Ye Olde Axe

Ye Olde Axe, a public house dating from the late 19th century, was built for Edward John Rose and Co, wine and spirit merchants. The building occupies the corner of Hackney Road and incorporates a site that had housed a pub of the same name since at least the 1850s. Ordnance Survey maps show that the building's footprint extended to abut an adjoining Georgian terrace between 1877 and 1896, indicating rebuilding took place during this period. The firm of Edward John Rose and Co owned several other pubs in London, including the Ten Bells on Commercial Street and the Jane Shore on Shoreditch High Street, many of which were decorated with particular lavishness.

The exterior exemplifies late 19th-century gin palace design in Queen Anne style. The façade facing Hackney Road is constructed in red brick with sandstone dressings and features a tile-faced ground floor. A prominent corner turret to the left rises to four storeys, carrying clock faces in its upper storeys and terminating in a bell-shaped copper dome. The pub front itself is divided into three bays by Ionic three-quarter columns and pilasters, with a curved entablature announcing the building's name and number, and a swan-necked pediment above the central bay adorned with garlands of fruit and a festooned urn. The soffit of the entablature is faced with decorative tiles and shows evidence that a bow window once existed in the central bay. Decorative ironwork runs above the entablature flanking the pediment, and an iron bracket supports a hanging sign. The upper storeys have mullion and transom windows with original glazing, marked by moulded brick ribs defining the bays. Decorative terracotta panels between the floors, a dentil cornice, and courses of moulded and plain sandstone provide further embellishment. The gabled parapet above the central bay features a further panel containing a cartouche depicting an axe and a semi-circular shell in the gable apex. Most of the original timber fenestration and doors to the pub front have been replaced. The building is largely blind and undecorated to the left return, aside from mullion and transom windows on the ground floor and upper storeys serving the staircase; the right side abuts the Georgian terrace, and the rear adjoins another building.

The interior retains a significant degree of original features. The most striking element is the moulded plasterwork ceiling, Jacobean in inspiration, with a highly decorative deep-coved cornice and frieze patterned with lion heads, winged creatures and shells amid swags. A barrel-vaulted section of similar lavishness runs along the side of the bar area and may originally have been the ceiling of a corridor through which individual compartments around the bar were accessed. The space is now divided by four partitions with cut-glass mirrored panels forming booths; whilst the arrangement is modern, the fabric of these partitions may be original. The mirrors match those in the back bar, seven cut-glass mirrored panels with wood entablatures painted with the names of products for sale including "Ports and Brandies". These, along with the bar itself, its gantries and light fittings, may also be part of the original decoration, though indications suggest they have been modified. The floor around the bar is tiled in black and white.

To the rear of the bar area is a section accessed through a wide arched opening with Composite columns and further decorative plasterwork. This contains a recessed alcove to the rear with paired Tuscan columns, half-fluted Ionic columns and additional ornamentation. The ceiling has a raised moulded band and coved cornice which would have originally supported a glazed lantern with stained glass clerestory; this lantern has been relocated to the upper storey of the pub where it survives intact. Metal light brackets survive in this section. A second skylight with matching plasterwork in the main pub area has a lantern that may survive above later plasterboard. Two slender iron colonettes with Corinthian capitals demarcate this section; three others are located elsewhere in the bar area. A small corridor stretch with decorative ceramic panels at frieze level and a plasterwork ceiling, accessed from the main bar through an opening with decorative keystone, may have been a second pub entrance or connected to the side corridor. The rear toilet block is not of special interest. The upper floors were only partially inspected, but two original stairs with turned newel posts and balustrades, and a number of panelled doors, were observed.

The pub frontage demonstrates exceptional richness of materials and decoration. The elaborate Jacobean-style plasterwork ceiling, frieze, coved cornice and skylights throughout the interior allow the original spatial arrangement to be read clearly, despite later alterations. Subsequent modifications have included the replacement of much secondary fenestration and doors, and the modern division of the interior by mirrored partitions, though the ceiling treatments and principal architectural elements survive to convey the building's original character as a late 19th-century gin palace of considerable ambition.