With or without the RIBA signboard facing the street, the construction work inside continue apace. The site is after all no stranger to a regular construction activity!
Originally built in the 19th Century, the site was a townhouse, sandwiched between others within an elegant, colonnaded Regency terrace.
The entire terrace was subject to the lateral conversion in mid-20th Century, turning all ten houses into a single hotel. In 1970s the hotel suffered from a catastrophic fire, causing death of four people.
Following the incident, all remaining internal timbers were removed and replaced by concrete and steel structures. The lateral openings through the original party walls were blocked up and the singular hotel block returned to the multiple of terraced houses. Most of the houses were then further sub-divided into flats and maisonettes.
Despite the attempts of the intervening 50 years to interior-design fit-outs of varying degrees of success, the elegant external envelope and the generous internal space proportions remained unscathed.
The presence of steel and concrete structure meant that the internal partitions could go. Once the suspended ceilings and secondary glazings were peeled away too and the remaining walls and ceilings repaired and re-plastered, the original quality of the interiors and the generosity of light that the windows bring finally come to the fore.
