Sadler House And Attached Porter'S Lodge

Sadler House and attached porter's lodge

A block of 33 flats with attached porter's lodge on Rosebery Avenue, designed in 1938 for Finsbury Metropolitan by Lubetkin and Tecton. The revised design was built between 1946 and 1950, with the completed work published in the name of Skinner and Lubetkin. Ove Arup and Partners served as engineers.

The building employs innovative reinforced concrete box frame construction with expansion joints. The open egg crate structure allowed Lubetkin, assisted by C L P Franck, to create an elaborately patterned exterior of brown brick with tiled ends and balcony fronts, complemented by dark red cast-iron railings and grilles. Red pointing and grouting form a distinctive feature. The roof is flat with skylights to each upper flat.

The serpentine block rises to four storeys with eight flats per floor, accessed via rear staircase and access galleries. One porter's flat is positioned below the end pilotis of the block. Kitchens, bathrooms and some bedrooms overlook the gallery, while living rooms and principal bedrooms have equal frontage, with the latter set behind balconies in an alternating pattern on the Rosebery Avenue elevation. This creates a rich three-dimensional chequerboard pattern enforced by the serpentine plan. Metal windows with opening casements are throughout. The rear elevation features concrete access decks finished with cast-iron grilles and a central staircase with rounded projection at the angle of the block.

The interiors are carefully designed and finished to a high standard. The fitted kitchens were noted as "a revelation for working class housing" and feature a Garchey system of refuse disposal—the first installed in London and the only one anywhere still known to be in operation. The block is served by district heating installed beneath Tunbridge House.

Spa Green Estate represents the first and finest public housing scheme by this celebrated firm, working for Finsbury Metropolitan, 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 publicised ideas competition for working-class flats in 1935. However, their private Highpoint development in Haringey proved so successful it rapidly went upmarket, frustrating their ambitions in the 1930s. 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, fostering the development of Ove Arup's box frame or egg crate system, which would transform post-war building. By placing the structure in the side walls and doors, the elevations were freed for the patterning and texture characteristic of Lubetkin's post-war work. This frame structure also allowed Lubetkin to explore his love of curves—this is the only block in which he adapted the frame to this effect, forming a counterpoise at right angles to the larger, square blocks.

The box frame was devised by Ove Arup specifically for this development, though one small block had been used earlier at Brett Manor, Hackney. Spa Green represents the work in which Lubetkin finally expressed his ideas on low-cost public housing, simply conceived yet without the cost constraints that limited his later work. Every detail of the exterior and interior is carefully considered and finely finished, making it the most important post-war development by this thoughtful and inventive pioneer of the modern movement in Britain.