SANDERSON & SONS FACTORY.

1902

Barley Mow Passage, Chiswick,
London.

For Sanderson & Sons wallpaper manufacturers.

 

The building has been converted into offices.
The walls are faced with white-glazed bricks and Staffordshire blue bricks and the coping is of Portland stone.
The roof is half glass and half slate.

 

Arthur Sanderson (1829-1882) had set up a business in Islington around 1860 for the importing of French wallpapers and built his first paper staining works in Chiswick in 1879.
Voysey House was the final extension to the Sandersons factory complex, completed in 1902, on the site of Bleak House, in which Sandersons had provided staff facilities. (Charles Lawrence)

 

 

Voysey House, image on chiswicktimeline.org
 Link > RIBA Drawings Collection (Sanderson & Sons)

 

Sanderson, photo on Voysey Society

 

 

Plan of the site circa 1903,
from Charles Lawrence, Voysey House Chiswick : Architect C F A Voysey 1902, p.7.

 

 

Elevations published in David Gebhard, Charles F. A. Voysey Architect, fig.95 & fig.96, p.151.
RIBA Drawings Collection

 

North elevation from Charles Lawrence, Voysey House Chiswick : Architect C F A Voysey 1902, p.11.

 

South elevation as published in The Builders' Journal and Architectural Record, February 25th 1903,
from Charles Lawrence, Voysey House Chiswick : Architect C F A Voysey 1902, p.10.

 

 

Worm's eye view drawn by Adrian Blanchard 1986.
Back cover from Charles Lawrence, Voysey House Chiswick : Architect C F A Voysey 1902.

 

 

Ground floor plan from Charles Lawrence, Voysey House Chiswick : Architect C F A Voysey 1902, p.9.

 

Cross section from Charles Lawrence, Voysey House Chiswick : Architect C F A Voysey 1902, p.14.

 

 



Photo by Steve Cadman on Flickr

 

 

Photo by Phil Beard on buttes-chaumont.blogspot.com

 

 

Photo by Charles Holland on fantasticjournal.blogspot.com

 

 

Photo by Jacques Lasserre on Panoramio

 

 

Photo by Jacques Lasserre on Panoramio

 

 

Photo by Jacques Lasserre on Panoramio

 

 

Photo by Jacques Lasserre on Panoramio

 

 

Photo by Jacques Lasserre on Panoramio

 

 

Photo by Phil Beard on buttes-chaumont.blogspot.com

 

 

Photo by Phil Beard on buttes-chaumont.blogspot.com

 

 

Photo by Phil Beard on buttes-chaumont.blogspot.com

 

 

Photo Courtauld Institute of Art

 

 

Photo Courtauld Institute of Art

 

 

Photo Courtauld Institute of Art

 

Sanderson's Factory, Chiswick, photo courtesy of John Trotter

 

Sanderson's Factory, Chiswick, photo courtesy of John Trotter

 

Sanderson's Factory, Chiswick, photo courtesy of John Trotter

 

Sanderson's Factory, Chiswick, photo courtesy of John Trotter

 

Photo by David Hawgood on geograph.org.uk

 

 

Photo by Joanne Lukacher on flickr

 

Photographs and Drawings Courtesy of The Royal Institute of British Architects.
Photographs, drawings, perspectives and other design patterns
at the Royal Institut of British Architects Drawings and Photographs Collection.
Images can be purchased.
The RIBA can supply you with conventional photographic or digital copies
of any of the images featured in RIBApix.

Link > RIBA Drawings Collection: Sanderson & Sons Images

Link > RIBApix: all Voysey Images

 

 Link > www.voyseysociety.org

Link > Wikipedia

Link > Work And Colour: Sanderson And Chiswick 1879-1928
               By Freddie Launert
               Brentford and Chiswick Local History Journal 10 (2001)

Link > Chiswicktimeline.org

Link > Black & White Photographs on flickr taken in 1976

Link > Flickr images tagged Sanderson Voysey

 

 

Pevsner's London 3: North West (with Bridget Cherry, 1991) says in Chiswick: Perambulation 2: High Road:

A little further W, where the lane becomes Barley Mow Passage, is VOYSEY HOUSE, built in 1902 as an extension to Sanderson's wallpaper factory opposite. By CFA Voysey; his only factory building, and a clean and charming design. White glazed brick with ground floor and dressings in Staffordshire blue brick (now painted black). Three floors of large horizontal segment-headed windows and a fourth with small circular windows. Buttresses (housing ventilation shafts) ending with flat 'mortarboard' projections like wooden bedsteads in the Arts and Crafts taste. A tall parapet curves gracefully between them. The interiors are equally satisfactory; well lit, and given character by shallow concrete barrel-vaults above corrugated iron shuttering. The supporting iron columns are progressively slenderer on each floor. Well restored from 1989 by Lawrence & Wrightson (with a roof-top flat tactfully behind the parapet).

Source: Pevsner Architectural Guides at Yale University Press.

 

 

Description on Historic England
Voysey House
Sanderson's wallpaper factory, building now offices. 1902, by C F A Voysey for Messrs Sanderson; alterations 1968 and 1987. Glazed white brick in English bond with Staffordshire blue brick now painted black to plinth, bands and opening surrounds; Portland stone dressings; late C20 felted roof. 4-storeys with 1987 roof-top flat; 4½ x 2 bays, the eastern bay containing stairs, lift and toilets. Original small-pane steel-framed windows to east side, otherwise replacement early-mid C20 metal casement windows; windows segmental-arched with dripmoulds and on all but east side occupying full width of bay; circular windows to 3rd floor. Bays defined by giant butresses, within which are air vents, smaller on 3rd floor and rising above parapet. Stone cornice to 2nd floor and to shaped parapet. South, entrance, elevation has round-arched entrance to bay 4 with recessed replacement doors; left-hand ground-floor window now entrance; metal quadrant caps in buttress angles; east bay blind apart from 3rd-floor window which replaces entrance to former bridge, spanning road, across to Sanderson's main factory building. North elevation: east bay has narrower round-arched windows, the 3rd floor blind; ground floor windows of 2 right bays blocked, with one inserted door. West end: ground floor windows altered, that on right blocked and with 1987 round-arched fire-escape door; that on left now entrance. East end: left bay has round-arched doorway and various windows, some flat. Arched; 1968 windows to 3rd floor. Interior: cast-iron columns, reducing in diameter on successive floors, support steel joists and corrugated-iron-shuttered arched concrete floors. Stair rises around lift shaft. Roof originally was double pitched with glazed north sides; north parapet lined with glazed white brick to reflect light down through roof. An important Arts and Crafts factory building and the only industrial building which Voysey designed.
The Buildings of England, Middlesex, N Persner (1951) p37; Edwardian Architecture, A Service (1977) pp128, 131; Charles F A Voysey, Architect, D Gebhard (1979), p 27; The Great Perspectivists, G Stamp (1982) p148.

 

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Phil Beard

Voysey’s Factory Building

C F Voysey has a long list of distinguished detached houses in the Arts & Crafts style to his name. As a devoted disciple of Pugin and the English Gothic Tradition and an assiduous follower of Ruskin’s bracing fundamentalism he would seem an unlikely candidate for an industrial commission. But Voysey had an active side-line in textile and wallpaper design and a genuine flair for sinuously elegant repeating patterns derived from close study of natural forms. Arthur Sanderson & Sons was the leading producer of high quality textiles and wallpapers and Harold Sanderson had employed the services of Voysey to design a summer-house. Not soon after, Voysey was chosen to design new factory premises adjacent to an existing factory in Chiswick, West London. As built in 1902 the Voysey factory was linked to the old building by a covered passage at third floor level.

Voysey's only industrial building is intriguing. Of concrete construction, faced with white glazed bricks, it had generous metal framed windows, bold vertical piers and an undulating parapet. The overall impression is austere but not inelegant. There’s a jaunty rhythm made by the black string courses that wrap round the piers and follow the gentle curves over the windows. The portholes near the top add a distinctive note. The main entrance comes flanked by cast-iron quadrants in the corners designed to deter drinkers from the Barley Mow pub next door, relieving themselves on the tiled finishes. It is reported that in later life Voysey detested being included in the lineage of Modernism. His fastidious nature would not have been flattered by association with the geometric severities of Le Corbusier or Gropius. There is no evidence of Voysey having any influence on the development of Modernism. Though it must be conceded that his preference for clarity of form and avoidance of ornamentation had some affinity with Modernist sensibilities.

Source : https://buttes-chaumont.blogspot.com


References:

The Builder's Journal & Architectural Record, XVII, 1903, pp. 26 & 32.

The Journal of Decorative Art and Wallpaper News, 1905, supplement pp. 16-23.

Duncan Simpson, C.F.A. VOYSEY an architect of individuality, London 1979.

Wendy Hitchmough, CFA  VOYSEY, London 1995, pp. 180-2.

 David Cole, The Art and architecture of CFA Voysey : English pioneer modernist architect & designer, 2015.

Lawrence, C., ‘Sandersons: a question of timing’, The Orchard (no.1, 2012), pp. 54-5.

Lawrence, C., Voysey House (Charles Lawrence, 2019).

Lawrence, C., ‘Voysey, Sandersons and Chiswick’, The Orchard (no.2, 2013), pp. 37-45.

Woodcock, S., ‘AB Sanderson and CFA Voysey: a personal connection?’, The Orchard (no.8, 2019), pp. 20-23.


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Compare the Sanderson factory with a building in Islington executed in 1897 (not by Voysey)

1897
32 Cross Street, Islington, London,
photo by Heinz Theuerkauf in 1976.

 

1897
32 Cross Street, Islington, London,
photo by Heinz Theuerkauf in 1976.

 

 

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