Former Premier Cafe, 3 High Street, Cheadle, Cheadle, Stockport

Summary

Former café with baker’s shop on the ground floor, a late-C19 building with Art Deco remodelling in the mid-1930s.

Description

Former café with baker’s shop on the ground floor; a late-C19 building with Art Deco remodelling in the mid-1930s.

MATERIALS: the building is brick-built faced with stucco, with a tile-hung gable and a slate roof.

PLAN: the building has a ground-floor shop with a rear staircase leading to two first-floor café rooms.

EXTERIOR: the shop front has a central entrance with a lobby and recessed doorway. This is flanked by angled plate glass lights with slender timber corner mullions and a large plate glass window to each side with timber transoms and transom lights with stylised sunburst etchings. The lobby has a yellow terrazzo floor with a diamond pattern and border of blue terrazzo. The timber door has a plate glass panel with an etched geometric Art Deco pattern, silver metal upright door handle, low letterbox and sill band. Over the lobby is a shaped transom light also with etching. The stall risers are of painted cement (originally black Vitrolite) as is the ground-floor shop window surround including the fascia. The painted, scribed stucco first floor has a wide canted oriel window. It has plate windows with slender timber glazing bars and a row of four upper casements with geometric etched patterns. The sill is of painted cement. To each side of the window is a framed, stepped black Vitrolite panel. The gable above has timber bargeboards and is tile-hung with orange-brown tiles. The slate roof has decorative orange terracotta ridge tiles and a tall brick stack to the right-hand side of the front pitch.

INTERIOR: the ground-floor shop has a floor of large square beige terrazzo tiles with a moulded green terrazzo skirting. At the rear of the shop, rising from the right-hand corner, is a staircase with an angled curtail step and two more steps to a quarter-turn landing and a straight flight leading up to a landing between the front and rear rooms. The outer tread ends of the steps are framed with a chrome strip with an outer curved chrome balustrade with few slender rectangular-section balusters and three oval-section rails. An extra curved handrail has been added to the lower three steps. The treads are covered in green marbled linoleum with black edging and inset black line to each side, with black and metal nosings. The inner staircase skirting is black with thin chrome bands and on the quarter landing is an original Art Deco corner display cabinet which the skirting and linoleum respects. The cabinet has a chrome frame with a black glass front and side panels and a stepped line of orange mosaic tiles with mirrored mosaic tiles above. At dado level the staircase has three stepped rows of square mirrored tiles. A more recent handrail has been attached to the wall over the mirrored tiles.

The shop has a modern suspended ceiling with integral lights. The rear rooms have terrazzo flooring but have otherwise been refurbished. The west wall of the enclosed passageway to the rear has been rebuilt further out in breezeblock (faced externally in brick).

The small first-floor landing has a black and chrome strip skirting and a dado band of three rows of square mirrored tiles, with double doors opening into the front room and a single door opening into the back room. The stairwell has a timber frame along the front and return walls inset with panes of opaque marbled green glass with lighter green horizontal and stepped strips. The rear wall has a two-light timber frame inset with opaque green glass panes and strips. The double doors are timber veneered with stepped upper lights with similar opaque green glass and upright, projecting, octagonal chrome door handles with shaped plates. The single door has similar door handles and two horizontal rectangular lights with pierced brass grilles in a stylised Art Deco feather pattern.

The front room is designed to be able to be split into two spaces with a thin partition wall containing a wide, timber-framed opening which could be closed by screens (no longer present). The two spaces of the room both have veneered dados with thin vertical black strips, black and chrome skirtings and chrome edging top bands; the rear part of the room is missing part of the veneer beneath the green glass, though the skirting and chrome edging band remain. Above the dado is a row of square mirrored tiles with patterns of triangular, stepped tiles and vertical bands of tiles decorating the walls. A deep, vertically grooved, painted timber frieze runs round both spaces with angled, opaque pink marbled glass cornice strips above with uplighters behind. In the centre of the rear wall at frieze height is an octagonal painted glass clock face. The larger front space has a contemporary blocky, beige-glazed ceramic fireplace to the west side wall with a replica round-headed mirror over the mantelpiece. The oriel window is wood-lined with a square-section chrome security rail. There are cast-iron radiators to the left of the window and also against the east side wall in both front and rear spaces. The rear space has a curved coat rail fixed across the corner between the east wall and partition wall. The west wall has a pair of wood veneered doors with upright octagonal door handles and black and chrome architraves. The left-hand door opens onto a narrow staircase to an attic room and the right-hand door is for an under-stair store cupboard. Set at a right-angle to the left-hand door is a doorway into a small room with a modern suspended ceiling.

It is unclear when the plaster texturing of the ceilings took place. The fan wall sconces are modern reproductions.

The narrower back room has a moulded cornice and a large circular roof light with fluted plaster edging to the aperture and a shallow-domed decorative glazed grille of pierced brass; the outermost pierced patterns retain faint traces of colour. The central fan and light is a modern addition. Over the domed grille is a pyramidal lantern. The east side of the room has three stepped, full-height painted timber and glazed screens. The timber dados of the two outer screens both have four horizontal-rectangular grilles of pierced brass in a stylised feather pattern. Above the dados are pierced brass panels glazed with small, square panes of green glass. Attached to the side of the left-hand screen is a curved timber coat and umbrella stand, which obscures the panel to access lighting behind the screens. There is a similar, but narrower, screen to the left-hand side of the rear, south wall and to the north wall adjacent to the entrance door, the latter with four similar brass grilles to the dado, to the rear of a cast-iron radiator. On the right-hand side of the south wall is an original doorway leading into a short corridor (originally with WCs to the left) and an external fire door. The door has a horizontal rectangular light with a pierced brass feather-pattern grille and similar upright, octagonal door handles, but in brass. The small room to the left is entered by a doorway inserted in the south wall. The painted timber door has an original brass upright octagonal door handle to the outside, with a facsimile to the inside, and is likely have been rehung from its original position in the short corridor. Above the inserted doorway is a clock face with brass shapes for numerals attached to the wall. Recessed into the west wall is a servery with a horizontal painted timber panel and row of five leaded lights over with geometric patterns of coloured and textured glass. To the rear the lower wall of painted timber has four horizontal-rectangular pierced brass feather-pattern grilles. Above is timber shelving with a mirrored back and to each side is a curved shelving area with a brass top and side rail, which may be later alterations. To the front is a bar counter with a brass top with curved ends to the staff entry at the right-hand end, which may be a later alteration. Beneath the countertop is a sink and shelving. The north wall screen has a projecting painted timber screen and shelving with a brass pole and a round-ended brass container with side rail at the left-hand end and projecting painted timber shelving at the right-hand end, both of which may be later additions.

History

The building that the Premier Café came to occupy was built in the late C19, appearing on the 1:10560 Ordnance Survey map revised in 1897, published in 1899, apparently replacing an earlier building with a narrower footprint shown on the map surveyed in 1872 and published in 1882. In the early C20 the property was run as a baker’s shop called Oldhams, before being bought by the Weinholt family in 1930. August Weinholt, eldest son of confectioner Ferdinand Weinholt who had emigrated in 1860 from Lubeck, Germany, had a vision to bring high-quality continental confectionary to Cheadle. At first the family lived over the ground-floor shop, with a small bakery at the back. In time they constructed a separate bakery on the adjacent Ashfield Road with an enclosed passageway to move goods between the two, also building a family home on Ashfield Road.

The Weinholts then opened a first-floor restaurant and café called the Premier Café with a staircase at the rear of the shop for the customers. The Art Deco décor was said to have been designed by a Parisian designer, though there is no known written record to confirm the attribution. The back room, which has a flat roof and roof lantern, is not shown on the 1:2500 OS map revised in 1934, published in 1936, but it is likely that it was built soon after as there is an historic photograph of the building with a fascia for the Premier Café decorated for George V's Silver Jubilee in 1935. The back room is also shown on the slightly later 1:10560 OS map revised in 1938, but not published until 1946. The photograph shows the 1930s shop front, which had plate glass windows with very slender glazing bars and black Vitrolite (a self-coloured glass made by Pilkington’s) fascia with the name PREMIER CAFÉ, with black Vitrolite stall risers, shaped side panels and a sill to the first-floor oriel window. Attached to the sill was a sign with three-dimensional lettering spelling out Restaurant. There are also historic 1930s photographs of the interior of the café. They show much of the contemporary decor of the front room, including the fireplace, dado, mirror tiles, opaque glass, clock, frieze and glass cornice uplighters. It suggests that the rear, south-west corner may since have been remodelled as a corner doorway appears recessed behind the pair of doors in the west side wall, rather than at a right-angle to them as now. Another photograph of a wedding function set up in the back room shows the pierced brass multi-pane glazed wall screens which remain in-situ. At an unknown date the small room containing WCs at the back of that room, reached from a short side corridor, was altered to form an ancillary, washing-up room, with the original doorway blocked and a doorway inserted directly from the main room. The dumb-waiter in the north-west corner has also been boarded up, and there may have been alterations to the adjacent bar area.

August died towards the end of the Second World War and initially the business continued to be run by his sons Frank and George. George subsequently established a bakery in Alderley Edge, leaving Frank to run the original family bakery. It prospered during the 1950s, at which time the Ashfield Road bakery was rebuilt, but by the 1960s the café was no longer thriving and was closed down with the business concentrating upon the shop and bakery. In the early 1990s the shop, named Michael Wienholt, was closed and the property became a charity shop. It is presently (2022) empty.

The building stands on the south side of the High Street (A560) between the George and Dragon Hotel (Grade II, National Heritage List for England:1241728) to the left and a former corner bank to the right, with which it shares a roofline.

Reasons for Listing

3 High Street, Cheadle, a late-C19 building with mid-1930s Art Deco remodelling, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:
* a rare surviving Art Deco scheme of two bespoke and distinctly styled café rooms and staircase, complemented by the survival of much of the contemporary street frontage;
* the former café retains a wealth of 1930s features, including doors, veneered dado, frieze and opaque glass cornice and fireplace in the front room, pierced and glazed brass work, notably a circular rooflight with domed grille, in the back room, and a sleek chrome balustrade and a jazzy Art Deco corner cabinet to the staircase.

Historic interest:
* the establishing of the stylish Premier Café on Cheadle High Street in the 1930s illustrates the national expansion of cafes and restaurants after the First World War when recreational dining became the fashion.

Group value:
* the building has group value due to close proximity with the listed George and Dragon Hotel, Hawthorn House and Cheadle War Memorial.

External Links

Historic England Listing

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