United Kingdom city
This former bus shelter and convenience store in Brighton is now used as a little kiosk coffee shop for the adjacent park. It has a distinctive Art Deco curve that runs from the broad roof down through the windows and the building itself. Somehow it appears to have retained its original metal window frames. It is located halfway between the Royal Pavilion and Brighton Beach.
The Imperial Arcade occupies the corner of Dyke and Western Roads in Brighton. The original building dates back to 1923-24 and was designed by Clayton and Black. It was remodelled in 1934 along the lines of streamlined Art Deco by Garrett and Son architects, and has a fine balance of horizontal and vertical elements. The windows of the vertical elements each have eight vertical segments in rows of four. These feature chevron forms dividing the glass.
This is a large retail and commercial building currently home to Brighton’s central Primark at 169-174 Western Road. Located not far from seaside Brighton, it had previously been a C&A store and started life as a British Home Store (or BHS) in 1931. It was one of several department stores that appeared on the main shopping streets of the city during the mid-war epoch. It features some wing-like motifs across the top of the façade.
Brighton-born architect Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel designed Princes House in 1935, though it was originally the home of the Brighton & Sussex Building Society. Located at 166–169 North Street, this brick faced, steel-framed building was constructed in 1936 and features such unique Goodhart-Rendel details as pleated fenestration and superb brickwork. It became a Grade II building in 1994.
A truly eclectic architect, Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel, was an architectural prodigy, who had an early design constructed when he was only 16 years old. An accomplished composer and pianist, he studied music at Cambridge, and, during this time, designed an important office that was built in Calcutta. Architecture won out over music, and he set up his own practice in 1909. One of his best known buildings is Hays Wharf/St Olaf House, on the Thames in London. This was constructed 1928-32, just a few years before Princes House. A property developer purchased the Brighton building in 2002 and had the upper storeys converted into 34 apartments.
This four-storey building in central Brighton features a facing of glazed, white vertical tiles and two sunbursts forming capitals to stripped Classical pilasters on either side of the ground floor. There are other fine Art Deco details on the upper floors. It is not known what the original function of this building was.
Brighton Art Deco apartment block Astra House was completed in 1938. It is tall for a UK seaside building at ten storeys high, with 61 flats rising above a ground floor of retail premises. The top two storeys step back and are thus less visible. It has continuous bay windows from the second to sixth floors.
Constructed for International Stores in 1935, Mitre House In Brighton was designed by J. Stanley Beard & Bennett. Located in Western Road, it is mixed use with shops below and a six-storey block of flats above. As with many apartment blocks in England from this time there is a fine interplay between the brick and stone facings. The balconies are all faced with stone and rise from the second floor.
Global Art Deco 