Former Constitutional Club

This is a former Constitutional Club building, dating to 1893 and designed by Frank Seale of Leicester. Constructed of red brick with stone dressings and a slate roof featuring terracotta decorative ridge tiles and ornamental ridge and side stacks, it stands on a corner site with main fronts to Pocklingtons Walk and Millstone Lane, and a smaller front to Rupert Street. The building is two storeys high, with a basement and a prominent attic.

The front facing Pocklingtons Walk has a seven-window range at first floor, with stone transoms and upper mullions, and two elaborate, curved oriels with triple lights and intricate carved detailing in the centre left and right. Below are six windows with stone mullions and transoms. A carved stone doorway with coupled pilasters in two tiers and a curved broken pediment sits below the right-hand oriel, leading to panelled double doors. The prominent attic has two joined gables, with five windows, three of which have transoms. The windows above the oriels are paired sashes with round-arched heads, set within elaborately decorated frontispieces that extend upwards into the gables. Patterned leaded lights are present in the upper parts of many of the windows on the upper two floors. Stone banding is a key feature of the design, continuing around to the front on Millstone Lane.

The Millstone Lane front is divided into three sections. The left section is largely blank except for a small ground floor window and a projecting stack bearing a carved plaque commemorating the laying of the stone by Lord Randolph Spencer Churchill on 21 June 1893. The central section features three stone mullion and transom windows on both floors, with twin facing gables to the attic and three-light windows within. The right section has stone mullion and transom windows, with an elaborate frontispiece extending from the first floor to the attic, centred around paired windows with round-arched heads, and patterned leaded lights in the upper parts of some of the upper floor windows. A stone doorway with carved decorative head and tablet dated 1893 is located on the far right.

The Rupert Street front is simpler, but notable for two prominent tall side stacks, each set into its own gabled dormer linking them to the main roof. Various sashes and two stone doorways are on the ground floor, one of which is blocked. The interior was not inspected.

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