Arcade Building on King Street (formerly listed as Grimes Arcade Building), Wigan Central, Wigan

Summary

An office building incorporating a bank and shopping arcade, of 1871 by Richardson Thomas Johnson for Richard Leigh, with some alterations.

Description

An office building incorporating a bank and shopping arcade, of 1871 by Richardson Thomas Johnson for Richard Leigh, with some alterations.

MATERIALS: buff sandstone, shap granite columns, red brick, slate roofs.

PLAN: U-plan formed by a double-pile front range parallel to the street bridging the entry to the arcade, with single-pile rear wings linked by the arcade roof.

EXTERIOR: the front range faces south-west and is three storeys tall plus a basement, and four bays wide, plus a fifth bay at the ground floor. The façade is asymmetrical, in a free Venetian Gothic style with prominent bracketed cornices with unusual nail-head enrichment over the ground floor and second floor, and a second-floor sill band.

The ground floor is arcaded with five unequal bays including the single-storey doorway at the left, which has a flying freehold above it and a less prominent cornice. The central arcade passage opening is the widest, with shop windows either side (wider at the right) and a second doorway at the right. These all have shouldered, flat-arched openings springing from engaged polished-granite columns with composite capitals (all different). In the spandrels above each column are paterae with floral designs (all different) in deep relief, and elaborate cornice brackets. Cartouches in the tympanum over each doorway bear the monograms of the Manchester and County Bank (left) and Richard Leigh. Each entrance has panelled timber double doors. The bank doorway has smaller, raised columns.

The bays above match the ground-floor widths and the first and third bays have projecting windows. All the bays have a one-light window except for bay two, which is two-light. The windows have architraves with engaged columns; at first floor they have decorated lintel labels and the window lights have trefoil heads with paterae in the spandrels. Windows are all timber, single-paned horned sashes.

The rear façade to Arcade Street is of red brick laid in English Garden Wall bond. The angles between the passage and the rear wall to the street are quoined with cream bricks. At the ground floor splayed entrances flank the arcade passage, and at the right is a shopfront, stepped due to the rise of the land. The upper floors are blind save for a window to the right of each floor, matching the second-floor rear window of the front range. The eaves have paired stone gutter brackets. Each of the rear wings has an eaves stack of red brick quoined with cream brick. The passage (to the left of centre) has a pitched glazed roof on arched decorated cast-iron trusses.

The rear of the front range is set well back in the passage, and painted. It has one window to each floor. These have plain stone sills and stop-chamfered stone lintels. At the second floor is a two-over-two sash, at first floor level a pvc casement. The passage through the front range has a segmental-arched brick vault.

The facing walls of the rear wings match the rear wall of the front range, with four windows to each floor. At ground floor level there are projecting shopfronts to all the units except for the former bank. The walls of the passage through the front range have Gothic embellishment such as pilasters with fish-scale bases. Near the Arcade Street end, prominent doorways face each other, accessing the stairs to the offices. These have moulded, two-centred arches and Gothic detailing matching the bank doorway, and both retain four-panelled timber doors.

INTERIOR: the interiors retain significant amounts of historic decorative joinery and plasterwork throughout, with some alterations. In places suspended ceilings obscure original features. The decoration is particularly elaborate in the former banking hall and office, and in the front-range offices, where the door and window architraves have engaged columns reflecting the external architecture, and the panelled doors are similar to the external doors. The first-floor front suite also has arches in the corridor which spring from stone corbels with Richard Leigh’s monogram.

Simpler spaces also survive however (such as in the rear offices and the entrance lobby into the bank from the yard to the north-west of the building), thus preserving much of the original hierarchy of spaces and standards of finish. The stairs survive with most of their original cast-iron splat balusters and square timber newels, and there is a wall safe in the northern stairwell. There are also built-in brick-vaulted strongrooms at the northern end of each floor of the front range. The brick-vaulted basement retains some of the original elliptical lightwells which span the lines of the shopfronts, borrowing light for both the central aisle of the basement and the shop basements.

History

The arcade in King Street was the first shopping arcade in Wigan. Eighteen-seventy-one, when it was built, was the very start of the most significant period of arcade-building in England. In providing office space rather than dwellings in the spaces above the shops, this arcade was relatively forward-thinking. The arcade was built for Richard Leigh, a local solicitor and county-court clerk. Possibly originally conceived speculatively, by the time it was built a tenant had been found for part of the ground floor. This was the Manchester and County Bank. The bank was established as a joint stock bank in Manchester in 1862 and previously had premises at 26 King Street, Wigan. In 1872 Richard Leigh also owned number 26, and it seems likely that the bank had been his tenant there before moving into tailor-made space at his new property at the arcade.

Plans exist for the building which were approved in June 1871, although construction must surely have started earlier than this. The final design varied slightly from these drawings. Perhaps reflecting its original setting, (opening onto the narrow lane called Rowbottom Square), the rear of the building was relatively plain, but by the time of the 1908 Ordnance Survey (OS) 1:2,500 map, a new street called Arcade Street had been laid out to connect the rear of the arcade with Library Street.

On 19 August 1871 a dinner attended by around 170 people was held at the Bull’s Head to celebrate the building of the arcade. The builders are thought to have been Wilson, Johnson, Winnard and Lea. By 1872 Leigh’s partnership with Thomas Ratcliffe Ellis had moved into the building. Although Leigh had married in Hastings in 1874 the practice continued in the arcade until 1876, when Leigh moved to the south coast, dying suddenly in St Leonard’s at the age of 40, in 1879.

A report on the opening of the bank in March 1872 indicates that construction work and fitting out continued after the 1871 dinner. In June 1872 plate glass windows from St Helen’s, reported to have been the largest sheets of plate glass in Wigan, were being fitted to the bank. By 1873 the arcade was definitely occupied including by Leigh and Ellis, the solicitors Part, Woodcock, Sons and Eckersley, and Johnson who was also advertising his own architect and surveyor business based here. Notably, at number 1 was Mrs Grime’s fancy-stationery and bookselling business (which also sold sheet music). Grime’s pianoforte and harmonium warehouse was also here, probably relocated from Mr and Mrs Grime’s original shop on Wallgate. Grime’s business came to be associated with the arcade even after Dawson’s took over their premises in the 1970s. The building was listed in 1983.

In the late C20 the entertainment venues on King Street were gradually converted to nightclubs and bars, and many of the former banks, solicitors and insurers moved out. The bank premises in the arcade also became a bar, with some alterations for that use, in particular to parts of the cellar where toilets were added. The glazed roof of the arcade has been replaced above the original structure. Replacement shopfronts have been added to all the units except for the former bank. The cross wall between the 22 King Street shop and the shop to its rear has been removed to create a larger unit. Some partitions, a replacement stair and a lift have also been inserted in the office ranges, affecting the circulation. Some balusters have been replaced on the southern stair. The arcade finally closed around 2000 and in 2022 remains empty.

After developing as a building type in France in the late C18, shopping arcades first appeared in Britain early in the C19. The first was the Royal Arcade in Covent Garden, London, of 1817. A handful of arcades followed in major English cities, seaside towns and spas before the 1870s. However, most arcades were built between 1875 and 1910, especially in the industrial midlands and north, reflecting the increasing prosperity of their middle classes.

Richardson Thomas Johnson (1848 to 1929) was born in London. His father William was from Wigan, but in 1851 was working as an engine maker in Lambeth. The family returned to Wigan where William became landlord of the Hole ith Wall (hole in the wall) pub off Market Place. Richardson was a boarding pupil at Well Hall school in Clitheroe. By 1869 Richardson was practising from Wallgate as a ‘land, building and engineering surveyor’, although still living with his parents in 1871. The arcade seems to have been his first notable building. In 1874 he built the Alexandra Music Hall for his father as a replacement for the pub. He also designed the nearby Royal Court Theatre (1886, National Heritage List for England (NHLE) entry 1384479), redesigned the Theatre Royal opposite (1890, demolished) and in 1892 redesigned the Alexandra as the Empire Palace theatre (demolished). He remained in Wigan until the end of the C19 but also had connections in Dewsbury, where two of his children were born. By 1901 he was practising in Blackpool. He later moved to live with his daughter’s family in Liverpool, and died there.

Reasons for Listing

The King Street Arcade (former Grimes Arcade), an office building incorporating a bank and shopping arcade, of 1871 by Richardson Thomas Johnson for Richard Leigh, with some alterations, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:

* as one of the earliest provincial arcade buildings in the country, and an early example of the provision of offices above an arcade;
* with a striking and highly decorative façade in free Venetian Gothic style with unusual nail-head enrichment to the cornices;
* retaining much historic fabric including most windows, decorative joinery, ironwork and plasterwork in the former bank and offices, and two built-in strongrooms, as well as the decorative metal ribs of the original arcade roof;
* for its association with the Wigan architect RT Johnson.

Group value:

* for its close proximal relationship to Johnson’s listed Royal Court Theatre, and visual relationship with other listed buildings on King Street, in particular the former townhouses at numbers 26-34 (even), and numbers 7-11 (odd), 13 and 15, and 21-25 (odd).

External Links

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