Wells House

Wells House is a block of 48 flats on the east side of Rosebery Avenue in Islington. Designed in 1938 for Finsbury Metropolitan Borough by the architects Lubetkin and Tecton, with a revised design built between 1946 and 1949, and completed work published in the names of Skinner and Lubetkin. Ove Arup and Partners served as engineers.

The building is eight storeys tall and represents a pioneering use of reinforced concrete box frame construction with expansion joints. The structure is innovative: the staircases are cantilevered as balanced cantilevers off a central spine stabilised by the twin columns of the lift shaft. This open egg crate structural system, which freed the elevations from load-bearing constraints, enabled Lubetkin (assisted by C.L.P. Franck) to create an elaborately patterned exterior of brown brick with tiled ends. Dark red cast-iron railings and grilles provide contrast, whilst red pointing and grouting are distinctive features throughout. The roof is parabolic, designed aerodynamically to provide drying facilities and with rounded lift tops.

The principal elevation overlooks Rosebery Avenue and was devised by Tecton. The entire facade is expressed as a grid, framed by a high parapet and tiled ends, with a separate framing emphasising a centrepiece that does not reflect the internal flat partitions. Six flats are arranged per floor on upper storeys, served by three lift towers, with living rooms facing the street and two or three bedrooms facing a quiet internal courtyard. The ground floor is set back, with upper storeys supported on pilotis. Concrete balconies are tile clad, with sections of decorative ironwork creating contrasting patterns on each floor in a chequerboard texture inspired, according to Lubetkin, by Caucasian carpet patterns from his native Georgia. Metal concrete seats are incorporated within posts as a feature of the Rosebery Avenue elevation. One-bed and bedsitter flats on the ground floor are reached by an access deck.

The rear elevation is simpler, with windows in concrete surrounds and chequer-pattern open ventilation grilles to the stairs. A ramped entrance loggia of cantilevered concrete provides access, with ramps on either side of a central door.

Interiors are carefully designed and finished to a high standard with timber floors. The fitted kitchens, linked by hatch to living rooms, were noted as a "revelation for working class housing" and feature a Garchey system of refuse disposal—the first in London and the only one anywhere still known to be in operation. The flats are served by a district heating system set under Tunbridge House. The aerofoil-shaped drying areas resulted from experiments conducted with scientist Hyman Levy.

Spa Green Estate, of which Wells House forms part, represents the first and finest public housing scheme by this celebrated firm, working for Finsbury Metropolitan Borough. The architects had previously completed a pioneering health centre at Pine Street in 1938. Lubetkin and Tecton were renowned for their commitment to public building. They had won a much-publicised ideas competition for working-class flats in 1935, though throughout the 1930s their private scheme at Highpoint (Haringey, also listed) proved so successful it rapidly went upmarket. Spa Green was originally designed before the war for a smaller site, but wartime bombing enabled the blocks to be better positioned. The war also allowed Tecton to continue their investigative approach to architectural design and rational planning. It witnessed the development of Ove Arup's box frame or egg crate system, which was to transform post-war building. By placing structure in the side walls and floors, the elevations were freed for the patterning and texture that characterise Lubetkin's post-war work. As Lubetkin told the Architectural Review in 1951: "Too often in contemporary buildings of this kind the elevational proportions, with their repetitive rhythm of openings, seem to form a part of a continuous band of indeterminate limits, which could be snipped off by the yard at any point." This is not the case here. Wells House and Tunbridge House form a mirrored near-pair, set back to back.

The foundation stone was laid by Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Health and Housing, on 26 July 1946. Wells House achieves high-grade listing because the box frame was devised by Ove Arup specifically for this development, though one small block was used earlier at Brett Manor, Hackney. It represents the work in which Lubetkin at last expressed his ideas on low-cost public housing, simply but without the cost constraints that limited his later work. Every detail of exterior and interior has been carefully considered and finely finished. It is the most important post-war development by the most thoughtful and inventive pioneer of the modern movement in Britain. As Sir John Summerson observed in 1959: "In this scheme the town planning interest, the structural interest, and the manipulation of structure and planning to arrive at an architectural totality of high quality epitomises the problem of high-density housing as the architect sees it, and offers one of the most interesting results yet obtained."