Former Motorcar Garage

Former Chelsea Garage, c1919, by Ernest Cole for Duff, Morgan and Vermont Ltd, motor engineers. Altered in the 1960s when converted to an antiques centre and later connected internally with the adjoining former Temperance Billiard Hall.

The building faces Flood Street with a strikingly traditional composition for what would have been a very modern building type in 1919. The style is Domestic Revival, apparently inspired by a cross-winged hall house, creating a consciously olde-worlde design. The main four-bay range has a tall, steep-pitched tiled roof with dormer windows under pitched roofs with tile-hung gables and tall brick chimneys. The upper floor of the two-storey brick elevation is weather-boarded, a notably vernacular feature for this metropolitan location. The ground floor has been altered with the insertion of shop windows. A brick external stair runs parallel to the elevation along its right-hand part, giving access to the upper floor and to the former chauffeur's quarters above the adjoining cross-wing. This cross-wing has its gable to the street containing two horizontal rows of timber casement windows—six on the first floor and two in the gable attic. The jettying of the upper storey adds to the vernacular effect, and even the projecting bracket, which formerly would have supported a trade sign, has a tiled cap. A final bay to the right of the cross-wing has a cat-slide roof and original casement windows on the ground floor. The building abuts adjoining buildings on all sides except the street front, but original plans show that a single-storey range, presumably the mechanics workshop, stretches back under a saw-tooth roof of three pitches, which appears to survive as built. The pavement to Flood Street is paved with square stone slabs, possibly laid when the garage was constructed to support motor vehicles driving into the workshops.

The interior contains nothing testifying to its historic use as a garage. The building now connects internally with the former Temperance Billiard Hall next door.

The building was designed by Ernest G Cole of Bedford Row as a mechanics garage for the repair of cars. A photograph of the garage appeared in The Autocar magazine on 8 May 1920, entitled 'Housing the Car in an Artistic Setting'. Original plans survive, labelled Chelsea Garage, and reveal that the building had two vehicular entrances—in the centre of the main range and in the right-hand cross-wing—with workshops above the former and a chauffeur's residence above the latter. The exterior survives largely as built, aside from the insertion of shop windows into the ground floor.

In the Edwardian period, motoring was a leisure pursuit for aristocratic enthusiasts, and filling stations and mechanics garages were not often commercially viable. Yet as vehicles improved in price and reliability, motor cars became commonplace in well-off households, and great numbers of associated buildings were constructed including car showrooms, petrol filling stations, garages, and mechanics workshops. The number of road vehicles in Great Britain rose from less than a quarter of a million in 1912 to just under one million in 1922, expanding to 2.4 million in 1934. These interwar years were the most significant in the proliferation of motoring, and Chelsea, a well-to-do area, no doubt had more than its share of motorcar drivers. The early phase of motoring had bestowed on the area one of its most significant historic buildings: the Michelin Garage on Fulham Road (1909–11, François Espinasse, Grade II). During the interwar period, repair and maintenance garages like this one became much more common, though this is an atypical example in terms of architectural quality. Most were plain in design or adapted from existing buildings.