12-14A, Clerkenwell Green

635-1/0/10139 CLERKENWELL GREEN 13-JUN-02 12-14A

GV II

12-14A Clerkenwell Green. Commercial premises, now offices. 1878 by T.E.J. Channing of Holloway. Yellow stock brick with red brick dressings, cast stone and moulded brick decoration, cast iron window mullions and railings, stone coping to gables. Slate roofs. Three and four storeys with basements. Row of four commercial premises, probably workshops. Eclectic High Victorian style, with Gothic and Queen Anne elements. EXTERIOR: endmost houses, Nos.12 and 14A, project slightly forward, are of four storeys, and culminate in shaped gables; Nos.13 and 14 to centre are of three storeys with mansards. Ground floors with pannelled entrance doors to right of wide, four-light glazed fronts; pilasters with foliate capitals either side of doors, with narrow friezes over. Moulded decorative panels between Nos.13 and 14, the centre of the composition, depicting an urn with sunflowers, and roses at frieze level above. Basements with areas, wide windows carried on pairs of cast iron mullions; original cast iron foliate railings remain in front of Nos.12 and 14A. Tripartite windows to first and second floors, with segmental-arched central lights flanked by narrow side-lights, with mullions of cast stone between on Nos.12 and 14A, ornamental brick piers to others; windows mainly pivoting sashes. Bands of moulded stonework and keystones, all with floral ornament. Third floors of endmost buildings rise up in form of ogee-shaped gables, containing Diocletian windows within arched openings of banded red brick; roundels of moulded terra cotta interrupt profile of gables. Inner pair of buildings with stepped brick eaves, large mansards above (that to No.13 renewed in recent times). INTERIOR: not inspected; ground floors much altered; upper floors seen to retain original tongue and groove boarding to walls and ceilings. HISTORY: built by the Holloway builder and developer T.E.J. Channing as commercial units; the first occupant was the Lewis Incandescent Gas Company, in 1885. The row is a highly characteristic survival of High Victorian commercial premises, erected in an area noted for its metal-working tradition. The fronts are richly eclectic in detail and material, reflecting prevalent tendencies in commercial design. SOURCE: Metropolitan Board of Works, District Surveyor's Returns.