Canalside House, 383 Ladbroke Grove. Headquarters of c.1928 for the Gas Light and Coke Company. A long block in the Neo-Georgian style, Canalside House is of fifteen bays and three storeys of stock brick with ashlar dressings. The building is today managed by Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea as office and meeting space for voluntary and community organisations. It is an important townscape building, enhancing the setting of Ladbroke Grove and its road bridge (qv) whilst providing a degree of enclosure to the exposed and open former gasworks site. Canalside House possesses group value as part of a cluster of elements relating to the Kensal Green gasworks, including the two remaining gasholders and the Grade II* listed.
Castle Public House, 140 Victoria Road. Built between 1913 and 1935 on the site of Wales Farm (latterly St Leonard’s Farm). A large, characterful and intact London pub and prominent local landmark. It is architecturally notable as a successful albeit late example of the application of a Victorian ‘free style’ to a public house.
Cumberland Park Factory, 69-89 Scrubs Lane (NGR 522477, 182564). A distinctive planned development of paired L-plan units on two storeys, built between 1894 and 1913. Cumberland Park Estate Ltd was incorporated in 1900 and dissolved before 1916.81 The 1913 Ordnance Survey revision labels the building ‘Cumberland Park Factory (Bedding)’. Targeted documentary research may shed more light upon this possible trading estate.
Elizabeth Arden Perfume Factory (now the Perfume Factory), 140 Wales Farm Road. Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, 1939. A two storey range of offices, with a single storey north-light shed behind. The building was turned down for listing in December 1995. Since then, the front has been heavily altered, with the removal of the central tower and partial rendering of the facade. The building is included on the Ealing list of buildings of architectural or historical significance. To the south is an additional block of post-war date, of four storeys on a reinforced concrete frame. Wallis, Gilbert & Partners also designed nearby factories for the Telegraph Condenser Company and S. G. Brown Ltd.
Friars Estate, Wales Farm Road. A mixture of two-storey blocks of flats and semi-detached housing, laid out c.1932 for Acton Urban District Council around Wales Farm Road, Conway
Grove and Acorn Gardens.
John Burgess & Son Sauce Works (now Park Avenue), 1-3 Hythe Road. The northern range (no. 3) and the double-pitched building (no. 2) were built between 1894 and 1913; the range fronting Hythe Road (no. 1) was remodelled or rebuilt after 1955. The earlier buildings are of two storeys of rendered brick with metal framed, segmental headed windows. The company was founded by John Burgess, a farmer from Hampshire in the late eighteenth century and was trading from the Strand by 1774. The firm established its works here in 1908 and the head office relocated in 1914. Burgess’s was most renowned for its essence of anchovies, and won awards at the 1867 Paris Exhibition and 1873 London International Exhibition for both its fish pastes and pickles. The company moved to Edmonton in 1960, after which the building became a laundry.
London Geographical Institute, Victoria Road. Built between 1896 and 1913 with later extensions; much altered. The printing works of George Phillip & Son of Fleet Street, publishers of maps and atlases.
Mitre Bridge. Carries Scrubs Lane over the Grand Union Canal. It was reconstructed c.1905 by Mayoh and Haley for the London County Council to carry the new tramway line between Hammersmith and Harlesden.70 The cost of the tender was £5,726. A hogback overbridge composed of flanged steel plates. The adjacent bridge carrying Scrubs Lane over the Great Western main line is presumably contemporary. The name derives from the Mitre Tavern, described in 1840 as ‘a house of entertainment of some celebrity, that, upon the opening of the Paddington Canal, was established here upon its northern bank, but has long been converted into a cottage ornée’.
North Acton is an irregular tract of land, 25ha in area. It is bounded by Victoria Road to the north, the Brunel Road Industrial Estate to the south, Old Oak Common Lane to the east and Acton Cemetery to the West. The area is fragmented by the Great Western main line, the Central Line and the Dudding Hill freight line, yet it was better and faster roads which led to the industrial development of North Acton in the early twentieth century. In 1901 north and south Acton were connected by Victoria Road, which followed the old route from Harlesden Green to East Acton. Midland Terrace and the short terraces around Old Oak Junction were fragmentary housing developments near to the tracks. A southern extension of Old Oak Lane was built alongside the North and South Western Junction line, leading to the triangular Wells House Road of c.1908.87 With the opening of Western Avenue (the A40) in 1927 industrial North Acton merged with the adjoining Park Royal estate. Chandos Road, St Leonard’s Road, School Road and Bethune Road were laid out in the early years of the century and the inter-war years saw frenetic expansion.
North Pole International Depot. Eurostar, a high speed passenger service connecting Britain with the continent via the Channel Tunnel, occasioned a major investment in rail infrastructure in the south east. This was managed by European Passenger Services (EPS), a division of British Rail and represented BR’s last major capital project prior to privatisation in 1991-94. For passengers the most conspicuous part of the journey, apart from the ‘chunnel’ itself was the Waterloo International terminal, designed by Grimshaw Architects. The British maintenance depot for the Eurostar fleet was constructed at a cost of £76 million at the North Pole Depot, a sliver of land between the GWR main line and Wormwood Scrubs. With privatisation, ownership of EPS transferred to London and Continental Railways (LCR) in 1996. When the Eurostar service moved to St Pancras in November 2007, the maintenance and servicing operation transferred from North Pole Depot to Temple Mills in East London. The Eurostar sheds were built in 1991-92 to the designs of YRM Architects & Planners, and are of space frame roof construction.64 The longest is in the South Park Royal City sub-area to the west. The service shed is six roads wide and a quarter of a mile long, sufficient to enclose an entire 20 carriage train. It is connected by arrival sidings to the rest of the complex were east of Scrubs Lane. This includes a maintenance workshop,
four roads wide and ten vehicles long, together with a bogie drop shed, a wheel lathe shed, stores complex and reception area.65
Old Oak Common Sidings. This former GWR locomotive depot was opened in 1906, remaining as a working site until compulsory purchase in 2009 for the Crossrail project. The site was partially cleared in 2010-11. The earliest surviving buildings are a carriage shed of 1906, part of the original installation, and a smaller carriage repair depot of the late 1930s. Both are heavily altered. In March 1906, the Great Western Railway company (GWR) opened the Old Oak Locomotive Depot, three miles from the Paddington terminus. The new facility, designed under C.J. Churchward, replaced the West London Sidings south of the line at Kensal Green. Sidings terminated in separate sheds for carriages and engines. The carriage shed is c.90×30.5m (296×100 ft) and four bays in width, each bay comprising five roads of track. There were 12 reception and 41 stabling sidings, totalling 16.9km (10½ miles) of track. A 15.25m (50 ft) turntable in the centre of the main yards was used for turning locomotives and carriages. A separate pair of lines between Paddington and Old Oak Common were constructed so that the movement of empty stock did not congest the main passenger line.
Rolls Royce Service and Repair Depot (now Car Giant), 45 Hythe Road. A purpose-built maintenance depot of 1939-40 in a Moderne style. A long red brick range of three storeys and 27 bays with Crittall-type windows arranged into horizontal bands. Central nine bay, two storey entrance colonnade with ashlar pilasters and spandrel panels with geometrical decoration. The original railings and entrance piers survive at the front. The Depot later became the coachbuilding factory for H.J. Mulliner Park Ward, subsidiaries of Rolls Royce, after the former Park Ward factory in Willesden closed. The highly elaborate Rolls-Royce Phantoms were built here in small numbers. After being vacated in 1992, the building was heavily altered when the wings were overclad with metal panels.
Westway Factory Estate, Telford Way and Brunel Road. A small, speculative industrial estate, planned in the late 1920s for Old Oak Factories Limited. Acton Council granted permission for a layout provided by the estate agents Hillier, Parker, May and Rowden of 27 Maddox Street, London on 2 July 1927. The firm also designed, or commissioned the design of the individual factories in an Art Deco style. The majority of the 1930s buildings have been replaced in recent years.
Victoria Terrace, 2a/b–8a/b Old Oak Lane. A short terrace of workers’ housing of ‘Tyneside Flat’ type, where paired front doors each give access to a single flat. These flats, perhaps part of a larger development, were built between 1896 and 1915, possibly by a nearby employer such as the Willesden Paper & Canvas Works or the North & South West Junction Railway. As the name implies, this house type is mainly encountered in the north east of England, although London examples have been identified in Walthamstow, Clapham and Colliers Wood.
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