Cheapside

Cheapside, Golders Green

A parade of 41 shops with flats above, built from around 1911 onwards by architects Herbert A. Welch and H. Clifford Hollis. The building is constructed in dark red-brown brick with Flemish and English bond, featuring orange-red bands and hipped and gabled orange plain tiled roofs with brick chimneys. The structure is four storeys and three storeys with attics, arranged in a shallow concave crescent plan, with ground floor shops accessed from Golders Green Road and rear service access from Golders Way behind. External access stairs serve each group of flats.

The parade is designed in a vernacular revival style. The long principal frontage is relieved by varied wall treatment, fenestration, and roof details, with the overall composition divided into three elements. The end corners are emphasised by placing a chimney breast and triple shafted stack on the diagonal, flanked by paired canted bays with stone mullion and transom windows on the first and second floors and wood casements on the third, capped by projecting paired hipped roofs. A jettied tile-hung projection at second floor features a gabled and quarter hipped roof, with a linked tile-hung 'M' gable with hipped margin adjoining the cornerpiece at each end of the Golders Green Road frontage. Wood mullion and transom casement windows run throughout the main frontage, with visual accents created by further 'M'-roofed projections.

The centrepiece contains three narrowly spaced tall canted oriel bay windows with attic dormers above, flanked by ornamental studwork and plaster, topped with a tile-hung triple gable. This central section is set between square chimneystacks and projecting hip roofs, with further studwork on the second floor above a hipped margin roof, and capped by triple tile-hung gables. The name 'Cheapside' is spelt out in tiles over Nos. 16 and 86. Ground floor shopfronts have been repeatedly renewed and shop units combined over the years, and none retain special interest.

The rear elevation to Golders Way was designed as a service mews with simplified design. The ground floor originally had rear service yards with access to shops through arched openings fitted with timber half-glazed doors and sidelights, many of which have been infilled as shops and stores were extended rearwards to the street frontage. Access to the flats is via external staircases to the first floor at regular intervals, each serving pairs of flats and maisonettes, with doors set in tile-roofed lean-to structures on four-bay projections, featuring wood small-paned casement windows. The roofs are hipped and tiled with tall slab-like chimneystacks.

The ground floor interiors have been much altered. Upper floor interiors were not inspected.

Welch and Hollis also designed the shops on the south side of Golders Green Road in 1908–9. For Cheapside, they adopted a full-blooded Arts and Crafts style, detailed and executed with panache and finesse, drawing on precedents from Temple Fortune House and Arcade House on Finchley Road, Hampstead Garden Suburb (designed by A.J. Penty for Parker and Unwin, 1909–11). Both Welch and Hollis had previously worked with Parker and Unwin. Work commenced at the south-east end: Nos. 10–22 were built by 1912 and Nos. 24–46 by 1915. Nos. 4–8 Golders Green Road, completed around 1921, formed the south-eastern continuation of this parade. Cheapside is a notable vernacular revival parade of shops, demonstrating the adaptation of the Hampstead Garden Suburb style for use in this important Edwardian suburban development.