page_title: Clayton & Black
section_title: Company history
hierarchical_section_title: Clayton & Black / Company history
caption_attribution_description: Houses on Sackville Road, Hove, City of Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, England. Late 19th-century villas within the "Pembroke &amp; Princes" Conservation Area.
context_page_description: Clayton & Black were a firm of architects and surveyors from Brighton, part of the English city of Brighton and Hove. In a career spanning the Victorian, Edwardian and interwar eras, they were responsible for designing and constructing an eclectic range of buildings in the growing town of Brighton and its neighbour Hove. Their work encompassed new residential, commercial, industrial and civic buildings, shopping arcades, churches, schools, cinemas and pubs, and alterations to hotels and other buildings. Later reconstituted as Clayton, Black & Daviel, the company designed some churches in the postwar period.
  Charles E. Clayton and Ernest Black, their sons Charles L. Clayton and Kenneth Black, and other architects articled to the firm, worked in a range of styles. The "architectural pantomime" of their Tudor Revival King and Queen pub and the elaborate Classical façade of the First Church of Christ, Scientist contrast with their plain Neo-Georgian Barclays Bank branch and the Gothic Revival St Thomas the Apostle's Church. Elsewhere in Brighton and Hove, they designed buildings in the Flemish Renaissance, Arts and Crafts, Art Deco and François Premier Revival styles.
context_section_description: Charles Edward Clayton was born in 1853 in Brighton, and Ernest Black, son of the Brighton coroner, was born there two years later.  Clayton entered architectural practice in 1876 with George Holford; both studied under the Brighton architect Thomas Simpson.  Black joined six years later, and Holford's involvement ceased the following year.   Charles L. Clayton and Kenneth R. Black, sons of the original partners, joined later; the name "Clayton & Black" was maintained, although "Clayton, Black & Partners" was sometimes used as well.  Charles E. Clayton, who made his home in Edburton near Brighton and who was mainly responsible for church-related commissions, died in 1923; Ernest Black had died six years earlier.  Other partners joined the firm later in the interwar period as its success grew, but the final name change did not occur until John René Francis Daviel joined in the early 1950s and became the main driving force: thereafter the company was known as "Clayton, Black and Daviel".  The last record of the company was in 1974.  Several other architects were articled to the firm at various times, such as Thomas Handy Bishop (between 1892 and 1893). John Owen Bond (between 1900 and 1903), Bernard Jessop (1908), and George Stanley Hudson.  M.G. Alford joined in the 1960s, during the Clayton, Black and Daviel era.
  Brighton and Hove were unusual among British towns and cities for the extent to which locally based architects received commissions for major buildings.  Clayton & Black was the most prolific of three Brighton-based firms which between them designed dozens of residential, commercial, ecclesiastical and other buildings in the late 19th and early to mid-20th century in the rapidly growing towns.  The others were Thomas Lainson (Lainson & Sons) and John Leopold Denman (Denman & Son).  Clayton & Black were the most "solidly commercial" of these, and commercial buildings represent their best work.
  The practice was recorded at 152 North Street in Brighton in 1890.  From 1904, the firm were based in offices at 10 Prince Albert Street—one of a terrace of four buildings on a road built in 1842 to improve links within The Lanes, the ancient heart of Brighton.  Sources disagree on whether the building, which is Grade II-listed, is late 18th-century or contemporary with the street, but Clayton & Black remodelled it extensively when they took over, giving it a firmly Georgian appearance.
  The first recorded commission for the firm, around 1875–76, was a complete rebuild of Blenheim House (56 Old Steine) in the centre of Brighton.  This was one of several old buildings (along with Marlborough House and Steine House) on the west side of Brighton's first fashionable area, the low-lying grassland of Old Steine.  In 1876–77, they extended the Brighton Friends Meeting House, built for Quakers in 1805, and in 1894 they extended and comprehensively redesigned the town's famous Theatre Royal, partly in response to new fire regulations.  Much of the firm's early work, though, consisted of housebuilding and surveying in the rapidly developing residential town of Hove, a comfortable middle-class counterpoint to the neighbouring resort of Brighton, in which "a certain gentility prevails" in the spacious streets of finely detailed houses.  The landmark Gwydyr Mansions at the bottom of Holland Road, a Flemish Renaissance red-brick and ashlar block of mansion flats with integral facilities such as a restaurant and barber shop, date from 1890.  Their next work was in Lansdowne Road (1891), Furze Hill (1893), Holland Road (1895: a studio) and Portland Road (1895: several pairs of semi-detached houses and villas).  On Holland Road, a major north–south route, they were also responsible for shops, flats and a religious institute in 1898, a factory for Green & Company in 1911, and a set of garages in 1925.  From 1895, they were the main surveyors to the Vallance Estate, a development of high-class Domestic Revival/Queen Anne-style red-brick housing on land owned by the Vallance family.  In particular, they were engaged at Pembroke Crescent and Pem
caption: From 1895, the firm was responsible for a large area of expansive red-brick housing in Hove.
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