New Filton House

Details

ST 67 NW FILTON GLOUCESTER ROAD NORTH
(West side)
319/4/10007
New Filton House

GV II


Alternativly known as: Pegasus House, GLOUCESTER ROAD NORTH
Offices. 1936, by Whinney, Son and Austen Hall for the Bristol Aeroplane Company. Brick over steel frame; banded rustication to ground floo. Statues in Portland stone.
PLAN: Approximately square plan, with stress on internal light and flexibility, the principal entrance being on the S elevation with a central first-floor conference room and originally conceived with main office rising through two floors to first-floor gallery with staff terrace on roof above.
EXTERIOR: 3 storeys with recessed attic storey. Uniformly-sized metal windows throughout, the larger openings being built of small standard sections. S elevation facing gardens of Old Filton House has projecting central 5-bay feature in unpainted brick with 3-bay porch in antis below tall first-floor windows lighting the Conference Room, with a figure of Mercury by Denis Dunlop to the centre. There is a distinct horizontality to the S, E and W elevations, accentuated by banded rustication to the ground floor, horizontal cill bands to ground- and first-floor levels and dentilled second-floor cornice. The horizontality of the 15-window E and W elevations is broken by a central stair window; sited above a porch to the W. The N elevation is given more vertical emphasis, the 5-window attic storey being brought forward and finished flush with the wall, with pilasters breaking the first and second floors into 6 bays, with a grid of mullions set over an otherwise continuous run of fenestration. The NE corner, finished as a tower which breaks the most prominent views gained of the building from the N, has 2 bays of similar fenestration in 4 storeys, with sculpture by Denis Dunlop comprising an abstracted relief of the Type 142 ( Britain First') above a figure of Pegasus.
INTERIOR: the offices were designed as a flexible working grid, the principal spaces of the interior being the entrance hall and the first-floor conference room, overlooking Old Filton House. The hall walls are lined in golden travertine marble, and the coloured terrazzo floor by Dunlop has signs of the zodiac, winds and sun: the principal feature is the staircase window by Jan Juta,which has a white background and is coloured in shades of sepia and yellow. The windows all set in a time sequence raked to the angle of the staircase, and record 25 years of the company's history, with illustrations of machines from the earliest box kites to the latest civil and military and civil aircraft and engines. Open-well staircase finished in typical Art Deco sweep to base. The conference room is distinguished by moulded plaster panels by Dunlop to the window embrasures, which depict birdmen', balloons and powered flight.

HISTORY: These offices for the Bristol Aeroplace Company were built in 1936 to the designs of Whinney, Son and Austen Hall, and in terms of their scale provided a direct response to Bristol's massive increase in orders for both aircraft, engines and prototype designs for the Air Ministry's rearmament programme. It is an imposing office block of the inter-war period, its overall design exhibiting a mixture of monumental classicism and Dutch Expressionism which is both characteristic of its period and well-handled and detailed within the context of inter-war commercial and office architecture. The principal view of the building, which stands on elevated ground, is obtained from the north, where the design incorporates a corner tower in order to break the visual changes of level. There are obvious parallels in terms of inter-war office architecture, but more striking is the influence of contemporary town hall and office architecture, where the twin demands of architectural dignity and internal flexibility had to be met: it is significant that Austen Hall, the principal architect for this commission, had worked on Lambeth and Holborn Town Halls, Berkshire County Offices and Shire Hall, Reading. The work commissioned from Dunlop and Juta was intended to reflect the history of powered flight and the importance of both the company and flight to the nation.

The Air Ministry financed the design of aircraft by private companies, mostly to specifications issued by them and the RAF, and buildings have survived from the firms and experimental shops which both prospered from and were responsible for the most remarkable developments in aviation: pre-eminent amongst these are Sydney Camm's experimental shop for Hawkers at Kingston-on-Thames (where the prototypes for the Hurricane were developed) and Geoffrey Munro's International Modern style gatehouse and offices for the de Haviland Aviation Company at Hatfield. The building of Bristol's new offices at Filton are highly significant within an international context, as the largest aircraft and engine design offices in the world, and for its artistic allusions to the development of powered flight and the political context of the inter-war aviation industry. The Bristol Aeroplane Company was established in 1910 as one of Britain's first aircraft manufacturers, and in that year was already established as the firm which provided flight training to both army and military personnel and was shortly to export machines to various foreign governments: hangars at Larkhill, Wiltshire, survive from this nascent period in world aviation. It was one of the major firms whose production was fed by military orders from the Air Ministry, especially under the massive rearmament programme which began in Britain after the collapse of the Geneva disarmament talks in 1933 and which by 1939 had made Britain - whose industry was mostly characterised by small and medium firms - the world's largest producer of aircraft. The accellerated improvement in aircraft design and constructional techniques in the inter-war period was matched by profound developments in engine design. The Bristol Company, under strong Air Ministry pressure, had taken over a successful engine design team led by Ray Fedden, whose Pegasus and Mercury engines became the mainstay of Britain's post-1934 expansion scheme: it supplied engines for nearly half the world's airlines and more than half the world's air forces, and in the Second World War it provided a third of the RAF's engines. The sculpture of Britain First' is a prominent and clear allusion to a highly-charged national debate of the inter-war period, Lord Rothermere's sponsorship of the Type 142 (the prototype for the Blenheim bomber) having been a successful and highly publicised criticism of Air Ministry policy. The entrance hall glass is a notable work of the celebrated Jan Juta, who designed and executed murals in South Africa House and the United Nations Building but is best known for his work on the Glass Ballroom of the Queen Mary and the RIBA building in Portland Place (completed in 1934). Filton's most distinguished work in post-war aviation included the Brabazon airliner, Concorde and the Bloodhound surface-to-air missile.


Listing NGR: ST6018979138

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