19-20 Cork Street

19-20 Cork Street is an art gallery, originally built as offices for Edward Howard around 1816.

The building is constructed of London stock brick laid in Flemish bond with stone dressings and a lead and slate roof. It comprises three floors and a basement to the street front range, with a single storey and basement to the northern side at the rear.

The western street front has four bays to the upper floors. The ground floor features a mid-19th-century shop front of colourwashed stucco with a central plate-glass window divided by a bronze mullion and transom, beneath which is a panelled stall riser. A sunken area in front of the window is protected by a tubular railing and grille. At either side are entrances flanked by pilasters, with an entablature and deep cornice above. The first floor has four sash windows with plate glass fenestration, whilst the second floor has four windows with three panes by four. All window heads are splayed, with a string course at the sill level of the second floor and stone coping to the top of the wall. The brickwork has been colourwashed. A chimney stack rises to the ridge at left of centre.

The east or rear elevation was designed to be viewed from the rear of 32 Old Burlington Gardens. At ground floor level, three bays are grouped under a pediment, with a central round-arched recessed bay containing a sash window of three by four panes with a splayed brick head. Sash windows of similar size flank either side, all with stone cills. The pediment has a simple moulded stone cornice and coping. To the left is a single bay, possibly a later addition, slightly recessed with a narrower sash window. Behind this ground floor front, the east elevation of the Cork Street range has a three-bay front at first-floor level. The central and left bays each have a sash window of three by four panes; the right window has been blocked. The second floor has a gambrel roof with a central doorway leading to a fire escape. The upper slope of the slate roof contains a row of skylights.

Internally, the ground floor gallery space (now Browse and Darby, formerly Mayor) is open, divided only by a boxed-in chimneystack at the northern end and a structural metal pole to the south. The staircase against the east wall was probably inserted by O'Rorke during his refit of the space in 1933 and retains his solid balustrade capped by a simple wooden handrail. Originally L-shaped, it has since been straightened to form one flight. The structural pole was used by O'Rorke to support a suspended ceiling stretching from the wall of the chimneybreast, which masked hidden lighting.

The rear of the site is occupied by the Redfern Gallery, accessed via a corridor extending north from the left-hand doorway on the Cork Street front. This opens into a roughly square, single-storey gallery space with a pitched, pyramidal roof rising to a central octagonal skylight, flanked by trapezoid skylights to the northern and southern sides. The basement is accessed by a wide staircase with shaped ends to the open treads and a metal balustrade believed to have come from George V's royal yacht Britannia. The vessel was stripped of its fittings and sunk off the Isle of Wight according to the king's wishes after his death in 1936, and a selling exhibition of fittings from Britannia was held in the gallery in 1937–8.

The basement floor features a series of brick groin arches supported by square piers, now used as stock rooms and storage but appearing to be the original strong rooms referred to in the auction catalogue of 1822. The first floor is a single gallery space divided by the chimney breast at its northern end. The second floor has a corridor along the west side and two rooms: one for storage and one for showing and office use.