British industrial architecture
New materials made available in large quantities by the newly-developed industries enabled novel types of construction, including reinforced concrete and steel.
Industrial architects freely explored a variety of styles for their buildings, from Egyptian Revival to medieval castle, English country house to Venetian Gothic.
In the 20th century, long white "By-pass modern" company headquarters such as the Art Deco Hoover Building were conspicuously placed beside major roads out of London.
[6] Industrial growth was accompanied and assisted by the rapid development of a nationwide canal network able to carry heavy goods of all kinds.
[11] Some industries had easily-recognised architectural elements, shaped by the functions they performed, such as the glass cones of glassworks, the bottle ovens such as those of the Staffordshire Potteries[15] or the Royal Worcester porcelain works,[16] the tapering roofs of the oast houses that dried the hops from Kent's hop orchards,[17] and the pagoda-like ventilators of Scotch whisky distilleries.
The cotton magnate Eccles Shorrock commissioned Ernest Bates to create a showy design for his India Mill at Darwen, Lancashire, complete with a 300 feet (91 m) tall Italianate campanile-style chimney.
This was built in red, white, and black brick, topped with cornices of stone, an ornamental urn at each corner, and an ornate cresting consisting of over 300 pieces of cast iron.
[28] At Stoke Newington, the Metropolitan Water Board's engine house was constructed to look something like a medieval castle, complete with towers and crenellation.
[29] The pumping station at Ryhope, Sunderland, was built in 1869, more or less Jacobean in style with curving Dutch gables, and an octagonal brick chimney.
The architectural historian Hubert Pragnell calls it a "cathedral of pistons and brass set within a fine shell of Victorian brickwork with no expense spared".
It is constructed of local limestone, and despite its 5 storeys, is grandly[31] modelled to resemble a Charles Barry type English country house, with the addition of the dominant chimney stack, "a sophisticated aesthetic solution to a functional requirement".
[2] Arthur Sanderson & Sons' Grade II* listed wallpaper printing works in Chiswick was designed by the modernist architect Charles Voysey in 1902, his only industrial building.
An example is his "futuristic"[41] 1933 Arnos Grove tube station, which has a brightly-lit circular ticket hall in brick with a flat concrete roof.
The impressive frontage gave access to a vaulted marble-floored entrance hall that was used as a car showroom, while the main factory building behind it was an early reinforced concrete structure.
It has concrete foundations, poured in shafts dug using caissons, down to bedrock far below the high tide mark; the bridge structure is of steel, with granite piers.
[46][47] The "daylight factory" concept, with long sleek buildings and attractive grassed surroundings, was brought in from America, starting in Trafford Park.
A well-known exemplar is Wallis, Gilbert and Partners' 1932–1935 Hoover Building in the Art Deco style; it was at the time derided for "its overtly commercial character", but is now Grade II-listed.
Its construction is modern, a pioneer of pre-stressed concrete, but it is decorated to recall the glories of ancient Egypt, after the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922.
Historic England calls it a "tour de force of post-war architecture with deliberate references to continental examples in the transformation of service elements into sculptural forms".
