Featured Buildings Archive


This is a gallery of some of Colchester's more interesting buildings, which have featured on the site's front page as "buildings of the month".

32 St Botolph's Street
Originally a branch office of the American Singer Corporation. The company was a manufacturer of sewing machines which was first established as I.M. Singer & Co. in 1851 by Isaac Merrit Singer with New York lawyer Edward Clark. It quickly became a huge and very successful multinational company. In Britain in the late 1860s, Singer started using door-to-door canvassers and set up a system of sales branches and small district offices to provide bases for them. Built circa 1875, no 32 St Botolph's Street belongs to this period of aggressive sales techniques. With the introduction of canvassers and an early form of hire purchase, sales in Britain increased from 30,000 in 1875 to double that figure by 1880. Contemporary company advice for canvassers: "Always learn the name of the family before you enter a house. Introduce your business at once, in a pleasant way. Do not immediately ask them to purchase, but proceed to show your machine, its usefulness and points of excellence, and the economy of having one. When they become interested, teach them how to use it, and try to effect a sale."

Bicentenary house
No 5 North Hill is 200 years old this year - well, at least this is the age of the front of the building because a date applied to the brickwork conveniently tells us so.
As was commonly done in the Georgian period, houses could be made to look more modern with the addition of a brick front. If this is what happened at No 5 North Hill, the result was to give an existing house a pleasing and fashionable appearance.
The house is relatively big because it has four levels, i.e. a basement, ground and first floors and attics lit by dormer windows. The front has sash windows each with twelve small panes, a parapet with a dentiled brick cornice, and small bowed balcony rails to the first-floor windows. The wooden door case surrounding the door has a decorated frieze above it and panelled sides. A large square opening on the left allowed horse-drawn carriages to reach the rear of the building where there was presumably a stable.
The 'blind' window above the door could have been blocked deliberately to reduce the window tax due on the building. But this would mean that the date on the brickwork is unlikely to be original because it could only have been added after the window had been blocked. Alternatively, the blind window could have been a design feature arising from the desire for symmetry favoured in Georgian times.

The Turrets, 89 Lexden Road
A picturesque Gothic curiosity with battlements, turrets and Gothic pointed windows. A castellated villa rather than a castle, the Turrets was built in 1817 of plastered brick for Frances Smythies. The architect was probably Robert Lugar (1773-1855), a Colchester-born son of a carpenter. He established himself towards the end of the eighteenth century in London as an architect, and went on to develop a widespread practice as a country-house architect working in different styles including Gothic and extending throughout much of England and into Scotland and Wales. Frances Smythies was a lawyer who served as town clerk for many years like his son of the same name after him.

2 Church Street
An unusual and very well preserved Art Deco shop front designed by architects Baker and Burton in 1936 for barbor H. Snow who was the shop owner. The right-hand door was for the gents whereas the left-hand one was for the ladies (upstairs). There is some panelling inside the building in what appears to be the same wood and therefore is likely to be contemporary with the shop front. It is remarkable and fortunate that, being wood, the shopfront has survived so well. Its fine condition is a credit to the present owner who was looked after it so well for many years. The shop front is a later addition. The building itself had probably been erected a few decades earlier.

Large Victorian house with lots of character occupying a prominent corner site on Lexden Road. Built in 1877. Been the the home of Oxford House School since 1984. Great example of High Victorian Gothic. Red brick with stone dressings. Picturesquely irregular plan and elevations, with Gothic windows (including some with plate tracery), gables with decorative bargeboards, steep pitched roof with dormers, and polygonal corner turret. An excellent building of its date, highly decorative, and unspoilt as far as the exterior is concerned. Built for Mr Buck the dentist.

The Wagon and Horses pub is a relatively modern building which echoes the appearance of a much older timber-framed house which stood on the same site. The sequence is a bit complicated and the similarities between the two buildings are fairly limited. The present building was built in 1939. It replaced a 15th-/16th-century building which was known as the 'Ancient house' (see no 66a North Hill in street directories of the late 19th century) and which was restored in 1911. The elevation of the restored version (see lower picture) as it was to be in 1911 gives us a good idea of the appearance of the original Ancient House because the restoration appears to have been fairly limited. See here for a photograph showing the building sometime between c 1870 and 1890. There are five gables on the left. The Ancient House is the third, fourth and fifth gables from the left.
Its neighbour, the Post Office, is also a Neo-Tudor building. The pair, being at the at the end of the High Street and the top of North Hill, occupy a prominent position in Colchester town-centre and reflect Colchester's bygone tradition of timber-framed housing.