Survey Data
Reg No
50100518
Rating
Regional
Categories of Special Interest
Architectural, Artistic
Original Use
House
In Use As
Shop/retail outlet
Date
1820 - 1920
Coordinates
316879, 233531
Date Recorded
28/07/2016
Date Updated
--/--/--
Description
Attached three-bay four-storey former house, built c. 1830, remodelled with shopfront c. 1910 to ground floor. Rear projects from line of buildings to east. Currently in use as shop with flats over. M-profile hipped slate roof, behind red brick parapet with masonry coping, having secondary pitched roof to east perpendicular to street and hipped to south end. Brown brick chimneystack to centre with red brick corbelling and lacking pots, and shouldered rendered chimneystack to east party wall with yellow clay pots. Concealed gutters with cast-iron hopper and downpipe. Flemish bond red brick walling; rendered walling to rear. Square-headed window openings, diminishing in height to upper floors, with brick voussoirs, rendered reveals and painted masonry sills, with two-over-two pane timber sliding sash windows with ogee horns. Shopfront has painted masonry panelled pilasters, fluted consoles with round-headed panelled gablets, dentillated cornice and over-sized recent acrylic fascia. Full-height recent display windows and shop door behind roller shutters; secondary door opening to upper floors having flanking pilasters, lintel cornice, plain transom light and replacement six-panel timber door.
Appraisal
A modest building of largely early twentieth-century appearance, likely remodelled from a pair of early nineteenth-century Georgian-style houses. Although there has been some insertion of replacement fabric, the early twentieth-century shopfront surround survives, in addition to the original Georgian proportions and massing retained across the upper floors, in keeping with its better preserved neighbours. The building contributes to the surviving historic architectural fabric of Mount Street Lower, which has been heavily marginalized by late twentieth-century development. Initial approval to open Mount Street Lower was obtained from the Wide Streets Commissioners in 1791, with the principal developers, Crosthwaite and Grant, having purchased land from Samuel Sproule. Although their building efforts were praised in 1796, building was halted until the early nineteenth century, due to recession, and progressed slowly with only 29 houses having been completed by 1834. Shaw's Directory indicates that No. 2 was in commercial use in 1850.