Albert Court

Albert Court

A large, purpose-built block of mansion flats constructed between 1890 and circa 1900. The building was designed by Frederick Hemings, who began construction in 1890, but following his death in 1894 and the collapse of developer George Newman's financial backers, the Liberator Building Society, in 1892, the structure had only reached third-floor level. The Albert Court Syndicate leased the building for completion, finishing it to the designs of R.J. Worley between 1896 and 1900.

The building is faced in red brick with horizontal stone bands and dressings. It features slated hipped roofs with tall brick and stone slab stacks and finials. The main western façade rises seven storeys above a semi-basement. The plan is D-shaped, with the north and east façades following the crescent line of the former Royal Horticultural Society's Garden. The interior contains light wells with tiers of open arcaded linking bridges that replicate the ground-floor corridor, a design that makes possible the grand plan form of the individual flats.

The long main western façade comprises three centre bays projecting forward, with additional projecting bays at angles. A central stone entrance surround features paired columns flanking a round-arched entrance and supporting a balustrade fronting a channelled stone lunette at second-floor level. Above this, at fourth-floor level, a balustraded balcony with projecting round-arched portico on attached columns shelters the fourth and fifth floors and supports the sixth floor, above which sits an attic storey rising above the roofline. Flanking the central bays, single bays at third-floor level contain cast-iron balconies with two floors above of canted bay windows. Most ground and first-floor windows feature segmental arches with gauged brick heads and aprons. Windows on other floors are segmental and flat-arched, some with stone architraves. Glazing bars occur to top lights only.

The other façades are treated in similar style. The south-eastern and south-western corners have conical-roofed turrets, while the north-eastern corner is denoted by a full-height rectangular bay and rectangular boiler chimney stack. The south façade has outer bays with grand stone paired balustraded balconies with Corinthian columns extending through four floors, linked across central bays by a balcony at first-floor level. The curved north and east elevation features continuous balustraded balconies at first and second-floor levels, with entrances marked by an ovolo-section attic roof. Second-floor windows are pedimented.

Chief internal features include the corridor running through the building from east to west, mahogany and iron balustrading to the staircases and landings extending the full height of the building, and principal reception rooms retaining original plasterwork detailing.

The design was approved on behalf of the 1851 Exhibition Commissioners by Alfred Waterhouse. Albert Court holds significant group value due to its relationship, as part of a masterplan for the area, with the Royal Albert Hall, the Memorial to the 1851 Exhibition, and Albert Hall Mansions, all undertaken under the auspices of the 1851 Commissioners and their architectural advisors, including Norman Shaw and Alfred Waterhouse. The building also echoes the original plan form of the Royal Horticultural Society Garden layouts. It was originally conceived by the freeholders, the 1851 Commissioners, as the first stage of a larger private development involving the erection of four blocks of flats on either side of Prince Consort Road, flanking the Royal Albert Hall to the north and the Royal College of Music to the south.