Sutton

  This post is not finished, it has not been checked or edited


Albion Road

67 Small attractive garden- made and maintained by owners including courtyard area with water feature, selection of trees, shrubs, bamboos and ferns chosen for their foliagey variation. Various types of container plantings.

Bushey Road

Sutton Bus Garage.

Cheam Road:

Trinity Methodist Church With a bold tower with a crown. Remarkable.  1907 by Gordon & Gunton. Ragstone polygonal

Church hall attached to the end

Baptist Church 1934.’  Finest modern church in Surrey’.  Windows with scenes of pilgrims’ progresses and war memorial apocalypse. Moderne red brick. Remarkable. By Cachemaille-Day. Secular parts well grouped. Striking interior with the windows framed by dramatic, steeply pointed wall arches.

Collingwood Road

Chaucer House. Depressing 15 storeys.

Crown Lane

Sutton gas works site

Gandergreen Lane

West Sutton station. 5th January 1930. Between Sutton and Sutton Common on Thameslink and Southern Trains. Built by Southern Railway plus a deal with London Electric Railway in 1929. It is a concrete blockhouse. Two lines of houses were already there when the line was built. It was completely rebuilt in 1989 but it was soon completely covered in graffiti – ‘heavily vandalised and dirty’. 

Greyhound Road

13 Little Windsor. Was called the Windsor Castle. Fuller’s pub. There since 1890 when it replaced another Windsor Castle but which was further up the road.  Pavement seating and a garden.

High Street

The Cricketers, with weather boarded part obscured by later additions.

Eagle Star House, a composition in concrete by the Owen Luder Partnership, 1963- 7. A nine-storey office block above two projecting storeys with shops. The line of shops follows the curve of the road, and then turns back along two sides of a little precinct. In front of this is a freestanding building with glazed upper floor on concrete stilts, linked with the main block by willfully complicated stairs to a car park behind. The tall block has horizontal bands of concrete with a rough surface, and round-ended lift-shafts and stairs of concrete with the shuttering marks exposed. The group looks best from the north making an emphatic statement at the entrance to the High Street, but closer up there are too many tricky details – like the low concrete lintels of the shop doorways.

National Westminster

Housing of 1978-9 by the Borough Architect's Department':  demure terraces, apparently of purple-brown brick - in fact timber-framed with brick cladding.

The Grapes, later c 19, debased Italianate.

7-8: Lilley & Skinner by M.Egan, and, much better detailed

Willerbys by C.J.Epril, small fry compared with what was built in the 1960s

Boots 1960s

Sainsburys with large upper blind wall, 1969 by Basil Whiting.

W. H. Smith, with a good plain front of concrete and glass bands, in scale with the older shops.

37 Green Man

Shopping precinct with bridge to the car park in Throwley Way begun 1979

Surrey House, another large block with a tower of offices at the back. Projecting mullions.  1975 by R. J. Wood & Partners.

Cock.  Sited at the top of the hill where Carshalton Road and Cheam Road cross. Thi was marked by an old inn sign above a central signpost which went rigfht across rthe road. The current pub is a successor to one demolished in 1961. The Old Cock Inn was here in 1735 on the turnpike road and the coach which left London at 7 pm stopped at the Cock at 9 P.m.   One landlord was Gentleman Jackson the prizefighter and associate of George VI. It had a new façade in 1897  with a round angle bay and two minor bays, with scrolly ornament.   

Barclays opposite, a good late c 19 corner building with lavish French Renaissance ornament

Lind Road

Where Jenny Lind lived on the Virgin.

7 New Town. Young’s pub.  Built in 1870 on a corner site as a hotel. Extended into a neighbouring house in 1877.

Lower Road

32 Lord Nelson. Young’s pub since the 1890s.  Victorian exterior with green tiles and etched windows. Garden.

Myrtle Road

18 New Inn.

Railway Line

Line between West Sutton and Sutton is ‘sinuous and steep’ with three reverse curves.

Robin Hood Lane

Health Centre.  An arrow in the Virgin’s heart. 1969 two storeys. By the Borough Architect's Department, white brick.

St. Nicholas. Flint 14th century style old church rebuilt 1862 by Edwin Nash. Broach-spire.  Concealed behind the organ is a monument to Dorothy Lady Brownlow 1700. There is an elaborate wall monument by William Stanton; reclining figure with mourning putti.

Churchyard. Gibson Mausoleum in the churchyard was a Watchhouse against eighteenth century body snatchers for the Gibson family. James Gibson was a citizen and merchant of London. It has a pyramid roof, rusticated quoins, and rusticated door surround. The Churchyard is opened each year in August by the vicar at ceremony for the Gibbons. The churchyard is now truncated and over-shadowed by the civic centre.

Rectory and Church Hall by Devereux & Partners, 1975.

St.Alban's Church 1930/3 used old timber from farm

St.Nicholas Road

St.Nicholas House built by London Power Co. for its workers. 1965. By Riches & Blythin. Three-storey block, grey curtain walling above shops, interlocking with a seven-storey block above.

Amos Reynolds  - became Skinners   the most interesting shop front in Sutton, the extension built for by Michael Manser Associates, 1965-6. Brilliantly simple. A plain wall faced with narrow white unbonded tiles, laid vertically, cut through by two tiers of cantilevered steel-framed glass boxes which act as miniature rooms for furniture display.

St.Nicholas Way

Civic Centre.  Nine-storey block on stilts. A monolithic, brick clad complex of 1973-8 with offices, library, advice bureau, and a college of the liberal arts all built around a sunken courtyard. This is a consciously plain building lacking in civic grandeur and it was designed by borough architects, J. Trevor Jobling and Peter Hirst. The proposed block housing the council chamber was never built as another victim of 1970s inflation and instead a multipurpose space, the 'Europa Gallery is used for council meetings. An imaginative mixture but not enhanced by its cramped position between service road and car park. The main approach is on two levels, the lower one via a subway from the High Street leading into a courtyard, with the information office at ground level and the informal foyer to library, exhibition gallery, and coffee area on the floor above.

Library

Advice Bureaux

College of Liberal Studies

Sutton

Sutton  ‘Sudtone’ 1086 in the Domesday Book, ‘Suttone’ 1164, ‘Suthtona’ 1174, that is "the south farmstead or estate', from Old English ‘suth’ and ‘tun’, probably so called in relation to Mitcham and Morden. Pre-Conquest spellings sometimes cited like ‘Suthtone’ 727 are from forged charters.

North of the road is Sutton New Town.  Pub called Jenny Lind.  Adult and nursery schools.  Christian Science church turned into a theatre

Tile works.  Halls’, selling tiles in Epsom not Sutton.

Surrey County Cinema.   First Compton unit organ installed 7 November 1921. Rebuilt as Kinestra 1927. John Compton had been developing a three ‘'unit' organ, complete with stop key console (as invented by Hope-Jones, and the first was installed here. It had 14 ranks of pipes and a primitive-looking three-manual console in a fixed position, as the idea of a lift to propel the organist into public view had not been thought of - at least, not in the UK. The organ was rebuilt in 1927 with a slightly more modern console.

Plaza Cinema, Compton organ installed 8 September: 1834   the Princes in Shaftesbury Avenue, now the Shaftesbury Theatre, installed an 11-rank Compton, removed in 1934 to the new Plaza at Sutton, a beautiful theatre of close on 2,400 seats. This Compton had a unique illuminated surround. The Plaza was staffed by Granada right from the start, including visiting organists like Reginald Dixon, and was later completely absorbed into the Granada circuit. The Compton survives in a private residence in Sussex.

Throwley Road,

Sutton Municipal Offices, demolished. This handsome Baroque style building of 1895, of red brick with stone dressings, formed part of an intended municipal grouping comprising library, magistrates' court and police station. It was designed by Curry & Tatlock who won a competition set by the Local Board.

Nine-storey block on stilts. The whole complex is by the Owen Luder Partnership, 1961-4. The tall block is a forceful, boldly profiled rectangular building with canted corners. There is a staircase tower at either end, the one nearer the High Street projecting well above the main building. The towers have continuous vertical bands of rough concrete; the office block has chamfered horizontal bands, projecting forward from the window plane. Both the Sutton buildings by this firm are an instructive illustration of the shift from the use of glass curtain walling in the Miesian tradition to the more expressionistic use of reinforced concrete that was gaining ground in the early 1960s. 

West Street

52 Robin Hood.  Imposing 19th detached building on the corner of Robin Hood Lane.

William Road

50 Victory.

Sutton United FC had been Sutton Cricket Club on ground donated by the Antrobus family. When the railway was built the ground was moved and the spoil used to fill a nearby chalk pit.

 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Bromley by Bow

South Norwood

River Lea/Bow Creek Canning Town