36-44 Long Row and 2-20 Market Street, Nottingham (former Debenhams buildings)

A department store combining several buildings from different periods, incorporating work by Bromley and Watkins (1927-1928), T.C. Hine and Son (1872-1887), and William Dymock Pratt (1893-1896), along with additions from around 1960 and various service structures. This was formerly the Debenhams store.

Materials and Construction

The complex uses varied materials across its component buildings. Numbers 2-10 Market Street are built in stone with slate roofs. Numbers 12-20 Market Street have brick walls with slate roofing to the front and flat roofs behind. Numbers 40-44 Long Row are clad in Portland stone under slate roofs. Numbers 36 and 39 Long Row feature moulded stone, while 37-38 Long Row combines brick with stone details beneath a slate roof. Various infill buildings have mixed slate and flat roofing. Ground-floor shopfronts throughout are executed in stone and metal.

Layout

The building complex presents elevations to Long Row on the south side and Market Street to the west. The eastern boundary is formed by Norfolk Place, a narrow alley separating number 36 from number 35 Long Row at ground level, running north from Old Market Square to Upper Parliament Street. The northern limit is marked by the south walls of numbers 22 and 26 Market Street and 7 Norfolk Place, which enclose a yard outside the store's rear goods entrance at the north-east corner. Flat-roofed infill buildings of varying dates extend back from the Market Street and Long Row frontages, some presenting east-facing elevations to Norfolk Place.

40-44 Long Row: The Main Corner Building

This forms the principal department store building at the corner of Long Row and Market Street. The main elevation faces south to Long Row, with a side elevation facing west to Market Street. It rises five storeys plus an attic level within a slate-covered mansard roof, which itself encloses a flat roof. The building is clad in Portland stone ashlar with fine joints. Windows are generally six-over-six sashes without surrounds.

The ground floor is recessed behind the upper floors, supported by six square columns creating an arcade for pedestrian access. These columns have polished stone cladding to their lower halves and Doric capitals. They support a plain stone frieze and cornice, with a smaller metal cornice fitted beneath. Behind the columns sits a glazed shopfront set within metal mullions, the glazing curving inward to a wide, four-door central entrance.

Long Row Elevation

Above ground level, the Long Row front spans thirteen bays arranged in a 3:7:3 pattern. The central section of seven bays is flanked by eastern and western pavilions of three bays each, demarcated by full-height rusticated pilasters. The pilaster capitals align with the tops of the third-floor windows and are decorated with egg and dart moulding. The third-floor windows have decorated cornices between their heads.

First-floor windows in the central section all have simply moulded architraves beneath projecting cornices. The most elaborate window is the first-floor central bay, featuring a curved iron balcony and framed by engaged Ionic columns supporting a triangular pediment topped with a cartouche flanked by two cherubs. The central first-floor windows in each pavilion have segmental pediments broken by cartouches on corbels above moulded architraves, also with curved iron balconies. The second-floor central windows in the pavilions are decorated with wide cornices supported by corbels. A plain frieze runs above the third-floor windows, surmounted by a pronounced modillion cornice.

The fourth floor continues the three-part division. Each pavilion has a tripartite window consisting of a three-over-six window divided from side lights by Tuscan columns. The central section forms a loggia of seven bays divided by pairs of Ionic columns with low iron railings spanning between the column pairs. A cornice and blank frieze complete this storey.

The fifth, attic floor sits behind a stone parapet which rises at the pavilion ends with coffered panels flanked by scrolls and then urns. The central section has seven dormer windows, centred over but smaller than those in the floors below. Each pavilion has a centrally located window.

Market Street Elevation

Above the shopfront, the southern section mirrors the west pavilion of the Long Row elevation but is narrower. The windows flanking the central bay are reduced to tall, narrow four-over-four light sashes, and the central first-floor window has lost the cartouche present on the corresponding Long Row window.

The northern section has windows in each of four bays across the first, second and third floors. Third-floor windows have no surrounds, but second-floor windows share the same detailing as the central second-floor pavilion windows on Long Row, with the architrave extending down to enclose the base of the first-floor windows. The large modillion cornice continues from Long Row, dividing the third and fourth floors.

36 and 39 Long Row

These are two late-1950s flat-roofed buildings flanking 37-38 Long Row: the four-storey number 36 to the right and five-storey number 39 to the left. All three buildings share a shopfront recessed from the building line and supported by rectangular columns. The upper floors are enclosed in moulded stone frames divided by full-length vertical mullions supporting tall windows. Horizontal floor divisions are marked by panels decorated with small square mosaic tiles within the mullions. These frontages are of lesser interest.

37-38 Long Row

A four-storey building beneath a hipped roof comprising two sections divided by a narrow flat valley. The building is asymmetrical, reflecting its construction in two stages, most visible through mismatched decorative carvings between its eastern and western halves.

The ground floor forms the central section of the late-1950s glazed shopfront shared with 36 and 39 Long Row. Above, the building divides into four bays by brick pilasters springing from stone corbels at the windows' transom level, where the first floor transitions from stone to Flemish bond brick. The third bay from west to east projects to form a three-storey oriel window, and the fourth bay is wider than the others. Windows are generally one-over-one square-headed sashes in stone surrounds with transom lights.

First-floor windows sit beneath polychromatic brick and stone segmental arches with decorated keystones. Above the arches runs a relief-carved acanthus leaf frieze continuous across the façade. Over this frieze, each bay has a carved panel: the two western bays feature foliage and cherubs, the oriel bay has scrolling foliage, and the eastern bay displays foliage with a central Green Man. A cornice above the panels divides them from the second-floor windows.

Second and third-floor windows sit in plainer stone surrounds, with carved panels between the second and third floors. Above these, a parapet with stone coping tops the building. Stone urns crown the pilasters at either end. The area above the oriel bay extends upward into the gable of a small pitched roof running north to meet the eastern half of the roof.

2-4 Market Street

This building comprises four narrow bays: a ground-floor shopfront with three floors above in rock-faced stone laid in regular courses, then an attic storey within a pitched slate roof. Ground-floor openings are framed in plain painted metal surrounds set below a blank stone frieze with cornice above. First and second-floor windows are round-headed sashes beneath triangular pediments in architraves that are lugged at the top and flare out at their bases. A stone string course separates first and second floors. Third-floor windows are smaller, square-headed two-over-two light sashes in lugged architraves. A plain band of stone runs under the roof eaves with dormer windows above.

6-10 Market Street

This five-bay building follows a similar design and uses similar materials to numbers 2-4 immediately south. Of the five bays, the central, northern and southern ones have oriel windows on the first and second floors, while the other two bays have the same round-headed sash windows in lugged architraves as at 2-4 Market Street. Stone string courses run level with the bottoms of the first, second and third-floor windows. Third-floor windows are round-headed two-over-two sashes in ashlar surrounds, with those in the end and central bays flanked by one-over-one sashes divided by Ionic columns. A course of plain ashlar runs horizontally at the level of the third-floor window tops. Five round-headed two-over-two sash dormer windows in stone architraves punctuate the west slope of the roof.

12-20 Market Street

Dating to around 1960, this building is of lesser interest than the other Market Street structures. It is a five-storey building of seven bays built in red brick in Flemish bond with Portland stone dressings. The ground floor is a shopfront. Upper windows are six-over-six sashes, with the central first-floor window distinguished by a horizontal cornice supported on console brackets. Plain stone cornices separate the ground from first floors and second from third floors. The building has a flat roof with a slope to its west, Market Street side, imitating a mansard roof.

Norfolk Place Elevations

On Norfolk Place, accessed by an alleyway immediately north of the east elevation of 36 Long Row, are the functional side elevations of 36 Long Row and the infill buildings behind it. Halfway up the alley, the former 1910 side entrance to the L-plan Mikado Café is visible. This is a curved brick bay set back from the street line at ground-floor level, immediately south of an early-18th-century style stone doorway with a thick, banded architrave with large keystones above a triangular pediment.

Interior Arrangement

The individual buildings have different numbers of floors, but the public shop-floor areas spanning between buildings are spread over five levels: lower ground floor, ground floor, then first, second and third floors. Staff welfare facilities, training and office areas occupy upper floors, while stock and service areas are on lower and basement levels. At below ground-floor level is a coal store carved into the sandstone bedrock.

Frequent renovations and adaptations have left the shop-floor areas as a series of open spaces with late-20th-century fittings and fixtures, suspended ceilings and dry lining to walls. The open shop floors have multiple levels, often linked by short staircases.

Principal Staircases

Two larger staircases of particular interest were both in place by 1927. One stair spans the join between 44 Long Row and 2-4 Market Street in the south-west corner of the building; the other is centrally located, west of the Norfolk Place bay to the former Mikado Café. The south-western staircase runs from basement to top floor (fifth floor of 40-44 Long Row); the central stair runs from ground floor to top floor (third floor at this part of the building).

Both have closed strings, square newels, flat handrails, turned balusters, and both make their turns at right angles. The south-western staircase has coffered plaster panels beneath the flights and Ionic columns supporting moulded friezes at some landings. The central staircase is irregular in the lengths of its flights and landings between turns and has coffered panels to the stairwell walls.

Surviving Historic Details

Occasional details survive from earlier building phases, including doorcases, plaster detailing to ceiling beams and simple octagonal columns. Particularly richly moulded ceiling beams and cornices survive in the round bay of the former Mikado café on the Norfolk Place side of the building.