Description

This list entry was subject to a Minor Amendment on 25/07/2017

TQ2982SE
798-1/94/1636

CAMDEN
TORRINGTON PLACE (South side)
Nos.42-56 (Even)
Former Dillon's Bookshop and attached railings and gates

(Formerly listed as Dillon's Bookshop and attached railings and gates)

28/03/69

GV
II
Includes: Former Dillon's Bookshop and attached railings and gates GOWER STREET.
Terrace of shops with flats over, now one shop and offices. 1907-8. By Charles Fitzroy Doll, the Bedford Estate surveyor. Red brick with terracotta and stone dressings. Steeply pitched, tiled roofs with gables to each bay and tall slab chimney-stacks. Elaborate Franco-Flemish Gothic style.

EXTERIOR: Three storeys, attics and basements. Eight bays and three-bay returns to Gower Street and Malet Street. Ground floor damaged during 2nd World War and repaired in a simple style of stone pilasters supporting an entablature at first floor level. Plate glass glazing. Above ground floor, the facade is articulated by vertical attached colonnettes, recessed rainwater pipes with heads dated 1908 and lion mask spouts, and horizontal strings. Each bay (except corner bays) with canted three-light bay windows through first and second floors and flanked by one, two or three lights with round-arched, moulded surrounds. Bay windows with enriched transoms and tracery, aprons carved with mythical beasts, coats of arms, foliage and the word SARA on ribbons.Enriched parapets from which sprout gargoyles in the form of mythical beasts. Enriched and cusped cornice at third floor level. Above each bay a large gable with carved finial, seated figures in tympanum, beneath which three round-arched lights. Both angles with octagonal corner turrets with tiled conical roofs. Rainwater heads with date 1908.

Gower Street return in similar style but without bay windows. In right-hand bay a three-light oriel through two floors surmounted by an octagonal feature with niches and gargoyles. At ground floor level, two shop windows, plain transom and mullion three and two-light windows and round-headed entrance with keystone, fanlight and part-glazed door. (Malet Street return similar.) At first floor level above the entrance a carved balustrade of three panels in Art Nouveau style.

INTERIOR: altered.

SUBSIDIARY FEATURES: attached wrought and cast-iron railings and gates to areas on Gower Street and having panels with scroll design and finials with elaborate flowers.

Listing NGR: TQ2969082050

External Links

• Historic England Listing
• Wikidata Q27086436

External links are from the relevant listing authority and, where applicable, Wikidata. Wikidata IDs may be related buildings as well as this specific building. If you want to add or update a link, you will need to do so by editing the Wikidata entry.

Recommended Books

• 
  Bristol (Pevsner Architectural Guides: City Guides)
• 
  Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (Penguin Art & Architecture)
• 
  Lancashire: Manchester and the South-East (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  [(Bedfordshire, Huntingdon and Peterborough)] [By (author) Nikolaus Pevsner] published on (January, 1968)
• 
  London 4: North: North v. 4 (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Peterborough (Pevsner Architectural Guides) (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)