London, Western Avenue, travelling westwards

A different angle

I’ve read two recently published books that mention the old Hoover factory in Perivale, West London. Both books were good ones, but neither author had had the chance to cover at any length the building’s fast-changing fortunes. After Hoover left, Tesco eventually acquired the building and ran a supermarket there for some years. This is the stage it had reached when I lasted posted about it in 2010. Tesco pulled out and in 2017–18 the building was converted into 66 flats.

I’m all for finding new uses for old buildings – it’s often a way of saving therm from demolition. But when I passed the other day on the coach from London to Oxford, I thought the price of this change of use was a rather intrusive alteration – it seemed that the developer had very slightly increased the building’s height by adding a pitched roof behind the original sleek, white parapet. Looking into the history of the Hoover Building, however, I discovered that the roof line has been changing almost since the beginning. The Hoover factory was built in 1932 as a two-storey building with a front topped by a long white parapet, with a centre portion slightly taller than the rest. As early as 1935, the building was enlarged by adding another storey, its front windows set well back from the parapet. Soon after that, a gently pitched glazed roof was added, to let more natural light into the top storey, and some time later still, this roof became more substantial, reaching the form it takes today. Various photographs exist of these stages, and the first version of the pitched roof was there early on. But it’s not clear to me quite when the roof reached its current form.

The fact that I could see this roof so clearly, its grey slope detracting from the effect of the original white parapet, was due mainly to the fact that I was looking at it from an elevated position on the top deck of the Oxford Tube,* when I took the photograph above. I’m much more used to seeing it from the position of the driver of the silver car, or from pavement level. When the Hoover factory was designed in the early-1930s by Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, the last thing the architects were thinking about was what their building looked liked from the top of a bus. Their main thought would have been for the result when seen at ground level – that and the host of other things that preoccupy the designer of a large industrial building: everything from getting the interior spaces to work for their intended purpose to making sure the building is completed on time and within budget. They might even be surprised that their building, years after Hoover moved out, having undergone two changes of use, is still, triumphantly, there.

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*The name of a coach service that runs between Oxford and London

Great West Road, London

Driving past the future

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Great West Road was the future. A row of factories, done out in the latest Art Deco style, lined the road, flagship premises for firms making what the people of modern England wanted: toothpaste, cosmetics, motor accessories, electrical goods. It was actually the frontages of these factories that were done out in Art Deco – these were the office blocks, the public face of the companies; behind were utilitarian, plain-vanilla factory sheds where the goods were actually produced. A number of these factory frontages – low slung blocks with white walls, strip windows, the occasional Egyptian detail (as on Perivale's famous Hoover factory in another part of West London), and tall towers – survive. As I drove along the road the other day, I resolved to come back and look at them properly, but photographed this one quickly by pulling on to a slip road and opening the car window.

It’s the former Curry’s electrical factory, but is now the headquarters of J C Decaux, the advertising firm whose posters and advert-festooned bus shelters are familiar in the capital and every other city in the land. It was designed in 1936 by F E Simkins and features the usual metal-framed windows, pale walls, and central clock tower. The combination of strong horizontals with the tower is typical of these factories, as are small details such as the step-topped buttresses, the three-section tower window, and the way the walls and windows curve in towards the tower. And what could be more 1930s than an octagonal clock face? Curry’s is not the showiest of the big Deco factories, but one of the best, and it’s good that it has survived and found appreciative new users. The building was restored by Foster and Partners in the late-1990s with this original office frontage preserved and a new warehouse replacing the original factory at the back.

Western Avenue, London

Perivalediction (3)

As a final footnote to my Art Deco encounters on London’s Western Avenue, here’s a detail of the building just across the adjacent road junction from the Hoover Factory. It’s a bank and row of shops, clad in this white and green tile and probably put up around the same time as the factory. No doubt the original shops were used by the Hoover workers as well as by the residents of the many new houses built in this area at around this time.

Here we have the vocabulary of Art Deco, the green and white colour scheme, the white cladding, the little bursts of ornament – plus some eccentric extras like the unusual window frames, which are a far cry from the sleek metal-framed windows of the Hoover Factory. It’s all used to much more modest ends, a small tribute to the monster factory nearby showing how this kind of decoration can work on a smaller scale. It’s easy to miss in the shadow of its neighbour, but satisfying to find.

Western Avenue, London

Perivalediction (2)

To the west of the main Hoover Factory in Perivale (see previous post) is the canteen block, which was added in 1938. Although it shares the white and green colour scheme of the main façade, the canteen is rather different. It’s a steel-framed building, and the load-bearing structure of metal uprights and girders is on the inside, which means that the outside can be covered with bands of windows, right up to the corners.

The details are still strongly Art Deco. The mixture of sharp angles and curves, the flashes of colour, the nautical railings to the balcony, the mouldings, the clock without numerals – all these features are typical of the style, which is a heightened, large-scale version found in streets of 1930s houses off the North Circular Road. The light interiors must have been pleasant spaces in which to eat and relax.

Strip windows, white walls, and a steel frame structure – these are features of buildings in the international modern style that many architects and writers in the years before and after World War II thought was the best way to build. But these structures for the Hoover Company, with their added ornament and strong decorative forms are a far cry from the pared-down simplicity of the international style.

Nikolaus Pevsner in his 1951 Buildings of England volume on outer London, could not stomach the industrial Art Deco of the Hoover Factory. He wanted factories to be plain and functional, with international modern facades that were in keeping with the utilitarian production floors behind them; such buildings were viewed as honest. Art Deco structures like the Hoover Factory, on the other hand, were seen as dishonestly hiding their functional heart behind a tawdry frontage. ‘Perhaps the most offensive of the modernistic atrocities along this road of typical bypass factories,’ thundered Pevsner about the Hoover Factory, giving succour to developers who wanted to knock such structures down.

Well, the present is another country, and we see things differently here. Indeed by 1991, when the relevant expanded Pevsner volume, London 3: North West, came out, the new writer, Bridget Cherry, revised this judgement, finding much to admire. It’s sad that Pevsner’s original words were seized upon by developers who wanted an excuse to pull down factories like this, but good that Art Deco buildings now have well informed supporters. London is the richer for the survival of such buildings.

Western Avenue, London

Perivalediction (1)

When I visit London my route in and out of the capital city takes me past the former Hoover Factory in Perivale, and seeing its long pale façade on the way out, I know that I’ll soon be beyond the urban sprawl and on to the M40. For thousands of others every day, this great flash of white and green represents their farewell to London, and no doubt when the factory, designed by Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, opened in 1933 it was designed to make just such an impression.

The Hoover Factory was one of many built on the western fringes of London in the Art Deco style. From the road, we see the office section, but behind stretched a huge manufacturing building – eventually extended to about a quarter of a million square feet – where some 1,600 people assembled the vacuum cleaners that were already synonymous with the company’s name.

For Hoover, manufacturers of the latest cleaning devices, this factory was a perfect symbol. Its white walls suggested cleanliness and hygiene; its flashes of coloured decoration implied that the company's products were stylishly designed; its big windows created light, airy spaces inside, showing that modern workers could work in modern comfort.


Gliding past along Western Avenue, one takes all this in, but stop and look at the details and it gets even better: the great cinematic sweep of the window above the entrance; the artful arrangement of diagonal glazing bars in the doors (mirrored incidentally in the patterns of the iron railings around the site); jazzy light fittings; white sculpted variations in the wall surface; amazing recessed quadrant windows in the stair towers.


For a while, buildings like this were unappreciated. They were seen as ephemeral cinema-style architecture, their flashy decoration out of kilter with the puritanical tenets of modernism. And so, one by one, as manufacturing moved away from London, they were demolished. Hoover shifted their manufacturing away from London in the 1980s, and their building looked likely to suffer a similar fate.

But by this time, more people came to see the virtues of buildings like the Hoover. The decorative flair, and sometimes excess, of postmodern architecture helped many see them in a new light. Architects and public alike realised that cinema-style building was not all bad (I once heard a well known postmodernist modestly refer to some of his own work as ‘B-Movie architecture’). So the Hoover Factory was saved, although it’s now the called Hoover Building, because nothing is manufactured here and it is occupied by offices and a supermarket. For which I for one am grateful, as I drive westwards, dodging speed cameras and dashing objects, and saying my farewell to London.