Skip to main content

Battam, Heywood & Hanks; Battam and Heywood (1870-1889)

Battam, Heywood & Hanks; Battam and Heywood

54 & 114 Oxford Street, 1 Berners Street and 17 Regent Street, London; furniture makers, retailers, upholsterers, decorators, estate and house agents (fl.c.1870-1889)

The principals of the firm were George Thomas Heywood and Joseph Hanks and the firm was the successor to Battam, Craske & Coleby. Battam, Heywood & Hanks were recorded as upholsterers and house agents at 54 Oxford Street & 1 Berners Street in the 1871 Post Office Directory. The firm came to an end in 1874 with the dissolution of the partnership between Heywood and Hanks. However, George Thomas Heywood remained in the same kind of business under the trade name of Battam & Heywood and continued to operate at 54 Oxford Street. The Furniture Gazette: Classified List of the Furniture, Upholstery, and Allied Trades (1886) recorded Battam and Heywood at 114 Oxford Street as cabinet makers and upholsterers. The company displayed furniture designed by Christopher Dresser at the 1873 Vienna World Exhibition. The set of furniture was black, with gold ornamentation and scarlet Utrecht velvet and deemed by a correspondent for The Leeds Mercury as ‘vulgar and glaring’. A photograph taken just before the firm folded in 1889 shows that its corner shop then sported two timber fronts, crawling with grotesque carving in the Vredeman de Vries manner.

Source: Taylor, ‘Additions to Christopher Dresser’s List of Clients’, The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present (2012).