The Red Lion Public House

SP 08 NW 6/11A 17.1.85

BIRMINGHAM SOHO ROAD B21 The Red lion Public House

II*

Public house. 1901-2 by James & Lister Lea for the Holt Brewery Company. Brick and terracotta facade; brick to sides and rear. Welsh slate roof. End stacks. PLAN. Long public bar along the road with further bars to right and behind. Spacious staircase hall in right-hand part of the building. EXTERIOR. 3 storeys. Free Renaissance style. Pink terracotta ground floor with entrances at the ends and centre. Shallow canopies carried on human torsoes over the doorways. Windows under shallow 3-centred arches. Upper floors buff terracotta. First floor with 6 traceried windows of different sizes with engaged colonettes and under an elaborate Jacobean-style frieze. Above a polygonal corner tower with attic window and surmounted by a cupola. Two gabled attic windows of different sizes and detail. INTERIOR. Public bar with blue and yellow Minton tiling on walls and panelling ceiling. Exceptionally fine bar back combining mirror-glass and mahogany joinery, enriched with gilded and painted letters. Bar front painted and detailed in Neo-Renaissance style. Fixed seating. Door to smoke room with etched and gilded glass Smoke room with fixed seating. Walls completely tiled with a similar scheme to the public bar but with framed coloured lithographs of girls in pastoral settings. Coffee room with more restrained decoration polished wooden panelling above fixed seats (with bell pushes) and extending to ceiling; framed engravings of dogs and narrative paintings. Oval mirror in over-mantle. Staircase hall entirely tiled with several designs and repeating the colours in the public bar. Ornately detailed newel posts and turned balusters; coloured glass of 1902. A public house of unusual richness and completeness, with interior detailing. comparable to the best surviving examples nationally. SOURCES: A, Crawford, M. Dunn & R Thorne, Birmingham Pubs 1880-1939 (Gloucester, 1986), pp. 118-9.

Listing NGR: SP0430489583