Already in the Sun Assurance Offices in Threadneedle Street in the City of London, designed in 1839 and built in 1841-2, which do not in fact conform at all closely to the standard palazzo formula, Cockerell not only opened the ground floor with an arcade of haunched-segmental arches but also linked his two topmost floors behind an engaged colonnade in order to reduce the apparent height of the façade to three storeys. Across the street in the Royal Exchange Buildings of 1844-5 Edward l’Anson (1812-88) in 1844-5 lifted his whole palace front above a tall glazed arcade and tied the top-storey windows into a sort of frieze as Barry had already done in the second storey of the Reform Club (Plate [35B]). In Manchester l’Anson’s cousin Edward Walters (1808-72) in the Silas Schwabe Building of 1845 at 41 Mosley Street linked the windows of the first and second storeys by an applied arcade.
The building with an exterior entirely of cast iron that James Bogardus (1800-74) designed and built for his own use in New York in 1848-50 was well publicized at the time,[[298]] and is still famous although long since demolished. On the corner of Washington and Murray Streets in New York another Bogardus building, the Laing stores erected in two months in 1849, is still extant (Plate [67B]). Although there was never any such general use of cast-iron fronts in Great Britain as in America in the fifties and sixties, it seems probable from contemporary evidence that some architect, probably Owen Jones, built one at 76 Oxford Street in London a year or so before 1851. However that may be, an ironfounder named McConnel provided the structural elements for an office building that still stands[[299]] in Jamaica Street, Glasgow, in 1855 with an exterior all of cast iron. A curious feature of the design of this structure is the delicate iron membering that forms a series of arcades between the major structural piers. This decorative device, structurally meaningless in iron except for bracing although employed by Paxton at the Crystal Palace, is probably an imitation of the masonry arcading that was, in the mid fifties, gradually modifying the earlier palazzo paradigm quite beyond recognition.
In 1849 Wild used two ranges of Italian Gothic arcades on his St Martin’s Northern Schools in London, and the perspicacious Street remarked in an article on the obvious suitability of the theme for commercial fronts, as has already been noted. In Manchester in 1851 Starkey & Cuffley in a pair of shops employed ranges of three arches on each of the two fronts in the four storeys, binding them in with coupled columns marking the ends of the party walls.
The lifting of the window tax in 1851 encouraged great increases in window area. In jubilant recognition of this H. R. Abraham the next year made all his windows triplets in the first and second storeys of the W. H. Smith Building at 188-192 Strand in London, but without using any arches at all. Two years later, however, in a building for Heal’s furniture store in Tottenham Court Road in London, James M. Lockyer (1824-65) carried a quattrocento arcade all across the first storey.
By this time architects and public alike had become aware of a different High Renaissance formula from Barry’s (see Chapter [4]). Beside the Reform Club in Pall Mall Sydney Smirke’s new front of the Carlton Club, designed in 1847, was coming to belated completion in the mid fifties. Moreover, its Sansovinesque arcades were already echoed in the first storey of Parnell & Smith’s Army and Navy Club of 1848-51 across the way. These London models were closely followed by William B. Gingell (1819-1900) in his West of England Bank in Corn Street, Bristol, of 1854 and quite outranked by the great Venetian palazzo that David Rhind (?-1883) erected in 1855 in Prince’s Street in Edinburgh for the Life Association of Scotland.
Possibly the fine warehouse at 12 Temple Street in Bristol with three groups of triplet arches in each of the upper storeys is by Gingell and of this date. There is none of the Sansovinesque lushness of his bank here, but the fine workmanship of the quarry-faced Pennant stone walls laid up in random ashlar, with smooth-cut Bath stone trim and coloured voussoirs banding the arches, bears some resemblance to the Bristol General Hospital he was building in 1853-7, notably in the very bold rustication of the ground-storey arches.
However that may be, two London buildings of 1855 advanced nearly as far towards the all-arcaded front. Hodgson’s Building by Knowles in the Strand at the corner of Chancery Lane had the general character of a palazzo, but all the windows were arched, as in buildings of the Rundbogenstil; moreover their trim sank into the wall rather than projecting from it, so that the wall sections between were reduced visually to mere piers, even though they had no imposts. The Crown Life Office, in New Bridge Street, Blackfriars, was built in 1855-7 by Ruskin’s friends Deane & Woodward, with whom he was most closely associated precisely in those years. The round-arched medieval arcading of this façade, with the piers hardly narrower than on Knowles’s building yet articulated by bases and imposts, may surely claim Ruskinian sanction. Here, at any rate, was the first important contact between advanced High Victorian Gothic and the commercial world, a contact destined to be very fruitful over the next fifteen years or so. Henceforth even architects of no aesthetic pretension were ready to exploit arcading.
The English development of arcaded masonry façades can be closely matched in America, specifically in Philadelphia.[[300]] There S. D. Button (1803-97), Napoleon Le Brun (1821-1901), and others in buildings of 1852-3 in Chestnut Street—that at 239-241 by Button is still extant—consistently used arched openings between slim piers; and Notman in 1855 provided for the Jackson Building at 418 Arch Street a façade even more completely articulated by arcading in all its four floors than the Crown Life Office. By this time, moreover, the trabeated design of Bogardus’s first iron fronts had likewise given way to ornate arcading in emulation of masonry fronts.[[301]]
Iron remained behind the scenes in most of the English arcaded buildings. In Waterhouse’s Fryer & Binyon Warehouse in Manchester of 1856, however, whose upper walls had the polychrome diapering of the Doge’s Palace so much admired by Ruskin, the first storey was opened up by an arcade carried on coupled iron columns. In the Wellington Williams Warehouse of 1858 in Little Britain in London, the obscure City firm of J. Young & Son used arcades in all the five storeys with iron columns to support the outer orders; thus the width of the piers could be considerably reduced, and the effect of over-all articulation was much enhanced as in the Philadelphia buildings.
Deane & Woodward’s very Ruskinian project of 1857 for the new Government Offices, with its endless Italian Gothic arcading, and a small warehouse in Merchant Street in Bristol of 1858 by Godwin gave some impetus to the use of pointed instead of round arches. But on the whole the best designed among the innumerable arcaded façades in England retained the rounded form, however Gothic their other detailing may be. In one of the largest and finest examples of the early sixties, moreover, Kassapian’s Warehouse in Leeds Road, Bradford, perhaps by Lockwood & Mawson, the detailing is academically Roman (Plate [114B]).