Former Gardiners Offices

BRISTOL

ST5972 OLD BREAD STREET 901-1/42/146 (North side) 04/03/77 Former Gardiners offices (Formerly Listed as: OLD BREAD STREET Warehouse premises of Hardware (Bristol) Ltd)

GV II

Offices, now warehouse. 1865-7. By Foster and Wood. Pennant ashlar and coursed, squared rubble, with brick and limestone ashlar dressings. Bristol Byzantine style with structural polychromy. 2 storeys; 10-window range. A regular, arcuated front has angled brickwork to headmoulds, string course and frieze beneath parapet. The ground-floor has 3 wide, semicircular brick arches on ashlar piers remaining from originally 5, the second and third from the left having been replaced by a C20 RSJ lintel, with rubble spandrels. A deep limestone string to the first-floor beneath an arcade of semicircular brick arches on Pennant piers with impost bands and metal windows with glazing bars, with a rubble parapet and decorative brick coping. INTERIOR: first floor with segmental brick arches on iron joists, with a cast-iron column. The warehouses behind extend at right angles to the front, and may be later infill, with wooden truss floors on timber posts, and 2 semicircular-arched arcades dividing them back to the rear of the c1845 Broad Plain block (qv). Originally part of Christopher Thomas Brothers' Soap Works. A rare survivor of the round-arched warehouse style considered particular of C19 Bristol. (Somerville J: Christopher Thomas Soap Maker of Bristol: Bristol: 1991-; Gomme A, Jenner M and Little B: Bristol, An Architectural History: Bristol: 1979-: 362).

Listing NGR: ST5968572877