Samuel Lewis Buildings, Flats 201 To 246

Samuel Lewis Buildings, Flats 201 to 246

Block of flats on Liverpool Road, Islington, dated 1909 on the rainwater heads with the estate as a whole completed in 1910. Designed by Joseph and Smithem for the Samuel Lewis Trust.

The building is constructed of red brick set in English bond with dressings of artificial stone and roughcast, and roofs of artificial slate. It rises five storeys and forms part of an estate of six parallel blocks with gable ends to Liverpool Road. The five southernmost blocks, including this one, are identical in design though not in orientation, and are symmetrical on both their long fronts. The northernmost block (flats 601-614) is shorter and of rather different design.

The block is designed in three sections, each of basically the same design but with variations in the outer sections which 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 the following elements: a central staircase bay with flat-arched entrance under a bracketed canopy, in a two-storey porch with battered sides and tented roof; two casement windows above this, the upper of three lights with stone mullions under deep bracketed eaves to a steep hipped roof with one narrow pedimented dormer; either side of the staircase bay is a five-storey bay of sash windows, each with gauged brick head and keystone, under a banded and corniced gable; either side of this, a canted bay to five storeys, with stone window surrounds and cast-iron window guards, rendered spandrels to third and fourth floors and an ogee domed roof; beyond that a bay of sash windows with window guards, gauged brick heads to the ground and first floors, moulded storey band between second and third floors, the whole of the third floor rendered, deep bracketed eaves and a flat-arched dormer in a mansard roof. The division between each section is marked by a 'party wall' whose profile is 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 floor and a canted dormer in the attic, 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 and employs the elements of the entrance front in a simplified way: central three-window bays to the middle of each range, under a gable to the middle range and under shaped gables to the outer ranges; canted bays with ogee domes to the middle section and canted dormers to the outer ones; two ranges of sash windows with render to the third floor; and outer bays which in the centre are of two windows, on the outer ranges of one tripartite window.

The west end to Liverpool Road has two windows in a shallow bay to the ground-to-third floors, the ground-floor windows with stone surrounds under a segmental pediment, the tympanum filled with putti and arabesques embracing a cartouche inscribed "SAMUEL LEWIS BUILDINGS"; tented roof to the bay; a fourth-floor window of four lights with stone surround and cornice; stone sill and storey bands; mansarded gable with 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, one of several housing trusts created in London around the turn of the century to provide housing for the poor. The estate in Liverpool Road, which originally provided a total of 332 flats, appears to have been the first estate that the Trust built.