Crescent House Including Ground Floor Shops And Shakespeare Public House

Crescent House is a block of 159 flats with ground floor shops and a public house, built between 1958 and 1962 by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon as part of the Golden Lane Estate. The building demonstrates exceptional skill in handling complex urban geometry and mixing architectural materials.

The structure is four storeys high with reinforced concrete construction. The concrete is exposed and bush-hammered up to a round-arched cornice and sill band, with mosaic cladding applied to the pilotis (supporting columns) and horizontal bands between floors. The ground floor is set back behind these pilotis. Above the shops, three storeys of flats are arranged in two rows either side of an access corridor that is open to the air on the top floor. Each flat has a head-high partition forming a bedroom.

The block curves along its front elevation facing Goswell Road, creating a dramatic street presence, while the rear is straight. This curved plan cleverly ensures all flats remain rectangular despite the geometry, with an open well at the southern end. The public house sits apart at this southern end, separated from the shops by steps and an archway leading into the estate. The overall composition — the curved arched cornice, the sill band and pilotis below, and the stepped profile of the dark, largely glazed floors of flats between — is exceptionally impressive. Windows are hardwood timber stained dark, with pivoting centrally-hung casements and some aluminium side-opening lights.

Inside, some apartments retain contemporary fittings and screens, but otherwise the interiors are not of special interest. The public house originally had features of note but has lost its original internal character.

The shops were designed with entrances both to the street and to the estate, where they are served by their own terrace above an access road for deliveries. Several shop fronts survive in original or near-original form. Number 12 has a timber front with toplights, a central door and tiled dado panel, along with contemporary lettering. Number 14 has a marble plinth and timber door. Number 26, dated 1969, features large picture windows in timber surrounds to both front and back. Number 28 has a timber shopfront with a band at dado level. The remaining shops retain their original form with toplights, fascia and plinth, though the main windows have mostly been replaced in aluminium. A large Corporation of London plaque and sign appears on the end wall.

Geoffry Powell explained how important the work of Le Corbusier was to the practice at that time, with the Maisons Jaoul being particularly widely admired in Britain. The use of Le Corbusier's influence for the curve facing Goswell Road is particularly handsome in its geometry and variety of timber and concrete finishes. The building is graded at II* for its place in the evolution of post-war architecture and for the sophistication with which contrasting materials and the geometry of the facade are handled.

At the end of the Second World War, the area between St Paul's and the northern boundary of the City lay devastated. Late Victorian commercial and warehouse buildings had been destroyed, leaving only isolated walls and rubble-filled basements by 1945. While the County of London Plan allowed mixed commercial use for the area, some housing provision was required for the small population connected with the City. The City Corporation agreed to purchase land adjacent to its boundary in Finsbury for the Golden Lane Estate. The site of 4.7 acres was acquired by compulsory purchase in February 1951 and extended to Goswell Road in May 1954, making almost seven acres in total.

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

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

The brief was to supply 940 flats of one, two, three or four rooms at a maximum density of 200 persons to the acre. As completed, the estate contained 1400 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 the line of shops facing Goswell Road terminating in the Shakespeare public house. 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, and Powell developed this by exploiting the deep basements left by previous commercial buildings to create varied levels. By erasing the pre-war road pattern and making the development inward-facing around courtyards, he made a virtue of the original lack of a street frontage to Goswell Road.

The layout changed considerably after 1952, partly due to the site extension in 1955 and partly due to increasing flexibility regarding block heights, which allowed Great Arthur House to be built higher than originally proposed. By placing many smaller flats in a sixteen-storey tower, Powell achieved the required 200 persons per acre density while building numerous maisonettes and maintaining open courtyards. The tower was from the first seen as the key element in the design, both by Powell himself and by Arthur Kenyon writing in The Builder on 7 March 1952. These principles were later repeated at the Barbican. Great Arthur House was briefly the tallest block of flats in Britain.

Other post-war housing schemes had attempted relatively little that was new in planning terms, either providing high densities in uniform blocks of medium height (as at Churchill Gardens) or low-density small-scale developments in the Garden City idiom (as at Lansbury). In 1957 the architects stated: "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." At Golden Lane, the spaces and relationships between buildings were as important as the buildings themselves. Special attention was paid to floor treatment with varying textures, colours and patterns, with the piazza floor pattern designed as a picture on the ground.

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 quality of the spaces are key features, as by covering the entire space with architecture, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon anticipated their later work at the Barbican. The result has worn exceptionally well. In 1964 Ian Nairn considered the estate to have "a powerful sense of place." The only significant alterations have been made to the pub under Crescent House, whose interior is now a Victorian pastiche, described by Nairn as "modern, but without the decorative affectations that plague pub designers."

Writing on Golden Lane is dominated by discussion of an unplaced scheme by Alison and Peter Smithson, which was widely published later. That work and the unplaced scheme by Jack Lynn and Gordon Ryder (the former later to design Park Hill flats in Sheffield) were to be the first demonstration of very long decks of medium-rise housing in Britain. The formality, three-dimensional planning and spatial complexity of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's formal grid was a more personal response to building high urban densities, reflecting contemporary antipathy to suburban developments such as the New Towns, but they created a total environment in which every inch of space had a purpose. Golden Lane is a complex mixture of the new formality emerging in British architecture in the early 1950s with picturesque attention to landscape, where 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.

Stylistically, the early blocks completed in 1957 stand out from later work by their use of coloured opaque glass cladding. Colour is a notable feature of all three of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's most important early works: their Witham seed warehouse, Bousfield Road School, and Golden Lane. 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, described by Ian Nairn as "rather like 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, principally Crescent House following the curve of Goswell Road, that are key to the same architects' later developments at the adjacent Barbican site. Completed in 1962, the Goswell Road block features a rear facade of hammered concrete forming a profile of segmental curves. It is transitional between the simple curtain wall blocks of the 1950s and the harder, more structural treatment developed at the Barbican during the early 1960s. This block set a new pattern for high-density housing at modest height that in many ways resembles Lillington Gardens in Westminster.

Comparison with the big, tough Barbican next door is instructive. It becomes clear that many of that well-known estate's ideas are present at Golden Lane, particularly at Crescent House: 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 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.