Former Constitutional Club

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718/0/10161

POCKLINGTONS WALK No 1

INCLUDING RUPERT STREET No 2

(Formerly listed as MILLSTONE LANE 5 POCKLINGTONS WALK 1 Former Constitutional Club)

11-JAN-02

GV II

Former Constitutional Club building. Dated 1893. By Frank Seale of Leicester. Red brick with stone dressings and slate roof with terracotta decorative ridge tiles. Various ornamental ridge and side stacks. Eclectic style combining English, Flemish and French Renaissance details. Corner site, the main fronts to Pocklingtons Walk and Millstone Lane and a subsidiary one to Rupert Street. Two storeys, basement and prominent attic.

The front to Pocklingtons Walk is a seven-window range at first floor of windows with stone transoms and upper mullions and two elaborate curved oriels to centre left and right with triple lights and much carved detailing. Below are six stone mullion and transom windows, and, below the right hand oriel, a carved stone doorway with coupled pilasters in two tiers and curved broken pediment. Panelled double doors. The prominent attic has two joined gables facing and has five windows, three with transoms, and those to centre left and right above the oriels are paired sashes with round-arched heads set in elaborately decorated frontespieces which continue above into the gables. There are patterned leaded lights in the upper parts of many of the windows in the upper two floors, otherwise the windows are plain sashes. Stone banding is one of the features of the design and this continues round into the front to Millstone Lane to the right.

This front is divided into three sections, that to left blank except for a small ground floor window and a projecting stack which has a carved plaque recording the laying of the stone by Lord Randolph Spencer Churchill on 21 June 1893. The central section has three stone mullion and transom windows on both floors and twin facing gables to the attic with three-light windows. The section to right has stone mullion and transom windows with an elaborate frontespiece going from first floor to attic in the centre and having paired windows with round-arched heads. Similar patterned leaded lights in the upper parts of some of the windows in the upper two floors. To far right a stone doorway with carved decorative head and tablet dated 1893.

The front to Rupert Street is plainer but has two prominent tall side stacks which are each set into their own gabled dormers linking them to the main roof. Various sashes and two stone doorways on the ground floor, one blocked.

INTERIOR not inspected.

This former club is an elaborate and imposing building and an unusual building type and forms a group with the adjacent Registry Office (qv).

SK5864304258