Tile Gazetteer Hammersmith & Fulham

Hammersmith

Six hand-painted tile panels of domestic and agricultural scenes by W. B. Simpson & Sons (two given by the Simpson family) installed at the former Charing Cross Hospital during the 1890s were removed in 1978-9, restored and resited on the first floor of the hospital’s main entrance area at its new site in Fulham Palace Road.[1]

The Church of St John the Evangelist (1857-9, William Butterfield), Glenthorne Road, has typically elaborate east wall decoration including yellow zigzag tiling; there are also two memorial tiles, one by the font and the other near the choir steps. The Craven Dunnill encaustic tile pavement in the Lady Chapel (1898, J. F. Bentley) includes a four-tile ‘green man’ group.

The Salutation Inn (1910, by the London architect A. P. Killick), 154 King Street W6, with its strange blue and mauve faience and red brick facade, was a showpiece pub for the local brewers, Fuller, Smith & Turner, whose Griffin Brewery still stands under a mile away in Chiswick.

In an office on the first floor of Hammersmith Library (1904-5), Shepherds Bush Road, is a ceramic fireplace made at the Fulham Pottery (see below, Parsons Green) in 1879 for the Pines, the Putney home of the novelist Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832-1914). The fireplace was one of matching pair; both were removed from the house in the late 1930s and returned to the pottery, where one was re-erected. The other was kept in parts until being donated to the Library in 1970.

William Morris (1834-96) moved to a Georgian house on Upper Mall in 1878, naming it Kelmscott House after his country retreat, Kelmscott Manor. There is no public access to the main part of the house, which has two fireplaces with Morris & Co Poppy tiles in a first floor room, but the basement - the headquarters of the William Morris Society - is opened regularly to the public, and has a fireplace with Dutch tiles commissioned by Morris and probably designed by Philip Webb (1831-1915).[2]

Parsons Green

Inside the Duke of Cumberland PH (1892-3), 235 New Kings Road (on the south edge of Parsons Green itself), is a large area of mostly floral wall tiling by the Brierley Hill firm Gibbons, Hinton & Co; it is split into three main areas centred on figurative relief panels, above a dado including three panels of nesting birds. Almost at the west end of New Kings Road, on the corner with Burlington Road, is an unusual survivor: a brick-built nineteenth century bottle kiln, the last remnant of the Fulham Pottery, which occupied the site from around 1672 until 1986. John Piper was one of the artists involved with its production of art ceramics during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

References

1.^         John Greene, Brightening the Long Days (Tiles and Architectural Ceramics Society, 1987).
2.^         Richard Myers and Hilary Myers, William Morris Tiles - The tile designs of Morris and his Fellow-Workers (Richard Dennis, Shepton Beauchamp, 1996).