Sandringham Buildings - Charing Cross Road, London, UK - UK Historical Markers on Waymarking.com

At the northern end of Sandringham Buildings, just above the Charing Cross Road street sign is a plaque that reads:

Sandringham Buildings
Erected by
The Improved Industrial Dwellings Coy Ld
(Sir Sydney H. Waterlow Bart. Chairman)
1884

The British History website (visit link) tells us:

"The deep decline in the standards of London's street architecture during the late nineteenth century is nowhere more evident than in Charing Cross Road. The southern half of the street is dominated by the ugly repetitions of Sandringham Buildings, multi-storey artisans' dwellings with shops at ground-floor level, which extend along both sides of Charing Cross Road between Litchfield and Great Newport Streets. The Metropolitan Board of Works was compelled to arrange for the erection of artisans' dwellings here because the Home Secretary, Sir Richard Cross, insisted that the Board's Bill of 1883 to amend the Metropolitan Street Improvements Act of 1877 should provide for the rehousing of 2,000 of the labouring classes on the site of Newport Market. In June 1882 a Select Committee of the House of Commons had agreed to the Board's proposal that only 1,470 persons should be rehoused here and another 600 in Old Pye Street, Westminster,  and the Board had immediately taken steps to rehouse 1,100 of the displaced persons in Newport Dwellings. The remaining 370 could have been rehoused to the east of Charing Cross Road, but in March 1883 the Home Secretary, in accordance with 'the settled view of Parliament on the subject', raised the total number to be rehoused in the Newport Market area from 1,470 to 2,000, and the Board therefore had no option but to provide large blocks of dwellings along the frontage of the new street.

Sandringham Buildings were erected in 1883–4 by the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company Limited, to whom the Board leased the site. The architect was George Borer, probably of the firm of Borer and Dobb, architects and surveyors, of London Wall, and the estimated cost was between £65,000 and £70,000. Nine hundred persons were to be housed here, and most of the tenements consisted of three rooms. Sandringham Buildings were formally opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales in July 1884. They are designed in the sour Gothic style characteristic of artisans' dwellings, mixed with debased Renaissance motifs. Above the shops is a fourstoreyed face of yellow stock bricks, regularly patterned with single, paired, and three-light windows having flat Gothic arches of brick, now painted. The end blocks have another storey of the same character, but the intervening blocks are all finished with a steep mansard slope of red fishscale tiles, broken by Gothic gabled features flanked by pedimented dormers, the roof line being crested with a spiky ironwork railing."