I have been meaning to do a blog about Wells & Company, the old commercial ironmongers opposite St. Leonard, Shoreditch. It was opened in 1877 for Edward Wells & Company, which sold stoves, gutters, pipes and decorative ironwork to the building trades. The building, designed by Fowler & Hill, is part-Gothic, part- Moorish, with a surviving mosaic inscription, ‘Wells & Company Commercial Iron Works’, in spite of the fact that it ceased trading in 1895 and became a bank:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
Every time I pass this I smile at the way in which a window, cackhandedly inserted at a later date, means that the o and r of the word ‘works’ are missing from the mosaic. It always makes me think of things in the tradition Stuart Brand’s ‘How Buildings Learn’ by which I mean I suspect the light gained probably makes the building more functional if at the expense of aesthetics.
Joan