These days it is boutique student accommodation, but it was built in 1923 as the Alexandra Hotel, and public house, alongside Hambleden House, W.H. Smith’s wholesale distribution centre (seen behind, now Exchange Place Studios), that had opened a year before.
It replaced an older Alexandra Hotel that would have stood to the left and out of shot in this photo, and demolished as part of street improvements that realigned Exchange Street with the approach to the old Victoria Station (nowadays, think of the sloping approach to the Crowne Plaza Royal Victoria Hotel).
Much of the site of Alexandra House would once have been the courtyard behind the Smithfield Hotel. Prior to the street improvements, the street line was much further forward and Castlegate did not exist until afterwards.
The right hand side of Alexandra House stands in what would have been the auditorium of the Alexandra Theatre whose frontage stretched from the Smithfield Hotel, along Blonk Street, and ended where public toilets were later built (now an empty cafe/bar) above the confluence of the River Sheaf and River Don (Castlegate/Blonk Street).
Both the Smithfield Hotel and Alexandra Theatre were demolished in 1914 to make way for the Exchange Street realignment and the creation of Castlegate.
Alexandra House, if only in name, still provides us with a glimpse of the past.
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