Metro Tools & Hardware

Terraced two-bay four-storey building, built c.1820, refaced c.1890, with replacement timber shopfront to ground floor. Hipped slate roof set perpendicular to street, hidden behind parapet wall with granite coping and moulded brick course below. Shared chimneystack to south party wall and cast-iron hopper and downpipe breaking through parapet to south. Machine-made red brick walls laid in Flemish bond. Gauged brick flat-arch window openings with granite sills, moulded brick cornices to first and second floors and replacement single-pane timber sliding sash windows throughout.

Capel Street was laid out in 1680 by Humphrey Jervis as a prestigious residential street and named after Arthur Capel the Earl of Essex. By 1800 the street had become one of the city’s primary commercial thoroughfares and the current plot ratios reflect the buildings of that period. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many buildings had been refaced, No.32 being a good example. The roof plan, graduated fenestration and plot ratio conform to an early nineteenth-century date disguised by late nineteenth-century brick façade. Recently restored the building now forms part of the commercial life that has managed to retain the early appearance of this historic streetscape.