Monsoon Building

MONSOON BUILDING

The former Paddington Maintenance Depot, off the Harrow Road in northwest London, was occupied by Monsoon between 2001 and 2009. Monsoon and Accessorize is a clothing chain that was founded by Peter Simon in 1972. He started off by trading ethnic apparel on the Portobello Road and when ‘faraway fashion’ became increasingly popular, his business grew. Today there are over four hundred Monsoon and Accessorize stores throughout the United Kingdom  and six hundred further outlets in fifty-four countries across the four compass points of the world.

It was typical of Peter Simon’s thinking ‘outside of the box’ to move his business into the abandoned depot, nicknamed ‘The Battleship.’ However, within only years of occupation it became clear that Monsoon had outgrown this building and they   decided to relocate further west to purpose built headquarters at the ‘Yellow Building’ in Notting Dale, in the north-western corner of the W11 area, near to the new Westfield shopping centre. Construction of the ‘Yellow Building’ was underway in 2007 and most parts of the Monsoon business had moved in by 2009.

The Paddington Maintenance Depot was designed by Paul Hamilton of ‘Bicknell & Hamilton.’ He was born Paul Albert Herschan in Vienna in 1924.  A Jew, he was fortunate to reach Britain under the Kindertransort scheme in 1939 and he went on to lose nearly all his relatives in the Holocaust. As soon as he was old enough, he signed up with the British Army and was advised to take a ‘nom de guerre.’ He was on army training in Glasgow at the time and he saw a bus heading to the local town of Hamilton, so he chose the name in order to preserve his initials. He saw much action in The Second World War, both in Europe and the East. On decommission, he was drawn to helping rebuild bomb riddled London and he studied architecture.

Railway architecture became Paul Hamilton’s speciality and he developed a particular fascination with designing signal boxes. Chosen for the Paddington Maintenance Depot project, Hamilton presented the designs in 1964, work began in 1967 and the building opened in 1969. It was touted as the first London building to come to terms with the symbolisation of a modern transport building. It is located right at the hub of three forms of transportation, a main road, a canal and a railway. The building is right at edge of elevated A40, so it can be seen by everyone travelling into or out of London on the M40. (See earlier blog: WESTWAY.)

Small in area but powerful in profile, the building has a reinforced concrete frame, clad on the upper floors with a glazed ceramic mosaic. It has an irregular, expressionist, triangular plan with four main storeys, topped with a flat roof. The building was divided into two distinct functional parts, with a train shed below the workshops and offices.  The design included a distinctive boiler house. There are bands of continuous, metal, mullion-light glazing on the first and upper floors. The main levels are open plan and contain a staircase with a sinuous, ceramic-clad balustrade.

The building marked the culmination of the British post war railways building programme, which began with lightweight prefabs through to this monument to the  ‘machine aesthetic.’ After being vacated by British Rail, the Paddington Maintenance Depot became offices during the 1980’s, but was empty by 1990. Squatters moved in and shortly before work started for Monsoon, a huge illegal rave took place at the premises in October 1999. A well documented event, the interior of the building was completely trashed over a forty-eight hour period and afterwards only the streamlined, sculptural blocks of Brutalist concrete remained unscathed.

Care was taken to consult the original architect Paul Hamilton for advice during the renovation of the building for Monsoon’s occupation. The refurbishment, costing ten million pounds, was deemed a sympathetic transformation, offering forty-six and a half thousand square feet of office space for the clothing retailer. Such was its success, that the work, carried out by the ‘Alfred Hall Monaghan Morris’ practice, was given the Royal Fine Arts Commission Trust Award for 2002. Paul Hamilton died in 2004. The Paddington Maintenance Depot was given Grade II* Listed Building status in his lifetime. The building is located at the Paddington Goods Yard, London W2, just off Harrow Road.