7, Hanover Street

1900/0/10291 HANOVER STREET 31-OCT-01 7

II

Shop, showroom and workshops/offices. 1907 to the designs of Treadwell and Martin, inscribed and dated on first floor. Rendered brick, roof concealed behind lead flashings. Five storeys and basement. One bay wide under broad broken pediment with keystones to Diocletian window. Projecting cornice below; the second and third floors a unified composition of an oriel set between Corthinthian pilasters, the area between the two windows decorated with swags of fruit and and putti below the pilasters: the inscription `Treadwell and Martin 1907' is to the right of these. First floor showroom with segmental arched timber window; timber window to shopfront below and door to side. Panelling to side entrance repeated internally in staircase hall; timber stair with thick square newels rises from ground to fifth floor. Some cornices survive to the principal rooms.

Henry John Treadwell and Leonard Martin were among the most inspired designers of offices and public houses working in London around 1900. Alastair Service writes that 'the inventive brilliance of Treadwell and Martin ... is developed from the Gothic style, with other ingredients thrown in and the stirring done with a spoon of originality.' This example is firmly but inventively classical, and shows their particular panache for designing very narrow, tall buildings, most prolific in the garment district around Oxford Circus: `as a group, a successful attempt to introduce a new light-hearted city architecture to central London' that was appropriate for the fast-expanding retail industry. This is a good and complete example of the work of one of the most distinctive London commercial practices of their day.

Sources Alastair Service, London 1900, Granada 1979, pp.15, 91 92-3, A Stuart Gray, Edwardian Architecture, Duckworth 1985, pp.354-6