Police Station And Stables

POLICE STATION AND STABLES

This complex comprises a police station built in 1903 by John Dixon Butler, Surveyor to the Metropolitan Police, and police stables with married officers' accommodation from 1937-8 by Gilbert Mackenzie Trench, Dixon Butler's successor. Minor later additions and alterations have been made.

STATION EXTERIOR

The police station is a red brick building in the Neo-Baroque style with stone dressings, a slate roof and tall brick chimneys. It presents a handsome six-window-bay façade to Bow Road, rising two storeys with a tall mansard attic. A stone balustrade runs between prominent mullioned, pedimented dormers. The elevation emphasises verticality through stone window surrounds that extend the full height to meet the façade's plain frieze and dentil cornice. The windows have lugged architraves, those on the ground floor featuring elongated keystones which bisect their segmental pediments and link to the shaped aprons of the first-floor mullions.

The elevation's regularity is interrupted only by an off-centre stone porch displaying Dixon Butler's characteristic triangular pediment and elongated swelling brackets. Its lintel is inscribed 'POLICE' and a date stone appears on the left-hand plinth. The front door and window joinery remain original, as do the iron railings and return boundary wall.

The ebullient stone detailing continues on the return elevation to Addington Road. This features a stone-coped round-arched gable with stone volutes, two further windows with segmental-headed surrounds, and two oriels with stone mullions. The chimneys have stone banding. A second gable with volutes enlivens the otherwise blind return to the west, which abuts the neighbouring listed late Georgian terrace.

To the rear are ranges of varying heights with functionally determined fenestration, but maintaining the same high-quality brickwork that distinguishes the façade, attractive brick arches to the windows, and some stone dressings. A cell block has small windows set high in the wall, most retaining the original cast iron glazing bars, with three replaced in glass blocks.

INTERIOR

The reception area has been refurbished but a vestibule door survives along with a quarry tile floor in the lobby. The external walls retain their exposed arches, designed to strengthen the construction, though there are no fireplaces. A good number of original panelled doors survive, as does the staircase with its iron balustrade and handrail. The basement lavatory block retains its white glazed brick walls.

The cell block survives largely unaltered. The cells retain their doors with shuttered apertures for monitoring prisoners, and inside there are solid half-height partitions indicating where toilets once stood. There are eight individual cells and one larger communal cell, the latter with a separate ablutions closet.

STABLES AND MARRIED ACCOMMODATION

Further along Addington Road stands a separate stable block in pure Moderne style, constructed in white concrete with the curved corners, horizontal windows and flat roofs characteristic of that aesthetic. The building is U-shaped at ground floor with a stable to the rear and two projecting wings containing further stables, tack rooms and other functional spaces. Between the two wings lies a central yard with a concrete canopy overhead. The stable is skylit and retains its original stall partitions and floor surfaces. A tall chimney, which originally served the forge, also survives.

The upper floor, stepped back from the ground floor, comprises two flats for married police officers and is reached by flights of steps, one at each end of the building's frontage. The plan cleverly ensures that the different and unrelated functions of stabling horses and accommodating married police officers and their families are kept separate, with individual entrances from the street. The metal windows to the flats have been replaced by plastic frames but those to the stable section survive. There are no original features in the flats. The boundary wall, also in white concrete, is original but the gates are modern.

HISTORY

Bow Road Police Station superseded a station of 1854 by Charles Reeves, which survives nearby and is listed at Grade II. The station originally housed one married inspector, one married constable (presumably with their families) and forty unmarried constables. Further accommodation was provided at a section house on Violet Street, Bow. In 1880, Bow became the principal station of the Division until reorganisation in 1933. In 1938, the station became the location for the divisional stables and accommodation was built for twenty horses to designs by Gilbert Mackenzie Trench, Dixon Butler's successor as Surveyor. Further accommodation for married officers was also provided at that time.

Dixon Butler, a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, succeeded his father, John Butler, to this post in 1895 and served as surveyor until his death in 1920, by which time he had designed over 200 police stations and courts. His period as surveyor is notable for the architectural quality of his designs. Dixon Butler stations are usually in a domestic style, sensitive to the context of the areas in which they were located, with strong municipal qualities such as handsome iron railings, inscribed lintels identifying the building as a police station, and other stone dressings. Surviving stations illustrate his proficiency across a range of different sites as the Metropolitan Police's jurisdiction covered a much wider area than comparable public service authorities, such as the London County Council, encompassing Middlesex and sections of other home counties. With this prolificacy came the opportunity to experiment with plan and elevational treatment, and it is no surprise that some of the most characterful and distinctive buildings in the Metropolitan Police estate are those by John Dixon Butler. In a wider context, Dixon Butler's police stations are noted as important components of early 20th-century townscapes which sit well alongside contemporary municipal buildings, and contribute to the high regard in which Edwardian civic architecture is held.

The Metropolitan Police Force Surveyorship was established in 1842, thirteen years after Sir Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police Act of 1829. From the first purpose-built police station in 1831, at Bow Street, new stations were built throughout the 19th century, particularly in the late 1880s following the political unrest of that decade and high-profile events such as the Whitechapel Murders. Victorian police stations were hence built in prominent positions with easy access from the street, in order to advertise the presence of the police to a concerned public. Design often responded to political and social concerns. In the 1880s, for example, following a diphtheria case in Rotherhithe police station, the separate accommodation of police officers and prisoners was recommended. This was then overturned in the 1890s after a volatile police demonstration at Bow Street, after which it was thought wise to house constables within the stations, and hence under the supervision of on-duty officers. By the time of Dixon Butler's surveyorship a formula had been established: stations were designed with a mixture of police accommodation and cells; separate access for the police, prisoners and public was provided; and thought was given to the well-being of prisoners. One such occupant of Bow Road Police Station was the women's suffrage campaigner and socialist Sylvia Pankhurst, who was arrested and held here for smashing windows in February 1913.

This building is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons: it is one of the finest stations in East London by John Dixon Butler, the most accomplished of the Metropolitan Police Surveyors; the stately Baroque façade, ebullient stone dressings and the quality of the craftsmanship distinguish this from contemporary stations; the well-preserved cell block once housed Sylvia Pankhurst; there is a group association with the nearby station of 1854 by an earlier surveyor, Charles Reeves; and the stables to the rear have special interest in their own right for their pure Modern style by interwar police surveyor Gilbert Mackenzie Trench.