AT GROUND LEVEL, London’s Oxford Street is lined with numerous retail outlets, many of which can be seen on shopping streets and in malls all over England. Raise your eyes above ground level, and you will notice that the shops are beneath buildings designed in a bewilderingly wide range of styles. Today (the 22nd of May 2024), I spotted a Modernist style building, number 219 Oxford Street, which is on the corner of Oxford Street and Hill Street. Its ground floor has become part of a Zara shop’s showroom.
The upper floors of the five-storeyed number 219 retain their 20th century Modernist style architectural features, and its Oxford Street facade is adorned with three bas-relief plaques. One of them, at the fourth-floor level bears the date ‘1951’ and a logo. Despite its date, the building has remarkably clean lines and an elegant simplicity. There is much information on the Internet about this edifice, but even though I have walked past it many times, it was only today that it caught my attention.
The Historic England website (https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1352668?section=official-list-entry) revealed that the building:
“… was designed by Ronald Ward and Partners in 1950 for the landlord Jack Salmon, who took the second-floor suite for himself. The scheme was revised in February 1951, but was not built until after August 1951 (explaining the plaques celebrating the Festival of Britain – an event which was held in the summer of that year), and appears not to have been completed until 1952, as evidenced by the dated tile near the door to the upper floors. Despite the delay in its construction the building was among the very earliest post-war commercial buildings to be put up in the capital.”
Another website (https://lookup.london/219-oxford-street-history/) provided some detail about what is depicted on the plaques. The plaque with the date 1951 also contains the (1951) Festival of Britain logo. Above this, the top plaque shows the Royal Festival Hall and next to it the Shot Tower from Lambeth Lead Works, which stood close to the Hall, but was demolished in 1962 to make way for the Queen Elizabeth Hall. The lowest plaque depicts the Skylon, which was also part of the Festival of Britain complex of structures (on the South Bank), but no longer exists.
Number 219 was threatened with demolition in 2004, but luckily for us it escaped this fate, and is now protected as a Grade II Listed Building.
yamey 