BEECH WOODEN FLOORS

VICTORIA MILL, DRAYCOTT AND CHURCH WILNE, DERBYSHIRE

Grade: II
Date Listed: 02/05/1986
NGR: SK4381034222

Tenement lace factory, now light industrial works. Erected between 1888 and 1907, with partial rebuilding after a fire in 1902. Built by E Terah Hooley, a wealthy local industrialist, and finished by Ernest Jardine. Red brick with blue and yellow brick and stone dressings. Slate roofs with numerous stone coped gables on moulded kneelers, plus moulded brick cornice. Four storeys and 57 bays. Main elevation of Derby Road has polished granite plinth, rock faced stone ground floor, red brick with blue brick and stone bands to upper floors and a moulded and dentilled stone cornice. Five bay facade with advanced central bay topped by square tower. Ground floor has a
large semi-circular headed doorcase with raised keystone and a pulvinated frieze and open swan-necked pediment over. Double panelled doors with fanlight, below. To either side there are pairs of semi-circular headed windows with rock faced stone voussoirs, and flush stone bands at sill level. Above there are pairs of iron casement windows under carved lintels with lozenge design, to either side of round central window with large keyblocks. Above again, five similar iron windows under carved
lintels with zig-zag design, and five more iron windows under moulded lintels above. Central tower above has a deep base inscribed '1906. JARDINE', with clockfaces to each side over, flanked by nookshafts to each corner supporting a bracketed cornice which curves up over the clockfaces. Ogival fish-scale tiled copper roof to top of tower with vented frieze below. East elevation has 57 segment headed iron casement windows below yellow brick heads to ground, first and second floors, each with stepped pilaster buttress to sides. Top floor has 57 similar flat headed iron windows below moulded stone lintels. West elevation is similar except for the addition of four full height bow fronted staircase turrets with loading doors to all floors to sides and small segment headed stair windows to front. Interior has wooden floors supported on iron columns. Steam engine with rope drive to all floors removed c1958. Chimney and outside lavatories also demolished.

Reputedly the largest lace factory in the world.

Roof-line of industrial buildings.

Now known as the Storehouse (the Guinness Visitor Centre), for many years this building was under threat of demolition, lying empty and disused. Ironically, only the cost of demolition saved it. The building is reputedly the earliest steel framed multi-storey building in Britain and Ireland and is a magnificent structure with massive brickwork and detailing. It was built in 1904 as the Fermentation House for the brewery. In plan the building was almost square with the steel structure allowing light wells to illuminate the ground floor. Unusually for a steel framed building, the steelwork is exposed, neither clad in concrete as was the norm in Europe or in terracotta or plaster as was the norm in similar Chicago buildings.

Perched on top is the new Gravity Bar by RKD Architects which has floor to ceiling glazing almost the entire way around and a magnificent view of the city.

The interior of the Storehouse (as it is now known) is impressive. The sheer scale of the original buildings engineering has been enhanced by the renovations. During this a new atrium, shaped like a pint glass was cut through the floors of the building leaving the original steelwork exposed. This space erupts through the roof to the new Gravity Bar perched on top of the building. The space is crisscrossed by escalators to take visitors to the next level. The Gravity Bar has fabulous un-interupted views of Dublin.

The interior of the building was finished in white glazed bricks and these bricks were also used on the undersides of the floors which where constructed on concrete jackarches clad with the bricks.