59 And 60, High Street

WORCESTER

SO8454NE HIGH STREET 620-1/16/339 (East side) 19/08/99 Nos.59 AND 60

GV II

Formerly known as: Cadena Café HIGH STREET. Built as The (new) Central Coffee Tavern and shops, with offices over, now shops and offices. Plans dated 1901, with later alterations including renovations of 1997. Architect, Lewis Sheppard of Worcester. Reddish-orange brick in Flemish bond with terracotta dressings, including floor bands, horizontal banding to first floor, architraves, parapet, turret and gable; plain tile roof, with copper to dome. Queen Anne Revival style. Occupying a corner site, the building has a continuous design with full-height bow to angle crowned with a turret, and with wide attic gables to outer ends. High Street facade: 4 storeys, 2 first-floor windows plus bow. Between all bays from first floor are full-height pilaster strips, those to right continuing as plinths to right gable surmounted by urns. Ground floor: entrance to angle, boarded up at time of review but with moulded, round-arched surround and cambered-arched hood with acanthus scroll moulding and shield, the hoodmould continues as ovolo-moulded continuous cornice over ground floor. Otherwise ground floor covered with boarding. First floor: continuous sill band, mullion and transom windows, those to angles are curved on plan and have engaged Doric columns between and with shield and foliate scrolls to blind lunettes. Otherwise a pair of 2-light and a row of three 2-light mullion-and-transom windows with pilaster strips between and similar shield and scroll moulding over. Continuous cornice over first floor acts as sill band to second-floor windows; bow has three 2-light mullion-and-transomed windows, all with pulvinated friezes and cornices. To third floor the turret has three 2-light windows and moulded band over with foliate scrolls and masks; modillion cornice. Otherwise two single lights with eared architraves and three 2-light windows. Continuous frieze and dentil cornice, surmounted by open balustrade between turret and attic gable at right, which has 3-light window in pilastered surround and with shield over. Attic dormers behind parapet. Similar facade to left return (St Swithin's Street) with, to each of the upper storeys, two 3-light and two 2-light mullion and transom windows. INTERIOR: not inspected. HISTORIC NOTE: Lewis Sheppard was the diocesan architect for Worcester c1893-1905 and was also responsible for Laslett Almshouses, Friar Street. The Central Coffee Tavern became the Central Temperance Hotel and Restaurant, then a Cadena Café. A richly ornamented example of Edwardian commercial architecture, which occupies a significant corner site, helping to frame the view to the High Street and St Swithin's Street. (Berrows Journal, 12 June 1915).