Tunbridge House And Boiler House

Tunbridge House and Boiler House

A block of 48 flats with attached boiler house and chimney, designed in 1938 for Finsbury Metropolitan Borough by Lubetkin and Tecton. The initial design was revised and built between 1946 and 1949, with the completed work published under the names of Skinner and Lubetkin. Ove Arup and Partners served as engineers.

The building represents an innovative approach to reinforced concrete construction, employing a box frame system with expansion joints and staircases carried as balanced cantilevers off a central spine stabilised by the twin columns of the lift shaft. This open egg crate structure freed the elevations for the elaborate patterning devised by Lubetkin, assisted by C L P Franck. The exterior features brown brick with tiled ends to balconies and dark red cast-iron railings and grilles. Red pointing and grouting is a distinctive feature throughout.

The building rises eight storeys and accommodates six flats per floor. Upper floor flats are served by three lift towers, with living rooms oriented towards the street and two or three bedrooms facing a quiet internal courtyard. One-bed and bedsitter flats on the ground floor are reached by an access deck. The roof is parabolic and aerodynamically designed to provide drying facilities whilst encompassing the lift tops. The boiler house is a single-storied angled block with an 80-foot chimney incorporated into its side.

The principal elevation facing the park, designed by Tecton on Rosebery Avenue, presents balconies set within the line of the block in front of kitchens. The entire elevation is expressed as a grid within a frame provided by a high parapet and tiled ends, with separate framing emphasising a centrepiece that does not reflect the internal flat partitions. The ground floor is set back whilst upper floors rest on pilotis. Concrete balconies are tile-clad with sections of decorative ironwork creating a chequerboard texture based, according to Lubetkin, on Caucasian carpet patterns from his native Georgia. Metal windows feature opening casements, and a porch with shell hood provides the main entrance.

The rear elevation is simpler in expression, with windows set in concrete surrounds and chequered open ventilation grilles serving the stairs. A ramped entrance leads to the deck access serving the small flats on the ground floor.

Interiors were carefully designed and finished to a high standard, with timber floors throughout. The fitted kitchens, linked by hatch to the living room, were described as "a revelation for working class housing". They are particularly notable for their Garchey system of refuse disposal, the first installed in London and the only one anywhere still known to be in operation. The flats are served by a district heating system installed beneath Tunbridge House.

Tunbridge House and Wells House form a mirrored near-pair set back to back. The aerofoil shape of the drying areas resulted from a series of experiments with the scientist Hyman Levy. The building takes its name from New Tunbridge Wells, the chalybeate spa developed on the site in the 17th century.

The Spa Green Estate represents the first and finest scheme of public housing by this celebrated firm working for Finsbury Metropolitan Borough, for whom they had completed a pioneering health centre at Pine Street in 1938. Lubetkin and Tecton were renowned for their commitment to public building and had won a much-publicised ideas competition for working-class flats in 1935. Their intentions had been frustrated in the 1930s when their private Highpoint development in Haringey, already listed, became so successful that it rapidly went upmarket. Spa Green was designed before the war for a smaller site, but wartime bombing allowed the blocks to be better positioned. The war also enabled Tecton to continue their investigative approach to architectural design and rational planning, and facilitated the development of Ove Arup's box frame or egg crate system, which would transform post-war building. By placing the structure in side walls and floors, the elevations were freed for the patterning and texture that distinguished Lubetkin's post-war work.

Lubetkin told the Architectural Review in 1951 that contemporary buildings of this kind too often had elevational proportions with repetitive rhythm of openings forming "a continuous band of indeterminate limits, which could be snipped off by the yard at any point". This is not the case here. The box frame system was devised by Ove Arup especially for this development, though one small block had been used earlier at Brett Manor, Hackney. Spa Green is the work in which Lubetkin finally realised his ideas on low-cost public housing, executed simply and without the cost constraints that limited his later work. Every detail of exterior and interior has been carefully considered and finely finished. This represents the most important post-war development by the most thoughtful and inventive pioneer of the modern movement in Britain.