28, HOCKLEY STREET (See details for further address information)

BIRMINGHAM

997/0/10320 HOCKLEY STREET 29-APR-04 28 SPENCER STREET 94,98 AND 100

GV II A terrace of offices, shops and workshops, formerly houses with workshops. c. 1871, with later minor alterations. Architect not known. Red brick with painted stone dressings, tall ridge chimneys and a slate roof covering. PLAN: Irregular wedge-shaped plot at the junction of 2 streets, with main street frontage range of varying depth. EXTERIOR: Hockley Street elevation forms narrow end of plot, with frontage of No.28 a single narrow return bay to the main Spencer Street frontage, all designed as a single complex of 3 storeys. Spencer Street frontage with wide semi-circular arch-headed door opening with door beneath fanlight set back within panelled reveal. Above, painted sill band and tall semi-circular arch-headed window beneath bracketed open pediment. Upper floor sill band with plain gauged brick arched head to 3 over 3 pane sash. Complex and deeply overhanging eaves with elaborate modillion cornice and ornate paired consoles. Spencer Street elevation of 11 bays rising from a shallow plinth with sill band and eaves cornice detailing as previously described. At bays 3, 7 and 9 are semi-circular arch-headed doorways with panelled doors and reveals. At bays 5 and 11, lower plain passage doorways with a painted lintels. Bays 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 have stacked tall window openings to ground and first floors, with wide painted surrounds and shallow canopied heads on elaborate consoles. Tripartite sash frames without glazing bars to openings. Above main doorways, first floor windows with pedimented heads, as on Hockley Street elevation. Upper floor windows originally all 3 over 3 pane sashes, but now altered to wide workshop windows at bays 4 and 6, and with 2 inserted small openings to right-hand end of frontage. Above passage doorway at bay 5, a rectangular stone plaque with the inscription ' PLANTAGENET BUILDINGS'. HISTORY: The complex appears to represent a speculative development to provide houses, or houses with integral workshop accommodation, on a restricted site where conventional rear yard workshop accommodation could not be provided. The 1889 Ordnance Survey plan shows 3 very restricted and irregularly-shaped rear yards accessed from a central passage, suggesting that the development was originally planned to provide 3 units, with combinations of residential, workshop, warehousing and display areas. Forms a group with No. 102 Spencer Street (q.v.) One of the least-altered examples of multiple use speculative buildings of its date in the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter. This impressively-detailed range demonstrates the economic viability of restricted sites during a period of rapid expansion in a manufacturing district in Birmingham now recognised as being of international significance.

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