Royal Arcade, Gloucester Row

Royal Arcade, Gloucester Row, Weymouth

A shop arcade, now an amusement arcade, built in 1896. The building is constructed in red brick with Portland ashlar or painted stone dressings, with lead and patent glazing roofs. The style is vigorously Art Nouveau, though the original ground-floor display fronts facing the Esplanade have been replaced.

The building is long and narrow, organised around a central through arcade flanked by small separate rooms on the upper level. It has shallow front and rear blocks with flat roofs and richly decorated frontages, with a raised central glazed roof fitted with clerestory ventilators. The rear of the building faces onto Gloucester Mews.

The front elevation has three storeys and three bays, divided by brick pilasters that rise to deep stone entablature strips. At second-floor level are paired six-pane casements set within striped brick and stone jambs. The dividing pilasters carry capitals in a Byzantinesque style, topped by a cornice on decorative corbels. The central window is a three-light lunette continued downwards through a stone apron to a pair of sash windows below (the upper sash alone retaining glazing bars), all contained within a wide arch with alternating stone and brick voussoirs. On either side at first-floor level are similar pairs of sashes in flush stone surrounds. The ground floor now has three late twentieth-century shop fronts, divided by four original Ionic pilasters with Jacobean entablature strips carrying a stone moulded cornice under a blocking course, with a plain sill band above rising to the first floor. The parapet features a high segmental centre with kneelers and a central feature carried through from the keystone of the main arch, flanked by low undulating segmental parapets. Each pilaster is crowned with a stone ball finial. The central stone apron bears a finely incised inscription reading "THE / ROYAL ARCADE / BUILT 1896" with strapwork decoration.

The elevation to Gloucester Mews is a simplified version of the front treatment, with two storeys arranged in three bays. First-floor brick pilasters frame 1:2:1-light original casements in banded brick and stonework. The lofty ground floor features a wide pair of central glazed doors with a slender central cast-iron column beneath a frieze painted with "ROYAL ARCADE". Plain ashlar panels flank these doors, set above stall boards with paired sunk panels. The ground floor also has four stone pilasters on deep podia with Jacobean capitals and entablature strips, carrying a deep moulded stone cornice. Above the first-floor cornice is a blocking course in brickwork with a central undulating low segmental parapet flanked by flat parapets, and stone ball finials to the pilasters. The return wall to the right is in plain brickwork with a series of first-floor casements. Five brick stacks rise at the eaves along both sides of the building, which has flat roofing on either side of the raised glazing.

The interior was not inspected. The building is listed principally for the architectural contribution its façade makes to the important group of listed buildings along the Esplanade, in matching style to the Royal Hotel.