Hoover Building

Selected by

Lucy Cleland, Founding editor, Country & Townhouse

Founding editor of Country and Townhouse magazine, now editorial director, Lucy is particularly passionate about sustainability and last summer, she pledged that 25% of her magazine’s content would reflect the ways we should learn to live; from the brands we buy, how we consume things and the way we travel.
Architecture

Grade II* listed. 1933.

Architects: Wallis, Gilbert & Partners

Renovated 2017

Architecture and Engineering: Interrobang

Contractor and client: : IDM Development

The Hoover Building has been a London Landmark since it opened in the 1930’s as the factory for the American Hoover Company. It comprised a double height ground floor and single storey first floor set behind a triumphal concrete facade.

In 1931 Ohio-based vacuum cleaner makers the Hoover Company commissioned Wallis, Gilbert and Partners to create a factory on the Western Avenue in Perivale. The London-based architectural partnership – initially Wallis, Gilbert & Partner, singular – had been founded in 1916, primarily for the purpose of collaborating with an American company that specialised in providing the reinforcement technology and materials for large concrete factories. The partnership was commissioned to work on several monumental projects, including Victoria coach station and factories for Wrigley’s chewing gum in Wembley, the Gramophone Company in Hayes, and Firestone tyres, Pyrene fire extinguishers and Coty cosmetics, all on the Great West Road.

Modern architectural commentators generally
treat the Hoover factory as an art deco design, but Thomas Wallis called his style ‘Fancy’. The building’s ornamentation is said to have been inspired by the art of Central and North American Indians, though there are Egyptian touches too.

The comprehensive renovation focused on the conservation of the historic fabric. Internally, many of the original Art Deco features have been refurbished. The building’s original colour scheme is reflected in new Art Deco-style corridors with green interiors and high-waisted dado rails. The light fittings, staircases with wrought-iron banisters and terrazzo lobby floors have all been restored.
Interesting facts

During the Second World War the factory was partly used to manufacture aircraft parts. The buildings were camouflaged to avoid being bombed by German aircraft. The building’s staff set up their own Home Guard unit.

John Betjeman described it as “a sort of Art Deco Wentworth Woodhouse – with whizzing window curves derived from Erich Mendelsohn’s work in Germany, and splashes of primary colour from the Aztec and Mayan fashions at the 1925 Paris Exhibition.” There’s no evidence that there ever was a Gilbert at Wallis, Gilbert and Partners, nor that there was originally any other partner. Gilbert and his anonymous colleague may have been invented by the genuine founder, Thomas Wallis, simply to make his practice sound bigger than it was.

“...it’s not often that London’s arterial roads offer such architectural conversation pieces. ”

It might have been one of those urban myths, but every time I head out of west London on the A40, with the Hoover Building to my right (it’s unlikely you’re ever actually going to veer off the road to visit it properly), I think about the story that some naïve tourist believed the beaming white and green Grade II listed ‘Fancy’ (note, not specifically Art Deco as it is generally ascribed to be) edifice to be none other than Buckingham Palace. Surely a cruel joke on the part of some cheeky taxi driver? Or maybe her Majesty would have been flattered.

The Hoover Building ©IDM developments

I recently passed it and, while it could do with a bit of a clean-up (it doesn’t help standing next to the petrol-fumed Western Avenue), it is always arresting – especially at dusk when it glows green like a bioluminescent insect; and surprising – it’s not often that London’s arterial roads offer such architectural conversation pieces.

The Hoover Building ©IDM developments

It was built for the American vacuum cleaning family in the 1930s, when hosts of wealthy transatlantic industrialists wanted to build eye-catching edifices to showcase their most modern products – the Silicon Valley companies of their day, some might say. The Hoovers stuck around for half a century or so before decamping up north to Scotland, whereupon a decade of decay and disrepair ensued. In 1989, supermarket behemoth Tesco took it on with the proviso from English Heritage that they would preserve and restore the iconic structure.

And now? Well, it’s luxury flats… as with so many of original company headquarters (such as the BBC Television Centre in Wood Lane) proprietors require their pound of flesh and real estate is where it’s at.

“...it’s not often that London’s arterial roads offer such architectural conversation pieces. ”

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