A Short History of
Northumberland House
8 Northumberland Avenue
London
WC2N 5BY
London Northumberland House - Canaletto - 1752
A Short History
The Northumberland, Northumberland Avenue, was built as a 500-room ‘grand hotel’
between 1882 and 1887. Northumberland Avenue was created in 1875-6, a major
element in the Metropolitan Board of Works’ civic improvements to the West End,
though it involved the demolition of the original Northumberland House, the
celebrated Jacobean mansion.
The Northumberland Avenue Hotel Company, set up in 1882 to develop the site,
appointed Florence & Isaacs as architects and started work on the building.
However, costs soared because of difficult ground conditions, and the company
went bankrupt in 1884. It was taken over by the vast financial empire of Jabez
Balfour; the hotel was completed, and opened and launched as the Hotel Victoria in
1887. Shortly after, it was caught up in the collapse of Balfour’s empire, and was
purchased by the rival Gordon Hotels group. It traded as a hotel, with a brief interval
during the Great War, until 1940, when it was requisitioned by the War Office. It has
been occupied by the Crown ever since. The building is listed at grade II, and is in
the Trafalgar Square Conservation Area.
The site
Northumberland Avenue was laid out on the site of Northumberland House between
1875 and 1876. The old Northumberland House had been one of the most
celebrated aristocratic residences in London, designed by Bernard Jansen and
Gerard Christmas and dating from c1600. The house was remodelled several times,
and was given superb new state-rooms by Robert Adam in the 1770’s. By the 1870’s it
was the last survivor of the great aristocratic mansions which had lined the north bank
of the Thames since the sixteenth century. It fell victim to the Metropolitan Board of
Works’ determination to improve Westminster’s traffic circulation by providing a link
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between Trafalgar Square and the new Embankment. The house was compulsorily
purchased and, after much protest, demolished in 1874.
The new street was designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette and George Vulliamy,
respectively engineer and architect to the Metropolitan Board of Works. It was built
by Mowlem and Company, who began work in the summer of 1875, and finished in
time for it to be opened in March1876, for a contract price of £15,750, not including
the wood-block paving of the roadway. It was designed as an avenue planted with
trees. A subway for gas and water pipes, seven feet high, ran its whole length.
Description of the Building
Façade
The carefully controlled ornament is generally Italian and cinquecento in manner
though the scale and the mansard roofline owe more to the Second Empire Paris, a
manner popular for large hotels. It is faced in high quality Portland stone ashlar.
The high arched entrance has a fine coffered ceiling of faience tiles. The sculptural
decoration was illustrated in the Builder on 6 November 1886, with figures of Day and
Night carved by J Boekbinder. Soon after completion of the hotel, an elaborate glass
and iron canopy was built spanning the pavement in front of the main entrance,
made by Coalbrookdale Company. Florence & Isaacs application for this was
approved by the Metropolitan Board of Works on 29 July 1887, and it appears in
several early photographs of the hotel.
The stone carving on the upper floors was by Daymond & Son. The ornamental iron
balconies on the front, were by Starkie Gardner & Co.
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The Marble Hall and Coffee Room
The walls are lined with alabaster, with bands of reddish Bardiglio marble, also used
for the door surrounds. The dado has a cap and base of Verde de Prato marble, with
a die (panel) of Sanguino; a similar combination was used for the columns. The
vestibule was also paved in marble. This area survives much as built in 1883-1886.
This area was originally occupied by an impressive staircase on the ‘imperial’ plan,
with a single flight 13 feet wide to a half-landing, and two return flights. This sat within
a double-height marble-lined hall. It only ever gave access to the first floor, and it
was evidently considered that it took up a disproportionate amount of space, and
the space laid out as a lounge, with two fireplaces on either side. A wide opening
was created to link the newly-created Coffee Room (now Boyds).
When the staircase was removed in 1914, the coffee room was linked to the Marble
Hall. The Coffee Room retains its 1880s ceiling with its bracketed cornice. The marble
wall treatment, matching the adjacent hall, the ceiling plasterwork was replaced in a
simplified neoclassical style.
The Ballroom
This magnificent room, the highlight of the hotel’s interior, is one of the grandest
Victorian hotel interiors remaining in London. On the original plan it is labelled ‘Salle a
Manger’. It was built with four-bay aisles to either side, and an apse at the far end.
The rich ornament, in an Italian cinquecento style, was, like the main entrance
carving, by Boekbinder, and largely survives. In the spandrels over the arches are
reclining figures representing the arts and sciences. The great Corinthian semicolumns have rich leaf-decoration around the foot of their shafts.
In the four big windows on the south side of the room the splendid original painted
glass remains. There is elaborate renaissance ornament, and figures representing
sculpture, painting, music and poetry. Early photographs show that the five windows
in the apse also had painted or stained glass, with heraldic decoration
The room originally had walnut panelling to eight feet in height, some of which
survives at its north-east end. The upper parts of the walls had bevelled mirrors and
tapestries:
In 1924 the hotel made application for the installation of a gallery, within the north
arcade of the room. The gallery itself was intended for musicians, while the newly
enclosed space below was to be a serving area.
The Reception Room and Salon
This original three-bay room retains its original joinery, and its splendid plaster ceiling in
a rich rococo manner. In 1923 it was called the Mayflower Room now called the
Salon which retains its original joinery, and a magnificent ceiling
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The London hotel trade
The coming of the railways was the key factor in the development of the modern
hotel from the eighteenth-century coaching inn. Euston Station developed the twin
Victoria and Adelaide hotels (1846); followed by the Great Northern Hotel at King’s
Cross by Lewis Cubitt (opened 1854). A new scale was announced by P C Hardwick’s
Great Western Hotel (1854), James Knowles’ Grosvenor Hotel at Victoria Station
(1860), and George Gilbert Scott’s Midland Grand at St Pancras (1868-72). The idea
of a hotel as a grand building of a public character became established.
The hotel trade was itself expanding and developing, with entrepreneurs moving into
areas of business hitherto supplied by a vast assortment of coffee houses, clubs,
dining rooms, private rooms and taverns. A key figure in this development was
Frederick Gordon (1835-1904). His father ran a number of the ‘principal dining rooms’
(restaurants) that were springing up to cater for the business classes and day visitors.
In 1874 he opened the Holborn Restaurant. In 1877, though without previous
experience of the hotel trade, Gordon began work on the Grand Hotel,
Northumberland Avenue, opposite the site of Northumberland House, opening in
1881. Its huge and immediate success enabled Gordon to found the First Avenue
Hotel, Holborn (1883), and then the Hotel Metropole, Northumberland Avenue (1885).
The Gordon Hotel Group was the undoubted pace-setter and leader for the hectic
development in ‘grand hotels’ which lasted through the 1880’s and 1890’s.
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The Northumberland Avenue Hotel Company
The Northumberland Avenue Hotel Company was set up in the summer of 1882,
apparently copying Gordon’s formula. A board was set up under the chairmanship
of Viscount Pollington, and a prospectus issued, predicting that a 500-bedroom hotel
could be built for £200,000m and that dividends of nineteen-and-a-half per cent were
to be expected.
Florence & Isaacs were appointed as architects; they had designed the Holborn
Viaduct Hotel (1876), and were to design the Coburg Hotel in 1896 (now the
Connaught).
Progress was swift, and in October 1882, Perry & Co of Tredegar Works, Bow entered
into a contract for the construction (Builder, 14 October 1882, p492).
The Building News illustrated the design for the façade on 2 March 1883. The
foundation stone of the new hotel was laid in July 1883. The Building News reported
on 28 July that:
The building has a frontage of 354ft and a depth of about 162ft, and occupies
a triangular site. On the ground floor are dining hall, 100ft by 42ft, a
restaurant, the frontage being occupied by private dining rooms and large
entrance hall leading to central staircase. In the basement are a range of
bathing rooms in front, swimming bath, cellars and engine room. The style of
Renaissance, of somewhat severe character.
It seems to have taken the Northumberland Avenue Hotel Company a long time to
start work, though it is not clear whether this was due to difficulties in negotiating with
the Metropolitan Board of Works (the freeholders of the site) or in raising money. They
did not finalise the agreement to lease the site until 8 August 1884 (Metropolitan
Board of Works minutes). Agreement was reached over the design on 11 August;
copies of the approved elevation and plan survive in the Metropolitan Record
Centre, signed by George Vulliamy, Chief Architect to MBW (LCC/VA/DD/159/1).
This design shows a design very similar to the hotel as built, but 55 feet longer, having
eight bays between the centre pavilion and the end pavilions. The reduction in the
size of the building was caused by the collapse of the company.
When the site was opened up, it was soon found that the ground conditions were
very difficult. The contractors had to go down fifty feet to find a solid foundation for
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the main walls, and hit an underground rivulet running from Highgate down to the
Thames. A 10hp engine had to pump the water days and night for seven months,
until a six-foot concrete bed was laid over the entire site (Builder, 1 May 1886, p639).
This vast increase in the cost forced the Company into bankruptcy late in 1884 by
which time the shares, floated at £9, had fallen to £2.17s 6d. Part of the site was sold
to help cover the debts, reducing the length of the façade. The hotel was bought by
the ‘Building Securities Company’, part of the octopoidal group of companies
controlled by Jabez Balfour, and the contractor JW Hobbs & Co of Croydon, another
part of Balfour’s empire, took over the construction work, completing it in 1886.
Jabez Balfour and the Liberator Building Society
Spencer Jabez Balfour was born in 1843, son of James Balfour, a marine store dealer.
His mother, Clara Lucas Balfour, was a fervent evangelical and propagandist for
teetotalism, and Balfour was brought in an atmosphere of strict Baptist evangelism.
The family were poor, but were well known in nonconformist and temperance circles.
Balfour worked for a firm of parliamentary agents, and then became a partner in
another such firm. In 1867, he and other nonconformists joined together to form a
building society for small investors and borrowers, the Lands Allotment Company,
founded with capital of £50,000. At its foundation, it was similar to the legion of cooperative and mutual association then being founded all over Britain. Its members
were mostly Nonconformists, and its agenda was to help its members become
property owners, and escape from the clutches of landlords. Balfour swiftly attracted
an army of nonconformists’ depositors and investors, in part by soliciting the support
of their ministers.
The Lands Allotment Company was the starting point for a huge financial empire. The
Liberator Building Society was added in 1868, the House and Land Investment Trust in
1875, the London and General Bank in 1882, and the Building Securities Company in
1884, with capital of £500,000. This last seems to have been set up to acquire and
complete the Northumberland Avenue Hotel.
Balfour had formed an association with a Croydon builder, J W Hobbs, and arranged
for him to receive vast building contracts. In 1885, a new company, Hobbs &
Company, was set up as a general contractor, with a capital of £250,000. This
company completed the Northumberland Avenue Hotel, or Hotel Victoria, 1884-6.
Over these years, Balfour and Hobbs embarked on some of the most ambitious
building developments London had ever seen, including Whitehall Court and the
National Liberal Club (by Archer & Green, c1884-92), the Hyde Park Hotel (Archer &
Green, 1888), the Hotel Cecil, Strand (Perry & Reed, 1888-95), and the Albert Hall
(1889). The hotel was thus one of the several immense developments being carried
on simultaneously by Balfour’s group of companies. In fact, this imposing – looking
empire was a morass of corruption and ineptitude, though it remains hard to say how
far its downfall was caused by one or the other. Balfour attracted thousands of
depositors and investors to his companies by offering a markedly higher rate of
interest (around eight per cent) on accounts. He seems to have found early on, that
he could never make the profits to support these rates from mortgage business, and
began to speculate in property, ever more wildly. He raised capital by setting up
new companies, inviting new subscriptions for shares, and using these proceeds to
pay the existing depositors’ interest.
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Balfour claimed in 1885 that all of his companies were ‘entirely and absolutely
independent of the others and not in any dependent on them’. This was the reverse
of the truth. In fact, the vast sums deposits by thousands of individuals with the
Liberator Building Society had mostly been lent to other Balfour companies, and
much of it sunk into his and Hobbs’ huge developments, including the
Northumberland Avenue Hotel.
On the strength of all this, Balfour became Liberal MP for Tamworth in 1880, Mayor of
Croydon in 1883 and MP for Burnley in 1889. In 1893 the roof fell in, as creditors began
to foreclose on his companies. Hobbs and Wright (the groups’ solicitor) were arrested
for fraud, and Balfour himself fled to Argentina. The Liberator Building Society’s
principal assets were found to be £3,251,218 of debts owed to it by three other Balfour
companies, all of them insolvent. Thousands of depositors lost almost everything, and
several suicides were reported as having been caused by the crash. The story ran for
months. Balfour was found and extradited to stand trial in 1895, was convicted of
fraud on a technicality (over a mere, £20,000), and was sentenced to 14 years
imprisonment. Released in 1906, he mended his own fortunes with a series of
newspaper articles about his imprisonment (published as ‘My Prison Life’, 1907). He
died on a Great Western railway train in February 1916. He had caused one of the
greatest financial scandals of the Victorian age.
The Hotel Victoria
On Balfour’s takeover of the hotel, Florence & Isaacs were retained as architects.
Their original design was for a hotel 353ft long. 53 feet of this site (the present Nigeria
House) had been sold, and Florence & Isaacs reduced the building accordingly; their
original design had eight window-bays on either side, between the centre and end
pavilions, the hotel as built has only six bays. A revised elevation was received by the
Metropolitan Board of Works on 14 March 1885 (Metropolitan Record Centre,
LCC/VA/DD/159/1).
The huge building received considerable attention in the building press, with long
articles on in the Builder on 1 May 1886, when it was nearing completion, and on 14
May 1887, when it had recently been opened; these provide a good deal of
information about its construction. The hotel was built to a very high standard. The
whole façade was faced with ashlar masonry of Portland Stone, with fine carved
decoration by Boekbinder. The construction was designed to be largely fireproof,
with cast-iron stanchions and wrought-iron girders used throughout. The floors are all
of concrete, made of coke breeze and Portland cement in a proportion of 4 to 1; the
internal lintels are of a similar material.
The hotel was fitted out with the newest technology. Electric light was fitted through,
but ‘to guard against the possibility of mishap’, was generally duplicated with gaslight. There were also electric bells with signal semaphores and speaking tubes, and
two passenger lifts and two goods lifts. Steam power, used for cooking, heating and
dynamos for the electric light, was generated by two Lancashire boilers, each thirty
feet long. With five hundred rooms (and four bathrooms) it was big, though smaller
than the neighbouring Metropole with nearly six hundred rooms, finished in 1885.
The hotel was evidently near completion when the Builder described it on 1 May 1886,
and was fitted out and furnished during that year. It was opened early in 1887, and
was named the Hotel Victoria, presumably in honour of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee.
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The hotel swiftly built up a lucrative banqueting trade, with dinner contracts for the 9th
Norfolk Regiment, the Buffs, the Grand Masters’ Chapter, and the Institute of Civil
Engineers. £1500 a year was obtained from the sale of showcase space to 32
companies including Liberty, Cadbury’s and the UK Tea Company.
Within a few years of its completion, the hotel was dragged into the chaos caused by
the collapse of Balfour’s empire in 1893. The Hotel Victoria was at least a going
concern, unlike many of Balfour’s businesses, and the liquidator sold it for £417, 433 to
Frederick Gordon, owner of the neighbouring Metropole and Grand Hotel. In 1893, a
new illustrated prospectus of ‘The Hotel Victoria’ was published.
In 1911, Gordon Hotels began planning a major refurbishment of the hotel, calling in
the architect William Campbell-Jones to discuss the removal of the grand staircase,
and the conversion of the space into a new lounge. Work did not begin until early in
1914, and on 4 March Campbell-Jones submitted drawings of the alterations to the
LCC; one dated 25 March 1914 survives in the Metropolitan Record Office (Theatre
Cases Index). A large opening was created at the back of the staircase hall, with
steel stanchions and a steel girder, linking the newly formed space to the Coffee
Room.
The original walnut panelling of the Coffee Room was removed and replaced with
banded marble panelling, to match that of the former staircase hall; indeed the
decoration of both spaces seems to have been simplified to satisfy the somewhat
severer taste of the age. In April 1914, Campbell-Jones notified the LCC that ‘in
addition to enlarging the Coffee Room, it is proposed to provide a screen and
revolving doors in the main entrance, and a new staircase in the basement…’, the
latter being the first indication of the major works at basement level which followed.
The huge Billiard Room in the basement also seems to have been found dispensable,
and around this time the decision was taken to convert it into a new ballroom or
banqueting hall. Wok was evidently interrupted by the Great War. In 1916 the hotel
closed its Grill Room, which was let to Messrs Cox’s Bank, and in 1917 the hotel seems
to have been taken over by the War Office. On the company’s recovering the hotel
in 1919, they resumed work on alterations to the basement. In the event, CampbellJones did not get the job, which was given to the well-known firm of furnishers and
decorators, Maple & Company. On 1 July 1919 they submitted plans to the LCC for
alterations ‘in connection with proposed new entrance from Northumberland
Avenue, extension in the Basement for Banquet Room, Toilet Rooms & c….’. The work
fell foul of the fire brigade, who demanded additional emergency exits. On 16
October 1919, E C Macpherson or Maple & Company wrote with a revised plan,
showing an additional exit created from the west side of the new Banqueting Hall, via
a new staircase to ground floor level coming out near the Smoking Room. This was
not the end of the scheme’s difficulties, for in December 1919 the LCC refused to
approve the ventilation arrangements. Campbell-Jones seems to have been
brought back to iron out the details, submitting new drawings for the ventilation
arrangement in January 1920.
The completed suite of rooms, with their new entrance from the street, was
decorated by Maple & Company in a smart eighteenth-century French manner, and
named in honour of King Edward VII. Partial plans for these alterations survive in the
Metropolitan Record Centre (Theatre Cases Index, GLC/AR/BR/19/0171), and the
work is documented in the case file, GLC/AR/BR/07/0171.
In 1923, the hotel recovered its Grill Room from Cox’s Bank, and re-opened it as a
Smoking Room and overflow banqueting room. Further work was done to modernise
the hotel in 1923, with more bathrooms being installed, and hand-basins put in every
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bedroom (Westminster Archives, Drainage Plans). The hotel continued to trade up
until 1940, the last year when it appears in the directories. In 1935, a further attempt
was made to modernise the main Dining Hall or Salle a Manger with an Art Deco
redecoration. This was the last major adaptation to be carried out by Gordon Hotels.
In 1940 the Hotel Victoria ceased trading, and was requisitioned by the War Office.
It has been in official occupation ever since.
Florence and Isaacs
Lewis Henry Isaacs (c1830 – 1908) and Henry Louis Florence (c1843 – 1916) were a
fairly typical successful late Victorian commercial architectural partnership. Isaacs,
the senior of the partnership, was from Lancaster, where he had been articled to
Edmund Woodthorpe. Coming to London, he worked as a surveyor in Holborn, and
published practical treatises on paving, sewerage and artisan housing. He was a
member of the Institution of Civil Engineers and a fellow of the Surveyors’ Institution, as
well as a Fellow of the RIBA.
Henry Florence came from Streatham, and had a promising early career, articled to
EC Robbins, JR Hakewill and F Pepys Cockerell, and studying at the Ecole des Beaux
Arts. He was Soane Medallist of the RA in 1869 and an Associate of the RIBA in 1869.
He seems to have entered Isaac’s practice around 1876, and until they formed a
successful partnership. Both of them seem to have been public-spirited men, Isaacs
serving as Master of the Paviour’s Company in 1903, while Florence was Master of the
Haberdashers in 1914. Isaacs was briefly MP for Walworth, Alderman and (1902-4)
Mayor of Kensington, while Florence was President of the Architectural Association.
Isaacs seems to have had business acumen, serving as a director and later Chairman
of the Metropolitan District Railway.
The practice specialised in hotels, grand in scale and eclectic in style, but their
oeuvre has suffered heavy losses. The Holborn Viaduct Hotel, High Holborn (1876) has
been demolished, as have the Carlton Hotel, Pall Mall (1897-9) and the First Avenue
Hotel, Holborn (1900), and Cadby’s Piano Manufactory, Hammersmith (later the
headquarters of J.Lyons & Company, c1874). In London, the King Lud on Ludgate
Circus (1870, in a commercial Italianate style) survives, as does the Connaught
(formerly Coburg) Hotel, Mount Street, Mayfair (1901), its exterior in a simple Norman
Shaw Queen Anne style, but its interior retaining ‘much of the original late-Victorian
richness and amplitude’, as the Survey of London puts it. Northumberland House is
probably their most important surviving work.
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