No. 1 Clerkenwell Road stands more in Goswell Road than Clerkenwell Road.
There is a new development behind No. 1 Clerkenwell Road and into Charterhouse Square, and that is the Charterhouse Square Campus of Queen Mary University of London.
There is a modern office and shop development which is No. 9 Clerkenwell Road.
Most of the south side of Clerkenwell Road is taken up by the wall of The Charterhouse which extends here from Charterhouse Square.
The curved building on the corner of Clerkenwell Road and St John Street has an interesting history. It was built as a swimming pool, called ‘Central Bath’. It had a glass roof. Apparently people didn’t swim in the winter, so in the winter months, the swimming pool was covered over with a temporary floor and used for meetings. The swimming pool didn’t last long and the building was converted into an electroplating works. From 1896 until the 1970s, the building was occupied by EC Furby & Sons whose business was electroplating and enamelling bicycle parts. The premises were still baths in a way – but for electroplating rather than swimming.
The electroplating and bicycle themes continued along Clerkenwell Road. On the other side of St John Street, No. 27 Clerkenwell Road was used as a workshop for tinplate manufacturing until well after the Second World War. No. 29 Clerkenwell Road, which now has a 1930s façade, was originally built as a bicycle factory.
Penny Bank Chambers, the rather grand building on the corner of Clerkenwell Road and St John’s Square takes its name from the National Penny Bank for which it was built in 1880. You can still see the bank’s penny piece emblem in the terracotta frieze running along the front of the building under the first floor windows. They had a bank branch on the ground floor and the upper floors were used by as artisans dwellings. (The Princess who opened the building was given a commemorative trowel, inlaid with silver pennies and the figure of a workman with a bank book, illustrating ‘the power of the penny’.) There were a lot of penny banks in the 19th century whose mission was to persuade working people to save their pennies. The bank survived until the First World War. The ground floor of the building was then taken over by jewellery and clock makers. In the 1970s, Islington Council refurbished it as craft workshops for the Clerkenwell Green Association.
On the next corner, No. 37-43 Clerkenwell Road was called St John’s Buildings and it was again occupied by yet more electroplaters, and jewellers, and also the rather grand-sounding National Society of Lithographic Artists and Engravers. Next to them, No. 45-47 Clerkenwell Road was a warehouse constructed for printers Gilbert & Rivington of St John’s Square.
No. 49-53 Clerkenwell Rd, on the corner of Britton Street, is the grandest and most elaborate building in Clerkenwell Road. It was built in the 1880s as an outpatients treatment centre for the Holborn Union Board of Guardians. The red brickwork is particularly beautiful. Now it’s a block of flats called ‘The Red House’.
Nothing remains between Britton and Turnmill Streets of Nos. 57 – 61 Clerkenwell Road, which used to be the headquarters of Kodak. In 1911 the building was taken over by Murray’s, the confectionery manufacturers (not the makers of Murray’s Mints – that was Trebor). The building was destroyed by bombing in the war and was rebuilt in the 1950s as an office building, called Fleet House (after the Fleet River which runs underground nearby).
The new office building on the corner of Clerkenwell Road and Turnmill Street (built in 2015) replaced No. 63 Clerkenwell Rd and No. 64 Turnmill Street. These buildings were originally stables for the Great Northern Railway Company. At one point, more than 190 horses were kept there. The railway company needed horses to pull the carts ferrying goods between Farringdon station and its goods depot. In the 1930s, when lorries were replacing horses, the premises were taken over by Booth’s, the gin makers, as a warehouse for their wine business. More recently the building was turned into ‘Turnmills’, a well-known night club. Michael Jackson and Madonna visited it, and the gangster, ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser was shot there in 1991.
North side – Goswell Road to St John Street
The oldest building in Clerkenwell Road – in fact, the only commercial building pre-dating the construction of the road itself – is the former Hat &Feathers pub on the corner of Clerkenwell Road and Goswell Road. It is elaborately decorated with statues, urns, and carved flower arrangements, and you won’t be surprised to know the architects specialised in building Victorian music halls.
Most of the buildings on the north side of Clerkenwell Road from there to St John Street were built as factories for the clock and watch trade. This area had been a particular centre for watch and clock manufacturing since the beginning of the 19th century. The trade was still going strong in the 1950s when Nos. 12 to 16 Clerkenwell Road were was built by Richard Seifert & Partners for a dealer in watch parts. Nos. 32 to 34 Clerkenwell Road were occupied by watch strap makers and at one time by Synchronism Electric Clocks. The present building on the site was put up in the 1960s.
Watch and clock making and jewellery manufacturing became the principal businesses in the area. Before the First World War, the list of local businesses included 18 clockmakers, 24 jewellery manufacturers, eight gold engravers, five gilders, and various electroplaters, refiners of silver, ivory turners, and diamond merchants. The workers in precious metals included goldbeaters who could beat gold to a thickness of 290,000ths of an inch.
One of the largest clock and watch manufacturers in the country was Robert Pringle & Sons who eventually occupied all of Nos 36 to 42 Clerkenwell Rd and a lot of Great Sutton Street at the back. They called it ‘Wilderness Works’ (after Wilderness Way, the original name for this part of Clerkenwell Road). It was built in 1898 in Queen Anne style with Dutch gables. At its height, the factory contained 14 different departments including jewellery and watchmaking, electroplating and silversmithing.
Next door to Pringle’s factory, the building comprising Nos. 44 to 48 Clerkenwell Road was built in the 1930s as a factory for another jeweller and watchmaker, Elias Korn.
Nos. 60 to 62 Clerkenwell Road is an ‘Arts and Crafts’ style building from 1910 which still houses one of the remaining watch businesses in the area, ‘The Antique Watch Co’.
Nos.70 to 74 Clerkenwell Road were originally two shops built in the 1870s. Uniquely for the area, they were largely constructed of iron, and you can still see prominent cast-iron panels and brackets on the façades.
The ornate building on the corner with St John Street was originally the Criterion Hotel, which was built in the 1870s by The Canon Brewery, which occupied a large part of St John Street north of Clerkenwell Road. In the 1960s it was taken over by the expanding watch trade of the time.
