New Filton House

New Filton House, also known as Pegasus House, is an office building built in 1936 by the architectural practice Whinney, Son and Austen Hall for the Bristol Aeroplane Company. Located on Gloucester Road North, it stands as a significant example of inter-war commercial architecture, combining elements of monumental classicism with Dutch Expressionism.

The building is constructed in brick over a steel frame. Its design emphasises an approximately square plan with stress on internal light and flexibility. The ground floor features banded rustication, and the exterior is adorned with statues in Portland stone.

The building rises to three storeys with a recessed attic storey. Throughout, it employs uniformly-sized metal windows, with larger openings built from small standard sections. The southern elevation, facing the gardens of Old Filton House, has a projecting central five-bay feature in unpainted brick with a three-bay porch below tall first-floor windows that light the Conference Room. Centrally positioned is a figure of Mercury by Denis Dunlop. This elevation is characterised by distinct horizontality, emphasised by banded rustication to the ground floor, horizontal cill bands at ground and first-floor levels, and a dentilled second-floor cornice.

The eastern and western elevations, each of fifteen windows, display the same horizontal emphasis, broken only by a central stair window. The western elevation is surmounted by a porch. The northern elevation introduces more vertical emphasis, with the five-window attic storey brought forward and finished flush with the wall. Pilasters break the first and second floors into six bays, with a grid of mullions set over otherwise continuous fenestration. The north-east corner is finished as a tower, which breaks the most prominent views of the building from the north. This corner features two bays of similar fenestration across four storeys, with sculpture by Denis Dunlop comprising an abstracted relief of the Type 142 (Britain First) above a figure of Pegasus.

The interior was designed as a flexible working grid. The principal spaces are the entrance hall and the first-floor conference room, which overlooks Old Filton House. The entrance hall walls are lined in golden travertine marble, and the coloured terrazzo floor by Dunlop features signs of the zodiac, winds and sun. The principal feature is the staircase window by Jan Juta, executed in white with colouring in shades of sepia and yellow. The windows are set in a time sequence raked to the angle of the staircase, recording 25 years of the company's history with illustrations of machines from the earliest box kites to contemporary civil and military aircraft and engines. An open-well staircase finished in typical Art Deco sweep leads to the upper floors. The conference room is distinguished by moulded plaster panels by Dunlop to the window embrasures, depicting birdmen, balloons and powered flight.

The commission reflected the Bristol Aeroplane Company's response to a massive increase in orders for aircraft, engines and prototype designs for the Air Ministry's rearmament programme following the collapse of the Geneva disarmament talks in 1933. The building exhibits well-handled and detailed design within the context of inter-war commercial and office architecture. Austen Hall, the principal architect, had previously worked on Lambeth and Holborn Town Halls, Berkshire County Offices and Shire Hall, Reading. The work commissioned from Dunlop and Juta was intended to reflect the history of powered flight and the importance of both the company and aviation to the nation.

The Bristol Aeroplane Company, established in 1910 as one of Britain's first aircraft manufacturers, became one of the major firms fed by Air Ministry military orders. By 1939, the company had contributed significantly to making Britain the world's largest producer of aircraft. The company's engine division, led by Ray Fedden following a takeover, produced the Pegasus and Mercury engines which became the mainstay of Britain's post-1934 expansion scheme, supplying engines for nearly half the world's airlines and more than half the world's air forces. During the Second World War, the company provided a third of the RAF's engines.

The sculpture of Britain First is a prominent allusion to the inter-war national debate surrounding Lord Rothermere's sponsorship of the Type 142, the prototype for the Blenheim bomber, which represented a successful and highly publicised criticism of Air Ministry policy. Jan Juta, the celebrated designer of the entrance hall window, is best known for his work on the Glass Ballroom of the Queen Mary and the RIBA building in Portland Place, completed in 1934. In the post-war period, Bristol's most distinguished work in aviation included the Brabazon airliner, Concorde and the Bloodhound surface-to-air missile.