Tile Gazetteer Hounslow

Bedford Park

The overmantel in the rear bar of the Tabard Inn (1880, architect Richard Norman Shaw), Bath Road, includes a pair of two-tile panels depicting Nursery Rhyme scenes hand-painted in blue enamel on plain Dutch tin-glazed tiles. These were most probably designed by Walter Crane and decorated in the Morris & Co workshops.[1] The front bar’s high-level frieze of tiles by William De Morgan runs on into the porch.

Brentford

The architect T. H. Nowell Parr (see below, Hounslow) often used coloured Doultonware for his pub facades, as at the Beehive (1907), 227 High Street; only the colour is unusual here, a mottled bluish-green.[2] South of Brentford’s centre is Syon Park, Park Road, where the ornamental dairy, built after 1847 by Decimus Burton, has internal Wedgwood encaustic tiling; the earliest Wedgwood encaustic tiles were produced in the late 1860s.

Hounslow

The Treaty Centre (1984-7), a combination of shopping mall and library on the High Street, occupies the site of the library, baths and council house complex of 1904-5 designed by Thomas Henry Nowell Parr (1864-1933), architect to Brentford Urban District Council during 1897-1907. The old group of civic buildings was rich in faience, terracotta and internal tiling, and a single pathetic remnant has been preserved above the High Street entrance of the new structure.[3] T. H. Nowell Parr also worked privately from around 1900, and was appointed architect to two local breweries, Fuller, Smith & Turner’s Griffin Brewery, Chiswick, and Brentford’s Royal Brewery. His pubs, mainly in the west London suburbs, tended towards the domestic in scale and were often faced with dark green or brown Doulton faience at ground floor level (see above, the Beehive, Brentford; and the Forester, Ealing).[4]

Isleworth

The Church of St Mary the Virgin, Worton Road, was designed in 1937 by the architect H. S. Goodhart-Rendel and built during 1952-5. It has a colourful tile reredos (1955) measuring about 20’ high by 10’ wide which was designed by Joseph Ledger for Carter’s of Poole; the tiles were hand-painted by Phyllis Butler directly on to raw glaze and fired at around 1100°C.[5] The reredos depicts a series of scenes centred on the Virgin and Child. Ledger designed two other large-scale Carter’s ceramic reredoses for Goodhart-Rendel, both at Roman Catholic churches: St John Fisher, Rochester, Kent (1955) and Our Lady of the Rosary (Westminster, 1966).

References

1.^         Richard Myers and Hilary Myers, William Morris Tiles - The tile designs of Morris and his Fellow-Workers (Richard Dennis, Shepton Beauchamp, 1996), p126.
2.^         Paul Atterbury and Louise Irvine, The Doulton Story (Royal Doulton Tableware, Stoke on Trent, 1979), p90.
3.^         Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, London 3: North West. Buildings of England (Penguin Books, London, 1991).
4.^         A. Stuart Gray, Edwardian Architecture: A Biographical Dictionary (Gerald Duckworth, London, 1985).
5.^         TACS Location Index.