W H Smith

Shop premises at 110 High Street, built in 1927 by J.W. Williamson of Blount and Williamson of Salisbury for W.H. Smith. The building is designed in the Arts and Crafts and Domestic Revival style.

The exterior comprises a two-storey main range constructed in Chilmark stone ashlar and coursed rock-faced rubble, with close-studded timber-framing and tile-hanging in the gable. The roof is of clay plain tiles with gabled ends and a louvred ventilator on the ridge. The south gable end to High Street features tile-hanging with moulded bargeboards and an ornate lead drain-pipe with decorative hopper and cistern head on the left side. A wide five-light oriel window on brackets sits on the first floor with small pane windows; the ground floor has a shop front with moulded lead fascia at the rounded corner, corbelled above. The fascia displays a moulded lead coat of arms with bearers and ships. The fascia continues on the right-hand return facing Parchment Street with shields and five bowed shop windows with glazing bars between ashlar piers. Above this, close-studded timber-framing extends to first floor level with five-light mullion-transom windows with leaded panes and casement stays. To the right stands a twin gabled stone three-storey range with flush frame windows featuring leaded pane metal casements, and a wide moulded four-centred arch doorway on the ground floor flanked by lead down pipes with elaborate castellated hopper-heads. Further right stands the gabled front of the former 1867 Masonic Hall, constructed in flint with red brick and stone dressings, incorporating blocked pointed arch first floor windows and roundels above decorated with carved stone Masonic symbols. A late twentieth-century shop front occupies the ground floor here, continuing around the right-hand return facing St George Street.

The original plan comprised an open-plan ground floor shop with a library at the rear, with a separate side entrance providing access to a first-floor dance hall, tea room and crush room. The first floor is now incorporated into the shop premises. The building has been extended into the former Masonic Hall at the rear, which was originally a Wesleyan chapel and was partly rebuilt in the late twentieth century.

The interior contains a five-bay hall open to a timber hammer-beam roof with curved braces to collars, above which are king-posts with curved braces to the principals and ridgepiece, moulded wall-plates and exposed purlins with straight wind-braces. Plastered ceiling panels divide the spaces. The end gables feature painted moulded plasterwork: one depicts King Arthur and the Round Table, the other King Alfred in the Shepherd's Hut, both with rope borders, scabbards and trailing vines. Side walls between the trusses display murals depicting William Wykeham building Winchester College, Sir Walter Raleigh, reindeer, oak trees, archers, a knight and a roundel of Philip II and Mary I, St Bartholomew and St Cuthlan. An elaborate cast-iron ventilator grille with trailing vine decoration hangs beneath the ridge. A plaster vaulted first-floor corridor features moulded plasterwork.

The W.H. Smith bookshop combined with tea room and dance hall represents an interesting example of this type of commercial building, well designed in the Arts and Crafts and Domestic Revival style.