Nos. 80 to 82 Clerkenwell Road were rebuilt after the Second World War, but back in the 19th century this was the home of Pierce’s Dining and Refreshment Rooms, which was a coffee tavern and workman’s temperance hotel. It sounds like a lot of fun.
One of the first buildings to be constructed along the new Clerkenwell Road was Edward Culver’s gold chain manufacturing business. This is the building like an acute triangle at the corner of Clerkenwell Road and Albemarle Way. Interesting original features include twisted iron columns on either side of the windows, and tall urns on top of the parapet wall. The building was taken over by London County and Westminster Bank in 1915 and they gave it a grander entrance deemed more fitting for a bank.
Nos. 86 to 88 Clerkenwell Road, on the other side of Clerkenwell Square, was built as part of a factory in the mid-1880s, and for long time it was the London base of Zetters Pools (football pools, not swimming pools – that was on the other side of the street.) In 2004, Michael Benyan and Mark Sainsbury converted it into an upmarket hotel, but shrewdly kept the memorable ‘Zetter’s’ name.
Nos. 102 to 108 Clerkenwell Road were originally occupied by the Salvation Army, which had a big publishing and trading business at the time. But from the First World War until the 1930s, this was the heart of the British record business as the headquarters and studios of ‘Columbia Graphophone’, which later became Columbia Records. Columbia merged with HMV in the 1930s to form EMI, and they eventually moved their recording studios to Abbey Road.
Nos. 110 to 114 Clerkenwell Road were originally called ‘Javens Chambers’ after the shop owner who commissioned the building in 1885, and it spent much of its life as a dairy and a café.
Nos. 116 and 118 Clerkenwell Road, the glass-fronted building near the corner of Clerkenwell Green, is an award-winning office building called Klamath House, built in 1990. The Victorian building it replaced had housed diamond polishing workshops.
The building called ‘Cornwell House’, on the corner with Clerkenwell Green, was built as ‘the Sessions House Hotel’, originally a pub and hotel. It was built on the site of the original Jerusalem Tavern. The Sessions House Hotel closed in the 1920s and was then turned into a spectacle factory. Finally, in the 1970s, it was turned into craft workshops by the London Borough of Islington for the Clerkenwell Green Association and renamed ‘Cornwell House’ after the company who refitted it – rather generous of the council.
