Patrick Comerford
Waterstones on Gower Street in London boasts that it is the largest new and second-hand bookshop in Europe, with extensive academic and specialist ranges. It is home too to an award-winning events programme, to Dillon’s coffee shop and to a vinyl shop Gower Records.
The bookshop is in the heart of literary Bloomsbury and I, like many of my generation, still think of it as Dillon’s.
And, as I found out during a recent visit, the shop also has an interesting architectural history.
The shop was first established by Una Dillon. Waterstones Gower Street continues to maintain her values of literary, academic and bookselling excellence. Over time, the shop has grown from a small space on the ground floor to encompass all five floors of the building, which is a Grade 2 listed building and a ‘Franco-Gothic’ masterpiece designed by Charles Fitzroy-Doll.
What is now the London University branch of Waterstones started life as a row of shops built by the Russell estate in 1907. The building was designed by the architect Charles Fitzroy Doll (1850-1929), the surveyor of the Russell estate, who also designed the Hotel Russell. He also designed the dining room on the Titanic, basing it on his design for the dining room in the Hotel Russell in Bloomsbury.
Doll was educated in Germany, and when he returned to Britain he trained as an architect under Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt. He worked with Wyatt in designing the India Office in London in 1866 -1868. Doll was appointed Surveyor to the Bedford Estates in Bloomsbury and Covent Garden in 1885.
In 1898, he designed the Hotel Russell, distinctively clad in decorative thé-au-lait (‘tea with milk’) terracotta, and based on the Château de Madrid on the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Doll engaged the sculptor Henry Charles Fehr to model the four life-size statues of British queens, who looked down from above the main front entrance. The hotel's restaurant, until recently named Fitzroy Doll’s, is said to be almost identical to the Titanic dining room, which he also designed.
Later, Doll designed the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square, which was described by the architectural historian Sir Niklaus Pevsner as a ‘vicious mixture of Art Nouveau Gothic and Art Nouveau Tudor’. The Imperial Hotel was demolished in 1967, and replaced by a contemporary, brutalist building designed by George Anthony Wilson Brandeth.
Doll was a member of Holborn Borough Council, and he was twice Mayor of Holborn (1904-1905, 1912-1913). He died in 1929. His son Christian Charles Tyler Doll (1880-1955) inherited the architectural practice and was involved in the reconstruction of the grand staircase of the Palace of King Minos at Knossos in Crete, working alongside Arthur Evans. He also designed the Villa Ariadne, a residence for Evans at Knossos, which now houses the Knossos Research Centre.
Charles Fitzroy Doll designed the Flemish French-Gothic terrace of shops with apartments above at Nos 42-56 Torrington Place. The Grade II listed building was built in 1907-1908 in what is described in Pevsner as Franco-Flemish Gothic, although it is eminently Victorian. It is built of brick with terracotta and stone dressings. It is steeply pitched, and has tiled roofs with gables at each bay and tall slab chimney-stacks.
It is a three-storey building, with attics and basements, and with eight bays and three-bay returns to Gower Street and Malet Street. The ground floor was damaged during World War II and repaired in a simple style of stone pilasters supporting an entablature at first floor level.
There are two shop windows at ground floor level, plain transom and mullion three-light and two-light windows and a round-headed entrance with a keystone, fanlight and part-glazed door.
Above ground floor, the façade is articulated by vertical attached colonnettes, recessed rainwater pipes with heads dated 1908 and lion mask spouts, and horizontal strings. A carved balustrade of three panels in Art Nouveau style is above the entrance at the first floor level is.
Each bay, except the corner bays, has canted three-light bay windows through the first and second floors and flanked by one, two or three lights with round-arched, moulded surrounds. The bay windows have enriched transoms and tracery, aprons carved with mythical beasts, coats of arms, foliage and ribbons with the words ‘Che Sara Sara,’ the motto of the Russell family, Dukes of Bedford. Gargoyles in the form of mythical beasts sprout from the enriched parapets.
Above each bay is a large gable with a carved finial. There are seated figures in a tympanum, and beneath it are three round-arched lights. Both angles have octagonal corner turrets with tiled conical roofs. There is an enriched and cusped cornice at the third floor level.
The Gower Street return is in a similar style but without the bay windows. A three-light oriel in the right-hand bay is two-storeys in length and is surmounted by an octagonal feature with niches and gargoyles. The Malet Street return is similar.
Una Dillon founded Dillons in 1936 and started trading in one of the shops, gradually spilling over into others as the business expanded.
Agnes Joseph Madeline Dillon (1903-1993) was known all her life as Una Dillon. She was born into a family of Irish ancestry in Hendon on 8 January 1903, one of six children of Teresa (McHale) Dillon (1867-1949) and Joseph Thomas Dillon (1866-1950). One brother, Edward Joseph Dillon, died during World War I, another brother emigrated a sister became a nun.
Una Dillon graduated from Bedford College, London, and was working with the charity now known as Mind dealing with books when she decided to open a book shop. She bought the business for £800, borrowing £600 from her father and £200 from a friend, and she opened Dillons on Gower Street, near University College London, in 1936.
She drove the business forward, delivering books by bike within the eight-hour target she had set herself. She stocked both academic and general titles, believing specialisation stifled curiosity, and the shop prospered catering to the needs of staff and students of the nearby University of London. Her shop soon attracted literary figures as regular customers, including Cecil Day-Lewis and John Betjeman, who in time became personal friends.
The shop originally occupied just the east end of the building that it would later take over completely. After World War II, Dillon increasingly focused on educational titles.
Una Dillon sold the majority of the company to the University of London in 1956, with the proviso that it continued to use her name. The business reopened as Dillon’s University Bookshop. By the time Una Dillon retired as managing director in 1967, the shop occupied the entire building and had an annual turnover of over £1 million. She remained as a board member until 1977.
None of the three Dillon sisters married and they spent 42 years together in Kensington. Tess Dillon had led the physics department at Queen Elizabeth College. Una retired to Hove with her sister Carmen in 1985. Carmen had been a film and production designer and won an Oscar for Laurence Olivier’s film Hamlet (1948). Una died on 4 April 1993; Carmen died in 2000.
Una Dillon was succeeded as managing director by Peter Stockham. Then in 1977, Grant Paton, from Glasgow, was appointed managing director by the then owners, University of London. It was taken over soon after by Pentos.
The shop had a major makeover and modernisation, announcing its relaunch with the advertising poster ‘Foyled again? Try Dillons’ displayed prominently on the bus shelter opposite its London rival Foyles.
Inspired by the success of Waterstones, and the potential for large modern bookshops with a depth of stock, Pentos rapidly rolled out the format across Britain, building up a chain of 75 stores. In 1990, Dillons bought Hatchards in Piccadilly, the oldest bookshop in England.
However, having overreached itself financially, Pentos Dillons went into receivership in 1995, and was acquired by Thorn EMI, which already held the HMV chain, for £36 million. Thorn EMI immediately closed 40 of the 140 Dillons outlets; of the remaining 100 shops, most kept the Dillons name, while the others were Hatchards and Hodges Figgis in Dublin.
HMV acquired the larger Waterstones chain in 1998, and the Dillons brand ceased to exist as a separate entity in 1999 when the branches were rebranded as Waterstones. A remainder were sold on to the smaller chain Ottakar’s, which was later taken over by Waterstones in 2006.
As for Dillon’s former London rivals in the business, Foyles was once listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s largest bookshop in terms of shelf length, at 30 miles (48 km), and for number of titles on display. It was a tourist attraction in the past and was known for its literary lunches and for its eccentric business practices.
Foyles moved in 2014 from 111-119 Charing Cross Road to 107 Charing Cross Road, once the premises of Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design. It was bought by Waterstones in 2018 and now has a chain of seven shops in England.
Waterstones also bought Blackwell’s in Oxford in 2022, and the Blackwell brand now has a chain of 18 shops.
Today, it is easy to get lost in the cosy corners of the former Dillon’s shop in Bloomsbury, where the shelves have miles upon miles of new and second-hand books, and where the second-hand titles range from vintage orange Penguins to signed first editions. The Dillons name continues in Dillons Café, which serves ethically sourced Union coffee and where, in these summer months, the fairy-lit courtyard is a suntrap.
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