499-517 Oxford Street
Mayfair
499-517 Oxford Street
London, England
W1K 7DA
A. W. Gamage’s Oxford Street store with flats above (completed 1930), designed by C. S. and E. M. Joseph under Lutyens’s close oversight as estate architect, is a vast red‑brick and Portland‑stone block whose massing and large classical motifs scale up neo‑Georgian domestic forms rather than embracing emerging modern commercial idioms.
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Description
A W Gamage Limited signed a building agreement for this Oxford Street site in September 1928 and proposed to build a store with flats above to form the new company of Gamages (West End) Limited. Gamages’ architects were C. S. and E. M. Joseph, but the building had to be erected ‘to the satisfaction of Sir Edwin Lutyens and Mr. Blow as … Estate Architects’ and Lutyens, in particular, had a firm hand on the finished design. He submitted elevations and a typical upper-floor plan for the (Grosvenor Estate) Duke of Westminster’s approval in 1928 and several of his sketches and detailed drawings for the building survive among the collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). When the building was completed in 1930 Messrs. Joseph were described as the architects with Lutyens as consultant. The builders were Higgs and Hill. The result of their collaboration is a huge building of red brick and Portland stone. The influence of Lutyens is evident in the general arrangement of the mass of the building, particularly at the upper levels, and in the large-scale classical features, designed to be seen from below. These features give character to the building, and what the architectural correspondent of The Times called, in another context, the skilful manner of his ‘stone binding of the brick mass’ is very apparent.G But the overall design, which was no doubt the product of a compromise between the reticent neo-Georgian then in vogue on the Grosvenor estate, the need to give dignity to what was in part a block of luxury flats, and the demands of a superstore, passed over the new possibilities then being opened up in the field of commercial architecture and relied instead on a scaled-up version of Georgian domestic architecture with superimposed classical motifs.
Bibliography
, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol40/pt2/pp176-184#h3-0017