Prayer Hall Building, Hoop Lane Jewish Cemetery

Prayer Hall Building, Hoop Lane Jewish Cemetery

This Ohel (Jewish prayer hall) building was built by 1897 to serve both Reform and Sephardi communities. The architects Davis and Emanuel designed it in an eclectic style that combines Romanesque, Byzantine and Arts and Crafts elements.

The building is constructed in red brick laid in Flemish bond and banded with sandstone, embellished with terracotta ornament. It has a deep pitched roof covered with plain tiles, brick chimney stacks with octagonal shafts and stone shoulders and capping, and retains original metal-framed windows with cathedral glass and coloured marginal lights. A decorative terracotta Lombardy frieze runs beneath the roof eaves. Above each prayer hall is a small gabled ventilation opening crowned with a finial.

The building is a long rectangle set on a west-to-east axis. To the west is the West London Synagogue prayer hall; to the east is the Spanish and Portuguese prayer hall. A central porte-corchère, aligned with the main cemetery entrance to the south, divides the two halls. Each prayer hall is entered from the carriageway, with coffins escorted to burial through doorways on the north elevation.

The tall round-headed archway of the central porte-corchère is framed north and south by pedimented frontispieces enriched with terracotta tiles and a band of Moorish ornament running beneath the pediment. Squared pilasters flank the archway and rise into octagonal columns topped by ogival lantern finials in stone. Similar finials mark the building's corners. Each prayer hall comprises three bays with round-headed windows separated by sturdy buttresses with shouldered offsets. The north elevation of each hall features a round-headed doorway containing original panelled double doors beneath a sunburst fanlight in its central bay. The west and east elevations have terracotta detail in the gables and single large round-headed windows beneath hood-moulds piercing the banded brick walls. Within the carriageway the roof is vaulted, with roughcast panels above the Lombardy frieze. Square-headed entrances to the prayer halls hold panelled double doors beneath mullioned fanlights. Modern hand-washing facilities for mourners have been installed within the carriageway, with a large granite basin set centrally at the north end.

The prayer halls are similarly and simply appointed. Both have barrel roofs with exposed arched trusses with metal ties resting on moulded timber corbels. The walls are lined with glazed brown brick to dado height, with glazed terracotta dado rails and door and window surrounds. Both halls have wood parquet flooring and original shallow timber benches fitted around the walls, along with modern lighting.

In the Sephardi hall, a hearth-stone indicates the former position of a stove. The Sephardi hall walls are largely bare except for a single commemorative plaque. The Reform hall walls carry a number of memorials, including a timber First World War memorial. A smaller plaque dedicates the hall to the memory of those lost in the Second World War, and a further plaque commemorates the six million Jews murdered in the Shoah or Holocaust. A number of tablets of various dates commemorate individuals.