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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.
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