Key Building

This key building from the practice of Bob and Bob is the best remaining example of their domestic output anywhere in the country.

Rye Hill is the name of the area around the steep road that leads into the picturesque East Sussex town of Rye from the north. To architectural historians it is probably best known for Reginald Blomfield’s large houses from the late 1890s, including his own country residence at Point Hill (acottage that he expanded in every direction), and Saltcote Place, a Queen Anne-style mansion for the Hennessys, the French cognac distillers. A lane from the hill leads towards Green Hedges, another Blomfield house, passing on the way what was once the residence of the Tate family, a house called Hilden. Between these two you can see a garage building which, although very small, is an intriguing and poignant relic of a largely forgotten architectural career.

The garage was designed by Horace Field (1861-1948), a member of the Art Workers’ Guild who launched himself with a series of very fine houses and a bank in Hampstead, in different styles but which all tended towards the early seventeenth-century. He is mainly remembered now, if at all, for two prominent exercises in Edwardian baroque – a headquarters for the North Eastern Railway at York, and the Church Times offices near Aldwych in London. But his career continued well after the First World War, in particular as the architect of a number of delightful branches of Lloyds Bank.

These include the palazzo-like premises in the centres of Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, (1920-23) and Southampton (1925-30). From the mid-twenties onwards Field started to refine his style so that it consisted of a small number of repeated features set off against substantial brick walls. The overall form was ‘Queen Anne’ (real Queen Anne, that is, not Art Workers’ Guild Queen Anne); there were typically tripartite sliding sash windows; yeux de boeuf; and very prominent, and eventually extremely prominent, ornamental consoles. You can see these features on Lloyds branches such as those at Andover.

Some other key buildings in the North West:

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  Key Building

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  Key Building 2