Lee House Great - Bridgewater Street


This eight-storey building is in fact the base for what was intended to be a 17 storey tower. It was designed by Harry S. Fairhurst and James Henry Sellers in 1928 as an extension to the Tootal Broadhurst Lee building and is named after the chairman Kenneth Lee. If the original design had been carried out, it would have been the highest building in Europe at that time.


The building has a steel frame and was intended to be clad in stone all the way up instead of just on the ground floor. It is suspected that the changes to the building had a lot to do with the impending economic Depression. There are a number of attractive Art Deco features, although when I revisited the building in October of 2011, some had been removed like the name and decorative metalwork around the entrance (compare the two images below).