Central Office Shinners Bridge Centre

The Central Office at Shinner's Bridge Centre is a building constructed in 1935 as offices for the Dartington Hall Estate. It was designed by W E Lescaze of Howe and Lescaze of America, with assistance from R Hening, and has undergone later alterations. The building is constructed of whitewashed rendered brick cavity walls with concrete coping concealing flat roofs. It is an example of the International Modern Style, with a basic H-shaped plan, featuring a short northeast wing and the remains of a southwest wing. Situated on a sloping site, the building is two storeys high on the south side and three storeys high on the lower north side. The northeast and northwest wings are two storeys, with the longer northwest wing originally open on the ground floor and supported by slender steel tube posts, now underbuilt. The southeast wing is single-storey but was raised to two storeys in the late 20th century, incorporating a small boiler house and chimney at the south end. The original design allowed for future extensions and alterations, which have made reconstructing the original room layout difficult. The elevations are defined by long bands of metal-frame windows with concrete sills, which run around the southwest corner but stop short elsewhere. Window bands are generally deeper on the ground floor, except on the three-storey north elevation of the central wing, where shallow window bands illuminate corridors, and similarly on the northeast wing, where deeper windows are on the first floor. The exterior is finished with plain whitewashed render, and apart from the windows, has small, louvred wall ventilators. On the south elevation, cantilevered reinforced concrete canopies feature over two doorways, with a section of black glazed tile wall to the left of the left-hand doorway. A reinforced concrete staircase with a bent steel tube handrail is located in the angle with the northwest wing. The entrance hall of the projecting southwest wing leads to corridors extending into the wings and a stairwell containing a reinforced concrete stair with an aluminium tube balustrade.