Patrick Comerford
Perhaps the work of my great-grandfather on buildings in Dublin such as the Irish House on Winetavern Street and the Oarsman in Ringsend has left me with an abiding interest in Victorian stucco pubs, and I find myself looking out for them when I am walking through a city or town.
In London in recent days, I have stopped to look at the Rising Sun is an ornate, 19th-century pub at 46 Tottenham Court Road in Fitzrovia. I returned again yesterday to look at its elaborate façades and to see what happened in the 1980s and the 1990s to its interiors.
The Rising Sun dates back to 1730, and was rebuilt in the Elaborate Art Nouveau Gothic style in 1897 to designs by the Victorian architects Treadwell and Martin. It has survived a drastic rebuilding in the 1980s, and is now a Grade II listed building.
Because of its associations with good weather and good fortune, the Rising Sun seems to be a natural name for a pub. But it also forms a large part of the coat of arms of the Distillers’ Company, which makes it even more popular as a pub name.
Tottenham Court Road runs a distance of about three-quarters of a mile (1.2 km) from Euston Road in the north to Saint Giles Circus and the junction of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road in the south, with Tottenham Court Road tube station just beyond the south end of the road. Tottenham Court Road is sometimes used to distinguish Fitzrovia to the west from Bloomsbury to the east.
The street takes its name from the former Manor of Tottenham Court, whose lands lay to the north and west of the road, in the parish of Saint Pancras. Tottenham Court had no direct connection with the district of Tottenham, now part of the London Borough of Haringey. The manor house of the former Manor of Tottenham Court lay just to the north of the road’s junction with Euston Road.
The Rising Sun dates back to a pub that was first licensed as the Sun in 1730. It is one of the pubs Karl Marx is said to have requented in the 1850s, at a time when there were 18 pubs along the length of the Tottenham Court Road.
The pub was rebuilt in the Elaborate Art Nouveau Gothic style by FA Rhodes in 1897 to designs by the Victorian architects Treadwell and Martin. The partnership was formed by Henry John Treadwell (1861-1910) and Leonard Martin (1869-1935), and was in practice for 20 years from 1890 to 1910.
Henry John Treadwell was born in Lambeth in 1862. He was articled to Franklin and Andrews of Ludgate Hill, and was then an assistant to the Giles Gough and Trollope in London. He practised with Leonard Martin in London from 1890 to 1910, specialising in developing small, narrow-fronted sites in London’s West End. He died in London on 24 October 1910.
Leonard Martin was born in London on 12 July 1869 and he too was articled to Giles Gough and Trollope. He attended the National Art Training School in South Kensington, London, and Lambeth School of Art. He met Henry John Treadwell at Giles Gough and Trollope and they formed a partnership in 1890.
The Treadwell and Martin partnership was dissolved after Treadwell died in 1910. From 1929 on, Martin was in partnership with EC Davis. Later, Martin exhibited at the Royal Academy in London between 1912 and 1929. He died in Surrey in 1936.
Stylistically, Treadwell and Martin worked in an eclectic mix of Art Nouveau, Baroque, late-Continental Gothic, and dashes of other styles, used in a very free way. They designed several public houses and breweries, and left a ‘trail of remarkable little buildings across London’s West End,’ according to the architectural historian A Stuart Gray.
The firm designed Scott’s restaurant, 18-19 Coventry Street (1892-1894), the Old Shades, a Grade II listed pub at 37-39 Whitehall, and 80 Fetter Lane, built for Buchanan’s Distillery, as well as the Rising Sun on Tottenham Court Road. Among their best buildings are 23 Woodstock Street, 7 Dering Street, 7 Hanover Street, 74 New Bond Street, 20 Conduit Street, 78 Wigmore Street, 106 Jermyn Street and 61 Saint James’s Street, all in the early 1900s.
Other works by the firm include the rebuilding and later addition of Saint John’s School, Leatherhead, Surrey (1890s); Sandroyd School, Cobham (1905-1906), hospitals in Carshalton and Cobham, Surrey, and Dartford, Kent, and Saint John’s Hospital, Lisle Street, Leicester Square, London (1904).
Their churches include the Presbyterian Church in West Norwood, the Holy Trinity Mission Church at Tulse Hill, London, and Saint John’s Church (1910), Herne Hill, Surrey. Their design for the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum was shortlisted but unsuccessful.
The Rising Sun is a late Victorian stucco pub designed by Treadwell and Martin in an Elaborate Art Nouveau Gothic style. The pub has four storeys and a basement; one bay has a three-bay return and there is a one-bay extension to Windmill Street.
It has a ground floor pilastered frontage and an entrance in a splayed corner. There are three-light transom and mullion windows with leaded panes on the first floor, and two-light windows on the second and third floors.
Each bay is separated by tourelles with pinnacles. The gables over the window bays are surmounted by segmental pediments. There is lavish use of vertical strips, scrollwork, heraldic beasts, cupids heads, and similar features in relief.
Rising from the first to the third floor on a splayed corner is a bartizan with a corbel including a male figure. To the right of this, a plaque reads ‘Built by FA Rhodes 1897, Treadwell & Martin’.
The brick extension has three-light transom and mullion windows and a stone-capped Dutch gable.
Their pub was the victim of one of the worst excesses of brewery greed in the early 1980s when the pub was renamed ‘The Presley’ and decorated with images of Elvis Presley. The owners lowered the ceiling and destroyed the Victorian interior, including the Grade II listed high ceilinged interior.
The litigation the followed led to the forced restoration of many of the original features in 1993, when the interior was entirely remodelled in an historicist style.
The pub was renamed the Rising Sun by the next owners, the intricate stucco exterior remains, and the current decor is much more welcoming. The Rising Sun is one of the pubs on the many Karl Marx-themed pub crawls based on the pubs Karl Marx was known to have frequented or, more speculatively, may have visited when he lived with his family in abject poverty nearby at 21 Dean Street from 1848 to 1856.
