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

Standing out again

By the early-1930s, a new generation of industry was establishing itself around the edges of Britain's towns and cities. This wasn't the heavy industry that had probably first come to mind when people thought of manufacturing in the 19th century. This was modern, light industry and it was producing all kinds of things – domestic appliances, personal-grooming products, and items connected with the growing car industry. I've posted before about some of the 1930s factories that survive along the main roads of West London –  especially Western Avenue and the Great West Road.

These buildings have gleaming white Art Deco fronts (containing offices, mostly) with larger, plainer, but well-lit workshops or warehouses behind. The fronts acted as advertisements, presenting a modern image on behalf of the owners and their companies. This example on the Great West Road began as the Coty cosmetics factory. Its white walls and strip windows speak of cleanliness and the latest decorative fashion of 1932. The building lacks the brightly coloured flourishes that appear on many Art Deco factories, but there are several telling details that show the architects, Wallis Gilbert and Partners, balancing decorative touches – their design is basically about setting up a rhythm of straight lines (windows, glazing bars, uprights) and then introducing just enough curves, steps, and diagonals to play variations on the grid. The stepped profile of the top of the facade and the detailing (both curves and verticals) around the entrance are key decorative elements. The way the glazing goes all the way up to the corners and the little angled detail on the lower edge of the corner windows is another telling touch.

It's interesting that this kind of building, now surrounded by office blocks of the 1980s and 1990s in various, mostly postmodern, styles (with much mirror glazing and colourful cladding), now looks almost restrained. Apparently cared for and well used, these buildings of the 1930s have found a new way to stand out.

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.