55-73, Duke Street

This is a terrace of shops and chambers built between 1890 and 1892 by W.D. Caröe for the Grosvenor Estate. The building is constructed of fine red brick with Ketton stone dressings and a ground floor facing, topped with a slate roof. It displays a lively, eclectic style drawing from Franco-Flemish Renaissance and Queen Anne influences.

The terrace has three main storeys, plus two storeys of dormers set into a steep mansard roof. A two-storey Flemish gable dominates the principal, six-window-wide double frontage. The overall composition is slightly asymmetrical, with the gabled double frontage being offset, flanked by sections of two and three windows, but with varied window groupings. The stone-faced ground floor features doorways with basket handles and display windows, articulated by a French Loire-style order with strapwork, cartouche and baluster decorations, rising to a cornice.

The upper floors have architraved and cavetto mullioned windows, both single and coupled, arranged in ranks to the second floor of the double frontage. The first floor of numbers 61 to 63 features a tent-roofed, mullioned and transomed canted bay supported on corbel brackets. Numbers 71 and 73 have tripartite, rectangular, tent-roofed, corbelled bay windows to their first floors. The bay window of number 73 is integrated into a stone-faced, narrow square turret that rises through the second floor and mansard roof, terminating in a concave spire. Similarly, number 57 has a turret, finished with an onion dome and spirelet, at its north end. Pseudo-parapets are present on the first and second floors, with a crowning entablature and superimposed Loire orders flanking the frontages. The roofscape is highly elaborate, including canted stone dormers at the lower tier and hipped roof dormers with spirelets at the upper tier. The double frontage is surmounted by an elaborated, voluted and ball-finialed Flemish gable. Moulded saddlestones are visible on the front walls, rising from large console buttresses, and there is a tall brick chimney stack with enriched stone caps.

This terrace is closely related to Caröe's slightly later block at numbers 75 to 83, Duke Street.