Walton House

Walton House is a block of flats on Longford Street, Camden, designed around 1906 by the London architect Percy Burnell Tubbs. Drainage plans were lodged with St Pancras Borough Council in August 1906, with builders G Munday & Sons, though the building may not have been completed until 1918, when it first appears in the Post Office Directory. It was built as speculative housing for lower middle-class families, with the landlord being Mr G Moore.

The building is constructed of soft red brick and buff terracotta, with a glazed brick basement and white rendered attic storey. The roof is Welsh slate. The plan comprises an off-centre stair hall with a cellar below and two flats per floor above. Each flat contains one or two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and bathroom or WC. The right-hand flats are narrower and deeper, with living room, bathroom and bedrooms arranged along a corridor running front to back. The left-hand flats are more compact, with the living room and main bedroom facing south towards Longford Street and the kitchen, bathroom and second bedroom facing north towards the rear yard.

The exterior is in a free Arts and Crafts influenced style. The building is four storeys above a low half-basement. The main south façade to Longford Street is dominated by a stair oriel in terracotta with grid-like mullion and transom fenestration, set off-centre above the main doorway. The doorway has twin part-glazed doors with moulded floral swags over the lintel. The ground floor above the low half-basement has three large tripartite windows with semi-circular heads and alternating brick and terracotta voussoirs. A terracotta string course breaks forward across the oriel. The first and second floors have sliding sash windows with flat rubbed-brick arches; those on the second floor have projecting brick aprons. A terracotta modillion cornice also breaks across the oriel. The attic storey has triplets of small casement windows. The deep-eaved roof features a shaped dormer above the stair. The return east elevation to Little Albany Street uses the same materials as the main façade and has two projecting end stacks supported on relieving arches springing from pairs of small scroll-brackets. The north elevation, which steps down on the left-hand side, is of brown brick and features a tall polygonal bay window to the right. The west elevation is blank and abuts the neighbouring building.

Inside, a terrazzo-floored entrance lobby leads to a cantilevered concrete stair with ornamental cast-iron balusters. Flats have part-glazed hardwood doors with brass knockers and letterboxes. Surviving internal features include moulded cornices, picture-rails and skirting-boards, four-panelled pine doors and simple timber fire surrounds.

Percy Burnell Tubbs (1868–1933) was a London-based architect and surveyor who commenced independent practice in 1889 with offices on Aldersgate Street in the City of London. He later went into partnership with his son Grahame and another architect as Percy Tubbs, Son and Duncan. Much of the firm's output consisted of commercial buildings in the City, most of which do not survive, with the notable exception of the Grade II listed Glasgow Herald offices on Fleet Street (1927). Other works included three suburban branches of Barclay's Bank, a surviving public housing scheme on Hortensia Road in Chelsea, and a number of war memorials, including one at Wooton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire, which is listed at Grade II. Tubbs was President of the Society of Architects from 1912 to 1914.