Golden Lane Estate E-Book

Stefi Orazi

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 133

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

WINNER of the Architectural Book of the Year Award 2023, Monograph (Building) Category. The story of the building of an iconic mid-century housing estate, that is often seen as the model for housing architecture. Fully illustrated with commissioned photography of the interiors and exteriors, archive images and newly commissioned writing by leading architectural historians, plus interviews with people on the estate to capture their story. Following World War II, the population in the City of London plummeted, and with a duty to provide housing for those working in the area – such as nurses, policemen and doctors –  the City Corporation commissioned architect Geoffry Powell in 1952 to design the Golden Lane Estate. Powell invited Christoph Bon and Jo Chamberlin to join him in developing a detailed design for the  Estate. They would later become Chamberlin, Powell & Bon, working on world-renowned projects such as the Barbican Estate and the University of Leeds. Golden Lane Estate, now Grade II and Grade II* listed is often cited as being a model estate. With its high level of detailing, use of materials, colour, its humane scale, thoughtfulness of space, light, communal spaces, leisure facilities and integrated shops, it is exemplary, particularly for social housing. It was deemed as a success from the off and remains popular today, with many original tenants and/or their families still choosing to live there. What sets the estate apart is the sense of community and neighbourliness which is promoted by the architecture and design. 

Leseprobe

Contents

Foreword Stefi Orazi

Introduction Elain Harwood

In conversation with Golden Lane residents

Plates

Floor plans

Further reading

Acknowledgements

ForewordStefi Orazi

A month before my 30th birthday, I moved into the Golden Lane Estate with my then partner. It was our first home together. After the initial realization of how much renovation the flat needed, we soon became obsessed with its idiosyncratic details: a three-quarter-height partition wall with uplighters integrated into the top; built-in wardrobes with more drawers than anyone with a sock fetish could dream of; a little two-way cupboard next to the front door for milk deliveries; unique cast aluminium door numbers; huge full-width timber windows that pivoted in the centre for easy cleaning — the list goes on. Every detail had been thoroughly considered, and as a whole, made the flat utterly charming.

We soon got ourselves involved in the residents’ association. It was at a time when there was an influx of young creatives moving onto the estate, and the long-standing residents’ association embraced this new younger generation and, in fact, wanted to attract more of us to join. I volunteered to become the association’s graphic designer and produced leaflets and posters to encourage new members. Through this process, I met lots of the residents and many have become life-long friends.

I lived on the estate for nearly ten years, and in three different types of flats, each unique in character, and in each the hand of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon could be felt. It is this relationship with the architecture and its architects that makes the estate feel so personal, and my attachment to it, as with many residents, is an emotional one. It was, therefore, with a degree of reservation that when I was approached by Batsford to create this book, I agreed to take it on. During the time I lived there, I saw a decline in the maintenance of the buildings. The once regular cyclical works programme seemed to have been abandoned, the promise of new windows across the estate was regularly shelved and delayed. Residents had begun to become increasingly frustrated and their voices not listened to. I knew that interviewing residents for this book would not be an easy listen (it’s worth mentioning that my request to interview the estate management for this project was declined). Of course, this is not a problem unique to Golden Lane: any estate, particularly one that is coming up to 70 years old and is Grade II and Grade II* listed, faces the challenge of how to bring it up to 21st-century standards, especially within the constraints of a limited budget. In many ways, it has fared better than other council estates due to the quality of its design and wealthy central London location, and it has not faced the antisocial behaviour some estates have.

Many of the original residents have sadly passed away since I first moved there, and this is a very different book to one that would have been made a decade ago. The sense of community, however, is still very strong — and like nowhere else I have experienced before or since. With the successful refurbishment of the community centre a few years ago, and the recladding of the Great Arthur House tower recently, the estate has been given a new lease of life. With firm plans for an estate-wide upgrade of the windows now in place, I hope that Golden Lane is now given the attention it deserves, and that the City of London seeks the knowledge of the people who know and care for it most — its residents.

1 Children’s paddling pool (now turfed over), views south towards Cullum Welch House and Great Arthur House beyond, 1964

IntroductionElain Harwood

The History of the Golden Lane Estate

Golden Lane, running north from the City of London’s boundary, was first developed in the thirteenth century. The dominant feature by the late sixteenth century was a brewery, which stood amid small houses and shops roughly on the site of Stanley Cohen House and the lawn behind it (fig. 2). A second, far larger, brewery was later added on the corner of Old Street; with the Brewers Hall and Whitbread’s brewery also close by, the area must have been awash with beer.1 Otherwise, Richard Horwood’s map of 1792–9 (fig. 3) suggests that Golden Lane had similarities with present-day Whitecross Street, which runs parallel to the east. To the west, behind the brewery, there lay a jumble of short residential terraces between the slightly grander Bridgewater Square to the south and the more orderly Hatfield Street to the north. To meet the demand of the expanding city, lots of local builders had developed tiny plots of land, leaving open space between them and creating a singularly haphazard, incoherent maze of culs-de-sac and alleyways.

The open spaces did not last long. As the breweries fell into the hands of a few large companies from the mid-nineteenth century onwards and their number was rationalized, so the area became the centre of London’s rag trade, with showrooms, warehouses and factories. The Builder magazine in March 1879 reported that Golden Lane was about to be doubled in width on its west side and rebuilt with ‘large warehouses and business premises’, following a similar operation nearing completion along Fann Street.2 These warehouses were noted for their deep basements—and for the combustible nature of their goods. A fire on the night of 19 November 1897 swept away 4 acres (1.6 hectares) of similar properties on Jewin Street and Jewin Crescent, further south in the heart of present-day Barbican, and the entire area burned merrily in the air raids of 1940–1.3 The most damaging of these raids occurred on 29 December 1940, when for three hours high-explosive bombs, incendiaries and parachute mines rained across the streets north of St Paul’s Cathedral. Overall, the war destroyed a third of the City, a third of its buildings and a quarter of its rateable value; but damage was concentrated in its northern and eastern wards, with almost every building in Barbican and Moorgate areas destroyed.4 In the square of land between Fann and Hatfield streets, Goswell Road and Golden Lane, only one building survived, the premises of Maurice Rosenberg, skirt manufacturer, at No.40 Fann Street on the corner of Hotwater Court.5 The rest of the site became a dumping ground for rubble cleared from the surrounding streets.

The Golden Lane Competition

The City of London boundary cut across Golden Lane, and so the site off Fann Street was subject to the strictures of both the London County Council (LCC), as overall planning authority, and the City of London Corporation. The County of London Plan produced by J H Forshaw and Patrick Abercrombie for the LCC in 1943 proposed a continued business use for the area, as in 1944 did the Corporation’s City of London Plan, the work of the chief engineer, Francis J Forty.6 In practice, however, the Second World War hastened the westward migration of the fashion wholesalers and showrooms to the area north of Oxford Street, which had already begun in the 1930s. The LCC and Royal Fine Art Commission criticized Forty’s plan as too conservative with its limited proposals for new roads and more open space, and in response the City brought in two well-respected architects, Charles Holden and William Holford, to make revisions.

2 Aerial view of the Genuine Beer Brewery, Golden Lane, 1807

3 Map of London (detail) by R.ichard Horwood, 1795

The City of London Corporation had been the first public authority in England to build social housing, in the 1860s. Its policy by the twentieth century was to concentrate most of its housing activities in healthy suburban areas such as Camberwell and Sydenham Hill, encouraging the drift of population away from the Square Mile that coincidently made more space for business users. The City’s population in 1851 was 130,000; by 1939 it was 9,000 and in 1951 it was 5,000, with only 48 people living in the worst-damaged ward of Cripplegate Without, the site of Barbican.7 The corporation nevertheless recognized that some key workers such as caretakers, police officers and nurses needed to live centrally and, as well as building flats in the late 1940s and early 1950s on the Old Kent Road, it also sought a site within the City itself. Holden and Holford suggested the corporation buy and redevelop the remains of Bridgewater Square, just north of Beech Street, but the Ministry of Health rejected the proposal because the land was so expensive.8

The City of London Corporation’s Public Health Committee turned its eyes towards cheaper land on the boundary with the working-class borough of Finsbury. Its chairman, Eric F Wilkins, was drawn to the derelict site off Golden Lane, where Finsbury Borough Council was slowly removing the rubble at the rate of 7,000 cubic yards (5,300 cubic metres) per month; such was the height of the mound that he estimated that it would take three years to clear.9 The City acquired these 4.7 acres (1.9 hectares) of land (including No.40 Fann Street) in February 1951, having already made an order for their development at 200 persons per acre, the maximum permitted under the County of London Plan. There then followed protracted negotiations with Finsbury, whose councillors were anxious to secure some of the flats for their own tenants. The City saw its emphasis on small flats as not only suitable for its key workers, identified as mainly couples with small children or none, but also as a means of keeping out Finsbury’s large working-class families; in November 1952 only 12.5 per cent of the initial nominations, or 42 flats, were offered to the borough, later increased to 55.10 The City’s surveyor produced a scheme for a single 9-storey slab, which the Common Council accepted in June 1950.11 The LCC was also happy, but after discussions with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in March 1951 the Public Health Committee determined to hold an open competition. Based on the surveyor’s estimates, the committee prepared a brief for a mixture of small flats: 35 per cent with one bedroom, 45 per cent with two and 15 per cent with three; 5 per cent of the units were to be bedsitters. It preferred small ‘working’ kitchens to those combined with living-room accommodation, in a break from working-class traditions, but asked for private balconies large enough for a cot or pram to be provided in the larger dwellings. The conditions of the competition also gave a preference for staircase access to the flats rather than the long balconies found in most local authority housing, though they were not wholly precluded so long as they did not run past living rooms or bedrooms. Car parking, a laundry and drying areas were excluded as expensive and unnecessary, but the committee asked for a community centre and children’s playground. It asked that the existing road pattern be disregarded but that the LCC’s 100-foot height limit should be exceeded only in special circumstances. The flats were to be centrally heated, then still a novelty in public housing since few tenants could afford the additional charges.12

The first major housing competition since that held by Westminster City Council for Churchill Gardens in 1945, Golden Lane attracted 178 entries from across Britain, many by young architects. They were exhibited for a week in March 1952 at London’s Guildhall. The Public Health Committee reported that ‘a large majority of the entries reach a high standard of design, many being valuable contributions to the study of urban housing’.13

Entries 172, 173 and 174 were by Peter Chamberlin (1919–78, known since schooldays as Joe after the politician), Geoffry Powell (1920–99) and Christoph Bon (1921–99). They had met at Kingston School of Art in 1948–9 when first Bon and later Powell joined Chamberlin as assistant teachers in the School of Architecture founded by the architect Eric Brown in 1941. Chamberlin, a conscientious objector in the war, had been among the first students to take the course; he stayed on to become Brown’s deputy and a partner in his architectural practice, collaborating on exhibition work that included the ‘Seaside’ section of the Festival of Britain. Powell had studied at the Architectural Association as one of a cohort that also included Philip Powell (no relation) and Hidalgo Moya. The three had similarly moved on to work with their head of school, in their case as assistants to Frederick Gibberd, at the height of his reputation as a designer of flats and low-cost housing, with whom they developed a love of bright colour. The son of Swiss hoteliers, Bon had grown up in St Gallen and studied at Zurich’s Federal Institute of Technology before gaining practical experience with Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti and Rogers in Milan; he also worked briefly in London for Holford on his plan for the City. Another Swiss, Alfred Roth, introduced him to Brown, who invited him to teach at Kingston.

By 1951 the group was growing restless. Powell recalled that ‘Eric Brown was a splendid person, but difficult to work with. … He complained that [we] didn’t keep time, didn’t wear the white coats expected of architectural assistants, and he thought we wanted to usurp his position.’14 They resolved to set up their own practice and the Golden Lane competition provided an opportunity. Chamberlin, Powell and Bon (CPB) came up with three different solutions, and Powell suggested that if they submitted all three they would have a better chance of winning. That by Bon was jointly credited with Chamberlin, who also produced his own design. The other two assistants, Charlie Greenberg and Roy Christy, did not enter, though Greenberg later worked on Barbican.

The RIBA nominated Donald McMorran as the competition’s independent assessor, beginning a long association with the City as a designer of housing and police buildings in traditional styles.15 Powell and Bon admired McMorran’s work ‘in its way’, Bon describing it as ‘post-modern before it had even started’. When Powell got his drawings in on the deadline of 31 January 1952 only by not completing the cross-hatching, the kindly McMorran finished them for him. Looking at the drawings today, this is hard to tell.16 Powell was 31, relatively mature compared to Powell and Moya when they had won the competition for Churchill Gardens aged 24 and 25 respectively — housemates since student days, they had each drawn up their schemes on the same dining room table.

Two unplaced entries to the Golden Lane competition have long overshadowed the winning scheme. Both designed by recent graduates from King’s College, Newcastle, these were proposals for long slabs with broad access ‘promenades’ or ‘streets in the sky’ — one by Jack Lynn and Gordon Ryder, and the other by Alison and Peter Smithson. Drawings only survive for the entry by the Smithsons. It is hard to imagine that they would have had the subtlety of the estate as finally built, or dealt so convincingly with the spaces and levels between the blocks. Chamberlin’s independent scheme comprised a 19-storey block, with medium-rise slabs surrounded by a web of 2-storey terraces across the remaining site. Something of its character can be gleaned from CPB’s later housing at Vanbrugh Park, Greenwich, although much of the detailed design there was by Powell.17 What Bon’s entry looked like is now unknown.

Geoffry Powell’s scheme (figs. 4–5) was declared the winner on 26 February 1952, and thus was born the partnership of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon. Monty Richards, clerk to the Public Health Committee, phoned to say he had won and to check if he was up to the job. Powell tried to reassure him. ‘Of course we can’ declared Chamberlin, the natural leader of the group characteristically coming to the fore.18 The Architects’ Journal declared CPB among its ‘men of the year’, ‘for proving that three solutions stand more chance of winning a competition than one, and that a competition is still one of the classic ways of establishing a practice’.19 Ove Arup and Partners were appointed the engineers.

4, 5 Geoffry Powell’s competition entry and winning design