The Denim Factory, 4-6 Davenant Street

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4-6 Davenant Street
Contributed by Survey of London on Aug. 7, 2017

In the early nineteenth century this site was an open yard, for coaches and with stables, south of which there was a brewery (the White Horse Brewery by the 1860s) behind cottages and a beer-shop, all seemingly held by Rayden Gower, William Bayford and then Samuel Bartram, a coachmaker as well as a brewer. New buildings in 1848 provided coach-building and painting workshops. There were further adaptations before redevelopment in 1899–1900 for S. Schneiders & Son, garment makers, for whom Robert W. Hobden was the architect, and Seth Grist Ltd the builders. Their substantial four-storey factory building, with its striking red- and white-brick façade with terracotta trim, had by 1904 been taken by H. Lotery & Co., wholesale clothiers, Schneiders’ short occupancy perhaps an upshot of the fire of 1901 that destroyed their main factory further east. Ellis & Goldstein Ltd, also clothiers, had the premises by 1940. After extensive bomb-damage reconstruction behind the façade, Mornessa Ltd sold the site to the Greater London Council in 1966. Numerous clothing-trade tenants continued here through the later decades of the twentieth century. Conversion and refurbishment to provide eight offices below fourteen flats in ‘The Denim Factory’ came in 2006–8 for HBC Investments, designs by Alan Camp Architects being followed by others from McGregor Associates, architects.¹