Samuel Lewis Buildings, Flats 101 To 148

Samuel Lewis Buildings, Flats 101 to 148

Block of flats on Liverpool Road, Islington, dated 1909 on rainwater heads and completed in 1910. Designed by Joseph and Smithem for the Samuel Lewis Trust, part of an estate of 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; the northernmost block (nos 601-14) is shorter and of rather different design.

The building is constructed of red brick set in English bond with dressings of artificial stone and roughcast, with roofs of artificial slate. It rises five storeys and is divided into three sections, each of basically the same design but with variations in the outer sections that render the whole block symmetrical.

On the entrance front, the middle section contains a central staircase bay with a flat-arched entrance under a bracketed canopy, set within a two-storey porch with battered sides and a tented roof. Above the entrance 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 five-storey bay of sash windows, each with gauged brick head and keystone, beneath a banded and corniced gable. Beyond these are canted bays to five storeys, with stone window surrounds and cast-iron window guards, rendered spandrels to the third and fourth floors, and an ogee domed roof. Furthest out are bays of sash windows with window guards, gauged brick heads and keystones to the ground and first floors, a moulded storey band between the second and third floors, the whole of the third floor rendered, deep bracketed eaves and a flat-arched dormer in a mansard roof.

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. 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 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 to the middle of each range 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 then 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 has two windows in a shallow bay from 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'. The bay has a tented roof. The fourth-floor window has four lights with stone surround and cornice. Stone sill and storey bands run across the elevation, and a mansarded gable with stone cornicing crowns the design. 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 founded 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.