Arding And Hobbs Store

Department store built in 1910 by James Gibson in Edwardian Baroque style, located on Lavender Hill and St John's Road. The structure is steel framed with reinforced floors for fire protection, clad externally in red brick in Flemish bond with stone dressings and centrepieces treated in Wrennaissance style.

The building rises four storeys with nine windows to the Lavender Hill front, twenty to the St John's Hill front, and three to the corner. The principal feature is a large octagonal stone tower with a florid dome top and base with carved ovals, crown, and four open pediments supported on composite columns. Below the corner cupola, the second and third floors are of stone with large blank panels to the parapet, moulded cornice and architraves. Second floor windows have blank tablets above with swags. The main fronts have a panelled parapet with piers at regular intervals. Third floor windows are in moulded architraves flanked by panels bearing the initials A and H with swags. Second floor windows have curved open pediments, console brackets and blank panels.

The Lavender Hill front features a central large curved pediment on pilasters spanning the second and third floors with round-headed niches containing putti, keystones, swags and blank panels. Its second floor window has an open pediment, console brackets and carving. The St John's Hill front has two such centrepieces, the southernmost carrying an early 20th-century gabled extension above.

The entire first floor has a continuous wooden display window with round-headed fanlights, brackets and pilasters, and stone fascia above bearing the shop name. The ground floor shopfronts have been replaced with 1970s aluminium shopfront and canopy. The southernmost four bays of the rear elevation to Ilminster Gardens follow similar treatment to the main elevations; the remainder is set back. The central twelve bays feature pilasters and plain triple wooden casements with leaded lights and heraldic shields on the right side ground floor windows. The left side has three shuttered doors and canopy. The northernmost section has three round-headed windows to the second floor and mullioned and transomed metal casements below. A stone rear entrance bears a panel with fasces and shield inscribed with the initials A and H.

Internally, the ground and first floors originally functioned as the main sales floors with workrooms above, dispatch facilities at basement and third floor levels, and the Ardington Rooms restaurant on the third floor. Secondary staircases with cast iron railings and original doors, particularly on the ground floor, survive. The first floor retains original plaster moulding and some original cast iron columns with plumed capitals. The second floor has structural cast iron columns. The third floor features a stained glass dome, coved cornice and high relief plaster with fruit motifs, and an adjoining room with a segmental arched ceiling with square panels and painted-over lightwell with stained glass which originally housed the restaurant. Plaster mouldings and plainer columns remain on the third floor.

The firm of Arding and Hobbs began as a drapery shop in Wandsworth High Street in 1867 but relocated to this site due to its greater commercial importance. The original buildings on this location, constructed between 1881 and 1885, were destroyed in a fire in 1909. The present building was the largest and grandest department store built south of the Thames. Early photographs of both previous buildings on the site were on display on the third floor at the time of inspection.