane overlight. The first and second floors contain sixteen-pane sashes with slightly cambered gauged brick arches and stone sills. The first-floor windows of the corner bay and central bay on Great George Street are emphasised—the former by its corniced ashlar architrave and the latter by being set in a segmental-arched embrasure. Many of the original sashes have been wholly or partly replaced by twentieth-century windows. Chimney stacks rise to the eaves and ridge.

At the rear, Nos. 19 and 20 Alexander Street form a four-storey, four-bay section with similar sash windows. The three left bays are set beneath a shallow pediment with oculus and ashlar coping, while the right bay contains an inserted or enlarged waggon entrance. Bay 2 was originally a loading bay with a wide segmental-arched first-floor door and a narrower second-floor door, to which an iron hoist was attached to the wall on the right.

Within the courtyard, Nos. 23–35 Cookridge Street retain sixteen-pane sashes, with late nineteenth and twentieth-century porches and gabled single-storey additions of no special architectural interest.

Historically, Nos. 23–25 were originally occupied by Schunck Souchay & Co., and Nos. 31–37 by William Smith, wool merchant banker and proprietor of Wm Smith, Son & Co. In 1873, George Corson purchased the block of offices and warehouses at Nos. 22–35 Cookridge Street and No. 21 Great George Street for £10,000, moving his own offices to No. 25 Cookridge Street in 1876. In 1898, Thomas Ambler, an architect, bought the property and altered the ground floor to provide additional shops. The building was acquired by Leeds City Council in 1936.

The wings to the rear of No. 23 Cookridge Street and No. 21 Great George Street are linked by Nos. 19 and 20 Alexander Street, later forming an internal courtyard.