Brewer Street
All of the ground on the north side of Brewer
Street between Bridle Lane and Warwick Street
formed part of Gelding Close. In 1684 Martha
Axtell granted fifty-one-year leases of most of the
ground between Bridle Lane and Lower John
Street to John Taylor, John James, Abraham
Bridle, William Partridge, William Dormer and
John Niblett. (ref. 91)
At the partition of 1675 the ground between
Lower John Street and Warwick Street was taken
by Isaac Symball. Building there was probably
under the long lease which the latter granted to
John Wells, gentleman (ref. 25) (see page 165).
No. 54 Brewer Street
Formerly No. 10
No. 54 is a stuccoed building of three storeys,
perhaps incorporating part of the original late
seventeenth-century house. The Brewer Street
front has in the ground storey an altered shopfront of mid nineteenth-century date, and in the
second storey three flat-headed windows. Above
these is a bandcourse, possibly of brick beneath
the stucco, and in the third storey a single wide
window. The interior has been completely
altered.
No. 62 Brewer Street
Demolished
This well-designed house at the east corner of
Lower James Street had a handsome shop-front
(Plate 137a) and was probably of mid eighteenthcentury date. The shop-front towards Brewer
Street was divided into three bays, narrow between wide, by Doric plain-shafted columns.
The middle columns had pilaster responds
flanking the plain elliptical-arched doorway to
the shop. Each side bay contained a shop
window, above a stallboard grating formed of
vertical iron bars twisted into wavy profiles.
The entablature, which had a plain frieze and
a dentilled cornice, was carried across each
side bay window and broken forwards over each
column, but in the middle bay the architrave and
frieze were omitted, while the cornice was carried
across to form an open triangular pediment-hood
to the doorway. The house front had been stuccoed to represent stone, but the original form had
been preserved. There were three storeys, each
with three windows in plain openings, the middle
one wider than the others. A bold sill-band underlined the first-floor windows, the middle one being
accented by a round-arched head. There was a
simply moulded entablature below the windows
in the attic storey, which was finished with an
open triangular pediment. Breaks in the surface
divided the wide return front into three parts, the
slightly projecting centre containing a trio of
windows in each storey, round-arched on the first
floor, rectangular on the second, and framed by a
semi-circular arch in the attic. Either side face had
two windows in each storey, but many of these
windows were, in fact, blind.
Nos. 80– 82 (even) Brewer Street
Formerly Nos. 21–22 (consec.)
These two houses appear to have been built
together, probably shortly before 1700. They
share a front and each contains a cellar, three
storeys, and a mansard garret. No. 80, however,
has the wider part of the frontage, with three
windows in each storey, but the shallow site
allows only one room on each floor, reached by a
cramped staircase in a compartment that projects
partly into the room and partly from the back
wall. The stair, which has moulded closed strings,
simply turned balusters, Doric column newels,
and a slender moulded handrail, is complete from
the first floor to the garret. Apart from some
box-cornices and fragments of plain rebated panelling, there is nothing else of interest within the
house. No. 82, with a two-windows-wide front,
has a conventional plan, with the dog-legged
staircase on the west side of the back room. This
staircase is complete above the first-floor level, and
some ovolo-moulded panelling survives in the
first-floor rooms. The ground storey of the front
has been replaced by shop-fronts, but No. 80 has
its original six-panelled front door. The upper
part of the front is very plain, in stock bricks
with red dressings to the flat-arched window
openings which contain flush frames with later
sashes.