Bruce House is a Grade II listed building in the Westminster local planning authority area, England. First listed on 14 January 1970. Lodging house. 1 related planning application.
Bruce House
- WRENN ID
- over-stronghold-rowan
- Grade
- II
- Local Planning Authority
- Westminster
- Constituency
- Cities of London and Westminster MP: Rachel Blake (Lab)
- Country
- England
- Date first listed
- 14 January 1970
- Type
- Lodging house
- Address
- Bruce House, Kemble Street Wc2, City of Westminster, WC2B 4AW
- OS grid reference
- TQ 305 811
- Coordinates
- 51.51393, -0.11962
- Source
- Historic England listing
Description
Bruce House is a large lodging house built in 1907 by W E Riley for the London County Council. It features red brick with some glazed brown brick and rendering, topped with a slate roof. Designed in a humane, Arts and Crafts Free Georgian style for a charitable lodging house, it incorporates a former dispensary. The building extends between Drury Lane and Kean Street and is mainly five storeys tall with a basement and attic dormers in a mansard style, including mansard gables.
The front on Kemble Street has a slight asymmetry with a grouping of 20 bays, where the right half is advanced. There is a semicircular arched entrance located off-centre in the first bay of the advance, accompanied by large semicircular arched windows on the ground floor. The upper floor windows are narrow, 2-light recessed sashes. The top floor is rendered beneath the eaves. There are two mansard gabled attics with dormers situated between them.
The return to Drury Lane features a staircase tower and a two-storey oriel window. The lower north wing, which returns to Kean Street, is four storeys tall with a basement and mansard, maintaining the same architectural details. The property is complemented by good Arts and Crafts area railings, which have an elongated design with ball finialed standards.
Local climate
Bruce House sits in one of the driest parts of the UK, with an average of 690 mm of rain a year. This makes it drier than 95% of listed buildings in the UK. Its exposure to wind-driven rain is lower than that of 98% of listed buildings.
It experiences an average of 35 freeze-thaw cycles a year, more than 57% of listed buildings. Of these, 16 follow at least 1 mm of rain in the preceding 48 hours. Average temperatures at this location have risen by 0.3°C per decade since 1991.
Averages for 1991–2020; temperature trend 1991–2025. Figures describe the wider area (a grid cell of roughly 10 km), not the individual site. Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2026.
More on this building
Sign in or create a free account to unlock:
- No EPC on record for this property
- No sale records on file
- Related listed building consents — 1 application
- Detailed attributes — period, style, materials, features
- Flood risk assessment
- Radon risk assessment
- Weather exposure and heating demand — rain and frost month by month and year by year, wind direction, solar and humidity
Matched applications, energy data and sale records are assembled automatically and may contain errors. Flag incorrect data.
Similar buildings
The closest matches to this building from all 493,000 UK listed buildings, by architecture, period and materials.
this building 1 similar nearby listed buildings
Nearby listed buildings
- Mortuary, Lodge and Linking Walls and Gate Piers of Drury Lane Gardens
- Space House (now Civil Aviation Authority House)
- The Fortune Theatre
- Theatre Royal Drury Lane and Attached Sir Augustus Harris Memorial Drinking Fountain
- Crown Court Church (Church of Scotland)
- The Aldwych Theatre
- Lamp post opposite Theatre Royal, outside 29 Russell Street
- The Waldorf Hotel
- Lamp post outside 24 Russell Street
- K2 Telephone Kiosk Outside Public Trustee Office Junction Kingsway/Sardinia Street