Design of the Times: Crawford's Advertising, 233 High Holborn

233 High Holborn by night. Image from RIBApix.

On High Holborn at No.233, just around the corner from the underground station, is a building that has a claim to be London’s first modernist building and almost certainly the first modernist office in the country. It was built for the W.S. Crawford advertising company in 1930, partially replacing and extending an older building. John James Burnet and his associates, most prominently Thomas S. Tait produced a series of office buildings from 1910 to 1930 that took their inspiration from the skyscrapers of America rather than the temples of Ancient Greece. The Kodak Building on Kingsway from 1911, had long vertical windows in between Portland stone cladding. Adelaide House (1925), looks over the Thames with an art deco influenced facade, again with a strong vertical emphasis. The Daily Telegraph building on Fleet Street (1928), leans into the Jazz age even more, with its colourful clock and Egyptian decorations. Charles Holden’s new HQ for London Transport was officially opened on 1st December 1929, with its monumental form looming over St. James Park. But none of these buildings truly took on the spirit of modernism like 233 High Holborn.

The entrance hall and staircase, with its shiny metallic finish.

The Crawford building presents a bold facade to High Holborn with horizontal bands of render, separated by continuous glazing with slim metal mullions. The rows of windows allow light into the office floor from the north-facing facade, and allows a deeper floor plan, by using prismatic glass which spreads light to the further reaches of the office. The building turns into the alley, New Turnstile, running alongside, with a chamfered corner. The original interior, now sadly lost, was perhaps even bolder, with steel and chrome used throughout, to create a futuristic setting. Despite its modernist credentials, no concrete was used, with a steel frame infilled with brick panels, and the external render in cement. The ground floor is finished in polished black marble with large, square windows and double entrance doors in steel. Through these doors, visitors would be greeted by a hall clad in stainless steel, illuminated by various hidden light sources, and with a green floor in artificial Roman stone. ​

A corridor and waiting area. Image from RIBApix.

The upper floors, containing the offices, meeting rooms and drawing areas, were designed by artist Rodney Thomas with less dazzle but still in a moderne style, with strip lighting and streamlined detailing. One ingenious inclusion was the integrated waste chute, needed to dispose of the large amounts of waste paper generated each working day. The paper, which was often chucked onto the floor, was simply swept into floor level doors and funnelled down to the basement to be incinerated.


The architects for this groundbreaking building were Fredrick Etchells and Herbert Welch. Welch seems to have been the designer initially given the commission and carried out the first designs for the building, before Etchells was asked to design a facade that was more in the spirit of “The New Style”, which had emerged from the continent in the years after the turn of the century. Welch had begun his career as an architect working for London and North West Railways before going to work for Parker and Unwin on the development of Hampstead Garden Suburb. He later worked on the garden cities of Letchworth and Welwyn where he met his later partners Felix Lander and N.F. Cachemaille-Day. His early work was thoroughly steeped in the Arts & Crafts tradition before moving gently into modernism in the 1930s.

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The Yews, Fetcham (1933) Frederick Etchells

Etchells career took the opposite trajectory. He came to fame as an artist, aligning with the Vorticists and producing murals for Borough Polytechnic. In 1927 he translated Le Corbusier’s Vers Une Architecture into English as Towards a New Architecture, an endeavor that later created controversy as it was felt that the new text was overly altered from Corbusier’s original. Aside from the Crawford building, Etchells designed a handful of modernist houses, including two in the aborted modernist development at Frinton on Sea. He then turned away from modernism towards more traditional styles, producing a number of neo-Tudor designs in Westminster. He devoted his post war work mainly towards restoration, especially to churches that had been damaged during the Blitz.  ​

The Daily Express Building, fleet Street (1932). Image from RIBApix.

Either side of Crawford's are two contemporary office buildings. On the east side is No.235, built as offices and showrooms for the Times Furnishing Company, and designed by Cecil J. Eprile in an art deco style, with vertical window bands that contrast with its more horizontally inclined neighbour. On the west side is No.232, a slightly later (1939) copy of Crawfords by Welch and Felix Lander. After the completion of 233 High Holborn, a number of new, modernist-influenced office buildings sprang up in London. The Daily Express building on Fleet Street, just down the road from Tait’s Daily Telegraph, was completed in 1932. The initial design by Ellis and Clarke was thought to be too staid, so Owen Williams was brought in to add a futuristic black Vitrolite frontage to the building. On the opposite side of the river to Adelaide House, architect Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel designed St Olaf’s House as a new HQ for the Hay’s Wharf company in 1932. The Tooley Street facade has horizontal windows with angled metal frames and the building's name in gilt lettering. 

One of Edward McKnight Kauffer's poster designs for London Transport. Image from London Transport Museum.

The company of Crawford’s itself has a place in the acceptance of modernism in Britain. Formed in 1914 at a different location on a building in High Holborn, the company produced many advertising campaigns for the government and official bodies in the interwar years, led by the sisters Margaret and Florence Sangster and Ashley Havinden. They often used a high visual style, moving away from the text-heavy poster style employed at the beginning of the century, using artwork influenced by modernist and futurist styles. Havinden himself produced work that took cues from cubism and the Bauhaus for clients like the Post Office, Chrysler Motos and Simpsons of Piccadilly (whose own premises was designed by Joseph Emberton with interiors by Laszlo Mohloy Nagy). Havinden and Maragret Sangster had married in 1928, and could count various artists and architects as friends, including Wells Coates, Walter Gropius, Paul Nash, Eillen Agar and many others. In 1938 they moved into the newly completed Highpoint II in Highgate by Berthold Lubetkin.

​The designer Edward McKnight Kauffer, who designed so many great posters for the Underground, worked for Crawford’s at the time the new office was opened. Crawford’s remained at 233 until 1972 when it moved to Westbourne Terrace, later being acquired by Saatchi and Saatchi. The Crawford building was listed in August 1971, among the first group of modernist interwar buildings to receive statutory protection. 

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