Great Arthur House including boiler house

Great Arthur House is a 17-storey tower block containing 120 flats above ground-floor estate offices. It was the winning design in a 1952 competition by Geoffry Powell, with the scheme built to revised designs between 1953 and 1957 by the newly formed partnership of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon.

Construction and Materials

The building uses reinforced concrete construction on concrete raft foundations. The side walls have a painted pick-hammered finish, whilst the main east and west elevations are clad in golden yellow opaque and clear glass set in aluminium frames, with fair-faced concrete finishes internally. The ground floor features pick-hammering with grey brick infill.

Layout and Design

The tower comprises 17 storeys above a basement. Each upper floor contains eight one-bedroom flats arranged in handed pairs, accessed by central lifts with an escape stair at each end of the block. The principal elevations feature paired cantilevered concrete balconies to each flat, painted and separated by wired glass screens with wired glass sides. The aluminium frames holding the cladding also form the windows, with horizontal sliding opening lights (featuring a distinctive internal security rail) and top-hung night ventilators. Timber windows to kitchens and bathrooms are set behind the balconies, reached via timber doors from the living rooms.

The ground floor houses offices and the basement contains a sub-station, both with timber windows. A large lift lobby occupies the centre, with an open way to the side linking the two halves of the estate. The side elevations have set-back glazed centres for the escape stairs, which successfully reduce the visual bulk of the block.

Roof Garden

The asphalted roof is laid out as a rooftop garden on two main levels, reached by open staircases. Features include a timber pergola, stepping stones and a pool. The water tank and lift motor room are concealed behind an aerofoil canopy, which has become the estate's distinctive decorative feature. Pevsner and Cherry noted in The Buildings of England that this was "the first time that such arbitrary, purely decorative or purely expressionist motifs appeared in London", marking the evolution of a distinctly 1950s style.

Interiors

The interiors are simple in design. Each flat has a sliding partition between the living room and bedroom. Kitchen and bathroom fixtures are not of special interest. The flats are screened from the central corridor by a series of fitted cupboards, which include the letter box.

Historical Significance

This building is the principal vertical element in the Golden Lane Estate and was the first block of flats to break the London County Council's 100-foot height restriction. When completed, it was briefly the tallest inhabited building in England.

Historical Context

At the end of the Second World War, the area between St Paul's Cathedral and the northern boundary of the City of London lay devastated. Previously filled with late Victorian commercial and warehouse buildings, photographs from 1945 show only isolated walls and mounds of rubble filling deep basements. The County of London Plan allowed this area to retain mixed commercial use, though it adopted a policy of dispersing industry out of central London in many areas.

Some housing provision was required for the small population connected with the City. The City Corporation provided most of its accommodation well outside its area, such as in the Old Kent Road and on Sydenham Hill, but it was agreed that it should purchase a small area of land adjacent to its boundary in Finsbury, which became the Golden Lane Estate. 4.7 acres were acquired by compulsory purchase in February 1951, and in May 1954 the site was extended to Goswell Road, making almost seven acres in total.

The Competition

In 1951 an open competition was held, assessed by Donald McMorran in February 1952. It was the first important housing competition since that for Churchill Gardens in 1945 and attracted 178 entries, nearly half as many again as in 1945. Among the entries were two prepared by three lecturers in architecture at Kingston School of Art, who had agreed to form a partnership if either scheme won. The entry submitted by Geoffry Powell was declared the winner on 26 February 1952, and thus was formed the partnership of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon.

The Development Brief

The anticipated need was not for large family units, but for a large number of flats for single people and couples such as caretakers, nurses and policemen who had to live near their work. In practice, the estate was popular from the first with professionals such as doctors, journalists, clergymen and married students. Paying the rent by cheque, as sometimes occurred here, was deemed sufficiently novel to merit a special feature in the architectural press.

The brief required 940 flats of one, two, three or four rooms at the maximum possible density of 200 persons to the acre. As completed, the estate contained 1,400 flats and maisonettes, a swimming pool and badminton court, a bowling green (now tennis courts), a nursery and playground, a community centre and club room, and a line of shops facing Goswell Road terminating in a pub, the Shakespeare.

Design Development

Powell's competition entry was subsequently greatly amended and made less symmetrical, but its principles remained the same. The brief demanded that each block have a basement for storage underneath it, and Powell developed this by exploiting the deep basements left by former buildings to produce a series of varied levels. By erasing the pre-war road pattern and making the development inward-facing around a series of courtyards, he made a virtue of the original lack of street frontage to Goswell Road.

The layout changed considerably after 1952, partly due to the original site being extended in 1955, and partly to increasing flexibility regarding the height of blocks, which allowed Great Arthur House to be built higher than originally proposed. To achieve the necessary density, the scheme required that many of the smaller flats would be in a high tower, and this tower was from the first seen as the key element in the design, both by Powell himself and by Arthur Kenyon in The Builder for 7 March 1952.

There was originally intended to be a more regular grid of flats to the east of Great Arthur House, separated by a strongly defined pedestrian access running north to south. The final layout was less rigid than this, though the strong formality which dictates the use of every inch of space remains. This was to be a key ingredient of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's philosophy of urban planning, which was seen again at their Barbican development immediately to the south (first plan 1954, with most of the layout agreed in 1959). Another was the provision of a wide range of facilities as well as housing on the site. A third was to remove all the original roads from the site, commemorated in the names of many of the blocks.

Planning Philosophy

Other post-war housing schemes had attempted relatively little that was new in planning terms: either they had provided for high densities in uniform blocks of medium height, as at Churchill Gardens, or they were low-density, small-scale developments still in the idiom of the Garden City movement, as at Lansbury. In 1957 the architects claimed, "There is no attempt at the informal in these courts. We regard the whole scheme as urban. We have no desire to make the project look like a garden suburb" (Architectural Association Journal, April 1957).

At Golden Lane the spaces and the relationship between the buildings were as important as the buildings themselves. "Special attention is paid to the floor treatment with varying textures, colours and patterns and with the floor pattern of the piazza being designed as a picture on the ground" (Architectural Design, July 1953).

Golden Lane straddles a boundary between the picturesque and the formal. One curious feature in the hard landscaping is the round bastion at the northern end of the site's central axis, an original part of the design. The urban quality and hard but richly patterned texture of the spaces are key features of the site, for by covering the entire space with architecture Chamberlin, Powell and Bon anticipated what they were to do later at the Barbican. The result has worn exceptionally well. In 1964 Ian Nairn considered the estate to have "a powerful sense of place" (Modern Buildings in London, 1964). The only significant alterations have been made to the pub under Crescent House, whose interior is now a Victorian pastiche.

Architectural Context

Writing on Golden Lane is dominated by discussion of an unplaced scheme by Alison and Peter Smithson, which was later widely published. That work and the unplaced scheme by Jack Lynn and Gordon Ryder, the former later to design the Park Hill flats in Sheffield, were to be the first demonstration of very long decks of medium-rise housing in Britain. Yet the formality, three-dimensional planning and spatial complexity of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's formal grid was a more personal response to the need to build high urban densities, reflecting contemporary antipathy to suburban developments such as the New Towns just as had the work of the Smithsons and Lynn, but which created a total environment in which every inch of space had a purpose.

Golden Lane was a complex mixture of the new formality emerging in British architecture in the early 1950s with a picturesque attention to landscape in which the spaces were almost as important as the buildings themselves; this was the secret of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's success in creating a sense of place.

Style and Materials

Stylistically, the early blocks, completed in 1957, stand out from the later work by their use of coloured opaque glass cladding. Colour is a notable feature of all Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's important early works. The central block, Great Arthur House, is bright yellow whilst the lower blocks of flats and maisonettes are red and blue, with their construction of load-bearing brick crosswalls clearly expressed. Great Arthur House is given added presence by a curved oversailing roof feature containing the water tanks, likened by Ian Nairn to "a concrete aeroplane". The roof was also provided with a pergola and water garden for the benefit of inhabitants of the upper floors.

However, it is the later blocks, and particularly that following the curve of Goswell Road, that are the key to the same architects' later developments at the adjacent Barbican site. The Goswell Road block was completed in 1962, and its facades are of bush-hammered concrete, brick and timber forming a profile of segmental curves. It is transitional in Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's work between the simple curtain wall blocks of the 1950s and the harder, more structural treatment developed at the Barbican during the early 1960s. Stylistically, it is contemporary with Sir Basil Spence's listed work at the University of Sussex in Brighton, though it is more varied in its materials. Both have as their sources Le Corbusier's Maisons Jaoul in Paris and Stirling and Gowan's work at Ham Common.

Assessment

Comparison with the big, tough Barbican next door is instructive. It becomes clear that many of the ideas of that well-known estate are present at Golden Lane. Here is the separation of transport and pedestrians, the differentiation of public spaces and private residential areas, the mix of different pedestrian levels, and the high proportion of recreational facilities. Golden Lane, however, is a unique environment, a self-sufficient "urban village" in which every element of space is accounted for and every detail carefully considered. It has good claim to be the most successful of England's housing developments from the early 1950s.