Metropolitan Benefit Societies' Almshouses And Attached Railings

ISLINGTON

TQ3384NW BALL'S POND ROAD 635-1/49/55 (North side) 29/09/72 Metropolitan Benefit Societies' Almshouses and attached railings (Formerly Listed as: BALL'S POND ROAD Nos.1-12 Metropolitan Benefit Societies Almhouses East Villa, West Villa & Chapel) (Formerly Listed as: BALL'S POND ROAD Gateway and railings of Almhouses)

II

Almshouses, originally known as the Metropolitan Benefit Societies' Asylum. 1836 (chapel and north wing), c.1865 (west wing), 1866 (east wing), and 1931 (rebuilding of chapel). By S.H.Ridley. Grey brick set in Flemish bond with stone dressings, roofs of slate. The accommodation in separate wings on three sides of a courtyard open to the street with the former chapel, now a hall, on the axis of the north wing; in a Tudor style. There are two houses on either side of the chapel and four in each of the side wings, plus East and West Villa at the end of their respective wings, which are separately handled. The houses are typically two storeys high and double-fronted. Each has a porch, entered through a Tudor-arched double-chamfered doorway with hoodmould; flat-arched, double-chamfered two-light mullioned windows with casements to either side. Two windows to first floor, of the same design but with hoodmoulds having stops of carved heads or floral ornament, the hoodmoulds linked by a moulded cornice; parapet with modern coping. Party walls rise above a single gabled roof and carry multiple stacks at the ridge. Modern flat-roofed extensions at the rear of each house. West Villa and East Villa differ in that they have four bays to the courtyard and a two-span roof with twin gabled fronts to Ball's Pond Road, each with a two-storey canted bay below it; the bay has four flat-arched lights to the ground floor with cavetto mullions and four Tudor-arched lights to the first floor, and pinnacles to the gables with corbels and crockets. (The plans of West Villa and East Villa have been altered so that they no longer occupy four bays to the courtyard.) The former chapel projects forward from the north wing, presenting a single gabled front. Central Tudor-arched entrance, elaborately chamfered and moulded, flanked by two small single-light windows, with a five-light oriel window above which has moulded corbelling, two ranges of Tudor-arched lights, a cornice with grotesque heads which continues round the rest of the chapel, and a band of lozenge-patterned openwork below its roof. The gable is truncated and carries a half-domed niche. Octagonal corner-buttresses ending in pinnacles. Side elevations have a two-light mullioned window each to the ground floor, and a cross window to the first floor. Dwarf, coped and stuccoed walls, square brick coped gate piers, recently rebuilt, and cast-iron railing with Tudor-Gothic finials to street. (Historians' file, English Heritage London Division).

Listing NGR: TQ3316384869