Samuel Lewis Buildings, Flats 301 To 345

Samuel Lewis Buildings, Flats 301 to 345

Block of flats on Liverpool Road, Islington, dated 1909 on the rainwater heads and completed in 1910. Designed by Joseph and Smithem for the Samuel Lewis Trust. The estate as a whole comprises six parallel blocks with gable ends to Liverpool Road; the five southernmost blocks are identical in design though not in orientation and symmetrical on both their long fronts, while the northernmost block (nos 601-614) is shorter and of rather different design.

The block is constructed in red brick set in English bond with dressings of artificial stone and roughcast, and roofs of artificial slate. It rises five storeys and is designed in three sections, each of basically the same design with variations in the outer sections that render the block as a whole symmetrical. All windows are flat-arched except for those on the second, third and fourth floors of the middle bay of each section at the rear. All windows are sashes except for those to the staircase bay and those altered in the outermost bays of the entrance front of each block.

On the entrance front, the middle section contains a central staircase bay with a flat-arched entrance under a bracketed canopy, in a two-storey porch with battered sides and tented roof. Above this are two casement windows, the upper of three lights with stone mullions, set under deep bracketed eaves to a steep hipped roof with one narrow pedimented dormer. Either side of the staircase bay is a bay of sash windows with gauged brick heads and keystones, under a banded and corniced gable. Beyond these are canted bays to five storeys, featuring stone window surrounds and cast-iron window guards, with rendered spandrels to the third and fourth floors and ogee domed roofs. Further out are bays of sash windows with window guards, gauged brick heads to the ground and first floors, a moulded storey band between the second and third floors, rendered third floor, deep bracketed eaves, and flat-arched dormers in mansard roofs. The division between each section is marked by party walls whose profiles are upswept to corniced chimneys.

The two outer sections reproduce the same arrangement except that the gables flanking the staircase bay are banded and shaped, the outer five-storey canted bay ends in deep eaves over the third storey and a canted dormer instead of an ogee roof, and the outermost bays of the whole block have narrower windows and a dormer abutting a front stack.

The rear elevation is again in three sections, employing the elements of the entrance front in a simplified way: central three-window bays under a gable to the middle range and under shaped gables to the outer ranges; then canted bays with ogee domes to the middle sections and canted dormers to the outer ones; then two ranges of sash windows with render to the third floor; and outer bays which in the centre are of two windows and on the outer ranges of one tripartite window.

The west end to Liverpool Road features two windows in a shallow bay from ground to third floors, with the ground-floor windows having stone surrounds under a segmental pediment. The tympanum is filled with putti and arabesques embracing a cartouche inscribed 'SAMUEL LEWIS BUILDINGS'. The bay has a tented roof, and the fourth-floor window is of four lights with stone surround and cornice. Stone sill and storey bands run across, with a mansarded gable incorporating stone cornicing. The east end is treated in the same way but with a stone cornice in place of the pediment and ornament above the ground-floor window.

The Samuel Lewis Trust was established in 1906 as one of several housing trusts set up in London around the turn of the century to provide housing for the poor. The estate on Liverpool Road, which originally provided a total of 332 flats, appears to have been the first that the Trust built.