Bridge Buildings

Bridge Buildings, Bideford

Council offices, built in 1882 by W R Bideford, with carving by H Hems of Exeter. The building is constructed of squared local stone rubble with rough-faced stonework on the ground storey, which has a marked batter below sill-level. Architectural details are in Ham stone. Four tall red brick chimneys with tops designed as entablatures stand on the building; the three fronting Bridge Street and The Quay have pilaster strips on their sides.

The plan is approximately square with an entrance hall and staircase positioned centrally on the Bridge Street side. The building is designed in Renaissance style and presents different storeys to each frontage: three lofty storeys facing The Quay, four storeys to Bridge Street, and three storeys to Allhalland Street.

The main fronts to Bridge Street and The Quay are arranged as a 6-window range, with the two middle windows set in slight projections. The front facing The Quay features segmental-headed ground-storey windows with moulded architraves and scroll-keystones, with continued moulded sills and an entablature above window-heads. The second-storey windows are flat-headed with rounded top corners, moulded surrounds, and hood-moulds with carved terminals. Below these are panels of carved foliage and cartouches, or in the centre projection, half-balusters. The outer windows of the third storey have flat heads and moulded surrounds, finished above eaves-level with shaped pediments. Round-arched windows in the centre have moulded architraves and keystones, flanked and separated by pilasters with carved capitals supporting an entablature and segmental pediment. This segmental pediment replaces the original ogee-shaped gable with carved front and small segmental pediment. Beneath the window a pair of stringcourses form an entablature.

The Bridge Street front is similar but less regular, as both the centre projection and the left side have four tiers of windows compared with three on the right. The centre projection is finished with a pedestal flanked by scroll-buttresses and carved with a cartouche and swags. An old photograph shows the pedestal, or its predecessor, topped by a segmental pediment. The shaped pediments which formerly topped the outer third-storey windows have been removed. Between the second-storey windows of the centre projection is a painted sundial, which according to the 1973 listing record derives from an earlier building, though it has been very thoroughly restored.

The front to Allhalland Street is plain, although it carries entablatures, stringcourses and continued sills around the building. The builder was R T Hookway of Bideford.

The interior contains an open-well stone staircase with an iron balustrade, scrolled at the foot. The balustrade has plain square-section balusters with S-scrolls fitted between their tops. On the walls of the compartment are four stone coats-of-arms, one inscribed "LEWIS BUCK ESQUR. MAYOR 1758".

According to Perkin's Almanack of 1883, the building was described as Bridge Hall and housed the School of Science and Art classes, the Free Library, the North Devon Permanent and Terminable Building Society, and the Bridge Feoffee Meetings. A plaque in the entrance hall states that the building was rebuilt at the cost of the Bridge Estate on the site of a Bridge Hall rebuilt in 1758, a Free School rebuilt in 1657 and repaired in 1680 and 1780, and a Grammar School founded in 1689.