Brunt's Buildings

Brunt's Buildings is an office building with shops on the ground floor, constructed in 1915, with alterations in the late 20th century. The building is brick, with ashlar and concrete dressings, and has slate roofs, coped gables, and single gable and three ridge stacks with stone bands and coping. It sits on a corner site with an angled corner feature and comprises nine bays by ten windows.

The windows are mainly 15-pane glazing bar sashes to the first floor, and 12-pane sashes above. Some upper sashes are single-pane. First-floor windows have keystones. The corner feature has banded pilasters with cornice breaks. Above the corners is a round-headed niche containing a life-size sculpture of a man in late 17th-century costume. A square clock turret rises above the niche, featuring corner volutes, a clock face set in a panel, a modillion cornice, a square lead dome, and a weather vane. The Leeming Street front has two projecting bays, each with two sashes on each floor, topped with dentillated pediments, each containing a half-round tablet inscribed "Brunt's Buildings." Cartouches are inset within leaves, one bearing the arms of the Dand family and the other an inscription. Between the projecting bays are two windows on each floor, and beyond, a set-back bay to the left with a single window on each floor, and to the right with two. The Toothill Lane front has a three-storey block to the right, with four windows, and a projecting central bay under a pediment featuring a half-round datestone. To the left of this is a two-storey range with six windows and a slightly projecting central bay with two windows, all under a plain pediment. The ground floor contains a continuous run of shop fronts and shop windows, linked by a rounded corner. Original wooden pilasters with curved double brackets and moulded square hoods, along with a continuous dentillated cornice, remain. Three right-hand bays to Leeming Street have had their cornices removed. A plain cart entrance is located in the second bay of the Toothill Lane front.

The building was erected by the trustees of Brunt’s charity on the site of the former house of one Rowland Dand; an inscription relating to this is on the Leeming Street front.