163, North Street

No. 163 North Street is a commercial office building designed for the Royal Insurance Company by Clayton and Black in 1904. It features pink granite and a roof of green slate, with a plan that follows the corner, resulting in a three-part composition.

The building has three storeys and a dormered attic over a basement, with four-storey tower bays at the party walls and a five-storey tower at the corner. It has a nine-window range and is designed in the Edwardian Baroque style. The flat-arched entrance at the corner is framed by Tuscan columns and is set under a deep bracketed porch formed from a semicircular pediment made of a raking cornice only. There are subsidiary flat-arched entrances in the first and ninth-window ranges, each with a shallow lintel porch above topped by a semicircular light.

The elevations of the intermediate ranges are identical, featuring segmental-arched basement windows set in a heavily rusticated base. The ground-floor windows are round arched with keyed architraves and arches, and the jambs of the side entrances are also keyed. A cornice across the ground floor serves as a base for the first and second floors, which are treated in the intermediary bays as distyle in antis, with the wall behind them treated as rustication that rises in the end bays to form the surface of the third-floor towers. In the corner range, the rustication forms piers that support a segmental pediment with arms bearing the legend: The Royal Insurance Company. Above the cornice line, the tower sets back one stage, with corner piers, before the final octagonal stage capped by a dome. The dormers between the towers are flat arched with segmental pediments and a scalloped parapet between each. All upper-floor windows have architraves and are flat arched; those on the first floor are floor-to-ceiling and set in aedicules topped by segmental pediments with keyed lintels and jambs. Upper-floor windows in the end bays and the centre tower have cornices or pediments. The interior has not been inspected.