The Elephant House Including Former Coopers' Building, Boundary Walls And Gate Piers

A former bottle store, coopers' building and boundary walls, built 1900–1 by William Bradford for the Camden Brewery. The group includes minor later alterations.

The bottle store, now called the Elephant House, is the most prominent building on the site. It is a two-storey building with basement, constructed of red brick on an engineering brick plinth with sandstone and rubbed brick detailing. The roof comprises two parallel ranges with a double pitched roof running east-west along the curve of Hawley Crescent, with renewed slate covering.

The elevations to Hawley Crescent and Kentish Town Road are the most decorative. They are articulated by rhythmic giant order brick pilasters, moulded brick cornices, and panels of decoration including sunflowers. A date stone sits in the raised central parapet of the Hawley Street frontage. Above the door to Kentish Town Road is the eponymous sandstone elephant's head, which was the trademark of the Camden Brewery and one of their products was Elephant Pale Ale. Historic photographs show that blank panels in the parapets once bore incised lettering announcing the brewery's name. Both parapets were formerly pedimented, with a second elephant's head relief in the Hawley Crescent parapet.

The windows have rubbed brick segmental arches with sandstone keystones and metal panes in a variety of designs, some with rose-shaped bosses. There are nine bays to Hawley Crescent and three to Kentish Town Road. A short flight of steps leads up to the central door with granite surround on the Kentish Town Road elevation; the two windows to either side have rounded-headed relieving arches.

The double gable end to the yard is simpler but well-built, with rubbed brick arches to the windows, cornices and projecting central sections with inset round-headed gauged brick window arches. Former taking-in bays to the left and centre of the elevation are much wider than the windows and have engineering brick surrounds. These, and a large iron hoist, lend the building industrial character.

The interior features concrete floors with jack-arched vaulting to the ground floor, supported by cast iron columns with bell capitals and concrete beams. Two original staircases survive: one of timber and the other of concrete with a metal balustrade. The timber roof trusses remain. The Brewers Journal of 1901 noted that the building had lifts, unusually for a brewery building. The lift shafts survive, though the lifts themselves have been modernised.

The coopers' building is smaller and faces the canalside. It has the same detailing to its yard elevation as the bottle store. The canalside frontage is the most decorative, featuring an oculus in the gable with gauged brickwork and stone keystones, like the other windows. There is a taking-in bay with surviving timber doors at the canal's waterline level and a second large bay leading to the yard. Inside, a timber ladder-like stair and a cast iron spiral staircase survive, although the latter has been moved from its original position. The timber roof trusses are unchanged. The first floor also has jack-arched vaulting. The 1921 Goad maps suggest that the second floor was used for storing chaff, a byproduct of brewing.

The boundary walls run in two sections: east-west between the former bottle store and the smaller building, and east-west along the boundary to Hawley Crescent between the former bottle store and the MTV building. The walls have lower courses of engineering brick and upper courses of red brick with stone capping and recessed panels in the brickwork along the Hawley Street side. The gate piers are of similar design with turning stones at their bases and support wrought-iron gates.

Brewing became a major industry in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and brewery buildings from this period are often monumental in scale, though architecturally utilitarian or in a very plain classical style. In the mid to late 19th century, a competitive trading environment and the influence of a small number of brewery architects led to the emergence of the 'ornamental brewery'. Brewery buildings now functioned as advertisements for the brewery's products, and images of brewery plants featured in beer advertising from the 1890s. On this site in Camden, the contrast between the fragment of surviving mid-19th-century brewery along the canalside and the Elephant House illustrates this development well.

William Bradford was the leading brewery architect of the last quarter of the 19th century and built or adapted over seventy buildings. He was one of the first brewers' architects to emphasise the importance of architectural detail in brewery construction in his own designs and publications such as Notes of Maltings and Breweries of 1889. The Elephant House building illustrates how Bradford used good brickwork and decorative terracotta to transform what might have been functional industrial buildings into an advertisement for a commercial enterprise. Bradford commonly incorporated the names or logos of breweries in his designs, which may explain his popularity with brewers. By the end of the 19th century this approach had become commonplace and Bradford's obituary in the Builder in 1919 noted: 'there are few towns in which he has not left some mark of his work, most of his brewery buildings bearing to a marked degree an individuality quite his own'.