bakery

Terraced six-bay three-storey bakery over concealed basement, built c.1895. Now in use as offices. Pie-ended copper-clad replacement roof with dormers and profiled red brick chimneystacks. Roof behind rendered parapet wall with moulded masonry coping. Red brick walls laid in Flemish bond with rusticated rendered quoins to either end surmounted by rendered frieze and deep moulded parapet cornice. Channel rusticated rendered walls to ground floor with deep moulded cornice and continuous rendered apron and moulded sill course to first floor. Yellow brick walls to rear elevation. Pair of three-centred arched recessed window openings to ground floor with keystones, impost mouldings and moulded sills spanning recess having original tripartite fixed-pane timber windows with fluted transom. Camber-arched window openings to upper floors having one-over-one pane windows. Central round-headed recessed door opening with keystone and moulded archivolt springing from impost mouldings having double-leaf timber panelled doors with glazed upper panels, lintel cornice and fanlight opening onto two granite steps with original granite paving to front. Elliptical-headed intregral carriage arch to west bay with voussoired blocks to arch, central keystone and replacement steel gates. Opening flanked by slender panelled pilasters and panel above with raised lettering stating 'ST. PETER’S BAKERY'. Early cobbled carriageway to arch providing access to rear of site.

Originally known as Ballybough Lane, Parnell Street was renamed Great Britain Street in the early eighteenth century, when it was set out in lots for building. The street was dominated by bakeries, grocers and clothiers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its Georgian buildings have more recently been adapted by the Asian community as shops and restaurants. This Edwardian bakery was built as an enlargement for Kennedy's Bakery by Charles Herbert Ashworth in 1906-8. Named for Saint Peter, the patron saint of bakers, the three-storey building is flanked on either side by late twentieth-century developments, isolating this building from its historic context at the east end of Parnell Street and providing some relief from the speculative over-development that now characterises this end of the historic streetscape.