2, South Embankment

This building is a shop with a house above, built between 1889 and 1893, likely designed by EH Back for CR Cranford. It is constructed from stone rubble with brick and Bathstone dressings and a timber-framed show front, with brick chimney shafts in the party walls and a flat roof.

The building is double-depth, with two rooms wide, featuring an entrance lobby and a staircase to the left. The symmetrical facade has two windows across each floor. The show front is ornamented in a distinctive Elizabethan style, with jettied floors, projecting bays, and balustraded balconies. The ground-floor entrance to the house has a painted stone surround. The shop front is largely original, with a central recessed doorway. Above the shop front, the upper floors have a symmetrical two-window arrangement with balconies across both floors. The second-floor balcony is styled to match the adjacent building at No.1. Projecting bay windows on the first floor are likely secondary additions and contain ovolo-moulded, two-light mullion-and-transom windows. The lower lights of these windows retain original, horned sashes lacking glazing bars, and are surrounded by Jacobean-style pargetting which includes the initials RC, believed to represent CR Cranford. Matching windows with glazed doors lead onto the second-floor balcony. A timber moulded cornice runs above the windows. The framing creates narrow panels which are covered in slate with toothed edges, alternately grey and purple.

The interior retains original features, including the staircase and a papier-mâché frieze on the ground floor.