No 6 Denmark Street

No. 6 Denmark Street

This is a three-bay, three-storey terraced house with attic and basement, built of red brick with stucco to the ground floor and timber windows and doors. The pitched roofs, with a dormer window to the front, are masked by a later brick parapet. Dating from the late 17th century, the building retains almost its original floor plan, which comprises a front and back room on each floor, heated by side-wall stacks with fireplaces in the back rooms set across the back corner. Towards the rear, a dog-leg stair is positioned against the opposing side wall. A closet wing to the rear is a 20th-century rebuilding.

The upper two storeys feature ranges of three two-over-two pane sash windows with exposed sash boxes. These windows have splayed flat brick arches with painted central keystones, and those on the first floor have been extended downwards. String courses run above the ground and first-floor windows. Unlike elsewhere on the street where ground floor shopfronts have replaced the original arrangement, No. 6 and its neighbour No. 7 retain the original arrangement of a door and two windows, although the brickwork is rendered and the window openings have been extended downward. The windows are glazed in sheet glass. The doorcase dates from the early 19th century and comprises pilasters supporting a projecting cornice, with a fielded six-panel door beneath a radial fanlight.

The building contains good survival of original, 18th-century, and 19th-century joinery and plasterwork throughout. Box cornices survive widely, and wall panelling reflects the house's hierarchy: bolection moulded panelling in the hall and on the first floor, and simple timber boarding in the basement and attic. The lower part of the stair has column and vase balusters with a cut string and decorative console-like brackets beneath the treads, a likely 18th-century insertion. From the half landing between first and second floors upwards, the stair retains its original moulded closed string with barley twist balusters. The basement stair has heavy turned balusters of seemingly early date, though possibly repurposed given their location. The fully-panelled ground floor front room features an anthemion frieze and alcoves to either side of the fireplace with moulded arches resting on carved console brackets (one bracket is missing to the right). Principal rooms have panelled window-shutters, and fireplaces of various dates survive on all three floors.

To the rear, facing onto the small courtyard between this building and No. 7, is a brick outbuilding (now painted) of two storeys with a flat roof. The ground floor has a door to one side and a pair of large segmental-headed windows with multi-paned, horizontally-sliding Yorkshire sashes. The first floor has a single wide window formed of what would have been three pairs of timber casements separated by timber mullions, though one pair has been replaced by a single sheet of glass. The interior comprises a single room on each floor linked by a modern open-tread stair and is otherwise modernised without features associated with its use as a workshop. However, the first floor walls are covered in unplastered, unpainted board material bearing significant graffiti and drawings in marker pen by John Lydon, dating from approximately 1977 to the early 1980s. These include unflattering caricatures of members of the Sex Pistols and their circle, among them the band's manager Malcolm McLaren (depicted grasping banknotes with the label 'Muggerage', a reference to Malcolm Muggeridge), Nancy Spungen (girlfriend of Sid Vicious, depicted nude with a cigarette and stubbled chin), Sid Vicious (rendered as a wild-haired, buck-toothed stick man named 'Ego Sloshos'), Steve Jones (named 'Fatty Jones'), and a self-portrait by Lydon. Eight cartoons by Lydon are present, supplemented by subsequent drawings and graffiti from the same period.