Anyone who wanders along Bond Street – New or Old – can easily become entranced. Shop after shop display the wares of the most prestigious and famous brands in the world. Huge glass windows and bright signs present the luxuries available to those who have the right depth of wallet or sufficient bendiness to their credit card. Among this cornucopia is Ferragamo. It resides in a building that, I would dare to suggest, outshines even this illustrious brand. Designed by the architect E. Vincent Harris, for the perfumier Atkinson, and completed in 1926, it is a fusion wonder, a blend of many scents, just right for its first occupant.
The walk up Old Bond Street from Piccadilly reveals a wondrous elevation. It is relatively narrow and soars upwards topped by a sharp gable. It’s as if the tip of something has been found in the ground by a giant pair of plyers and then dragged upwards. As this side of the building rises, its central section recesses before finishing in an arch. Either side of this recess are windows on each of the four stories. Hawksmoor’s glorious Christ Church, Spitalfields has exactly the same sense of vertical elongation.
From here, walk around the corner into Burlington Gardens where the main shop frontage is found. How can I describe this best? Well, it’s almost as if Harris took a good bit of medieval Flemish cloth, put it in the washing machine and decided to run it on a gentle classical programme. At the street level is a windowed arcade, a real les halles of Ypres in the West End. Above this is a cornice line and six sets of windows. Here, Harris goes ‘Tudorbethan’ with corbels holding two sets of oriel windows, richly decorated with gold bosses, which stretch upwards for the remaining three stories. Covering all is a mansard roof complete with windows. Completing the Flemish dream is a flèche spire containing a full carillon bell set.
In adopting this conscious recreation of the past, Harris’s work is of a piece with Edwin Hall’s Liberty of London store on Great Marlborough Street and Sydney Tatchell’s Ironmongers’ Hall on Aldersgate Street. Overlaying this medieval-‘Tudorbethanism’ is the Classicism that holds everything together in its balances, proportions and the simplicity of the Portland stone.
This gloriously eclectic mix makes just lingering on a West End corner as pleasurable as sniffing a very fine perfume. Let’s go on the trail of these scents together on my Upstairs, Downstairs walk.
