The Scottish Mutual Assurance Society Building

The Scottish Mutual Assurance Society Building is an office building dating to 1895, with alterations in the 20th century. Designed by Frank Barlow Osbourne for W H Smythe, Solicitors, it is located in Birmingham and stands on the corner of Edmund Street and Newhall Street. The building is constructed of red brick with ashlar sandstone dressings and a blue tile roof. It is four storeys high, with cellars, and has an asymmetrical 4:1:4 bay arrangement wrapping around the corner. The style is simplified Flemish Revival.

The ground floor has been altered with a corner entrance and separate entrances to 29 Newhall Street and 110 Edmund Street. Each upper floor is distinguished by a continuous balcony with a wrought-iron balustrade, supported by a corbelled ashlar cornice. Moulded sill bands and cross windows with chamfered ashlar dressings, set within brick surrounds, are visible throughout.

The Newhall Street frontage features a projecting bay in the third bay, with a canted bay window on the first and second floors, featuring side-lights with transoms. The projection narrows on the third floor, with a window flanked by C-scrolls and brick pilasters that rise through string courses and cornices to a shaped gable, finished with kneelers, copings, and a ball finial. A decorative ashlar panel sits above the window. The flanking bays are recessed but similarly treated, whilst the first bay is narrower with a cross window to each floor and a simpler gable. The main ridge features broad, corniced transverse stacks, matched by a coaxial stack.

The corner bay has a rounded turret with curved cross windows to each floor, culminating in a 4-light mullioned opening beneath an octagonal ogee dome set on a corbel table. The Edmund Street frontage is generally similar to the Newhall Street frontage, with a projecting gable on the left, featuring cross windows to each floor, flanked by brick pilasters and single-light windows with transoms. A carved ashlar panel displaying a monogram and the date ‘1895’ sits beneath the first-floor window. The cornice above the third floor is surmounted by a small ashlar pediment containing a 2-light window. Transverse ridge stacks are again present.

The building occupies a prominent city centre location and is notable for its roofscape.