Samuel Lewis Buildings, Flats 501 To 545

Samuel Lewis Buildings, Flats 501–545

Block of flats on Liverpool Road, Islington, dating to 1909 (dated on rainwater heads) and completed in 1910. Designed by Joseph and Smithem for the Samuel Lewis Trust.

The building is constructed in red brick set in English bond with artificial stone dressings and roughcast, topped with artificial slate roofs. 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 symmetrical on both their long fronts. The northernmost block (Flats 601–614) is shorter and of rather different design.

This block is organised in three sections, each of the same basic design with variations in the outer sections that render the whole block 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 those to the staircase bay and those altered in the outermost bays of the entrance front.

On the entrance front, the middle section contains: a central staircase bay with flat-arched entrance under a bracketed canopy, within a two-storey porch with battered sides and tented roof; above it are two casement windows, the upper of three lights with stone mullions under deep bracketed eaves rising to a steep hipped roof with one narrow pedimented dormer. Either side of the staircase bay is a five-storey bay of sash windows with gauged brick heads and keystones, under a corniced and banded gable. Beyond this, a canted bay extends to five storeys with stone window surrounds and cast-iron window guards; the spandrels to the third and fourth floors are rendered, and the bay terminates in an ogee domed roof. Beyond that is a bay 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, the whole third floor rendered, deep bracketed eaves and a flat-arched dormer in a mansard roof. The divisions between each section are marked by party walls whose profiles swell upward 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 instead of an ogee roof, and the outermost bays have narrower windows and a dormer abutting a front stack.

The rear elevation is likewise divided into three sections, employing the elements of the entrance front in simplified form: 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 and on the outer ranges of one tripartite window.

The west end facing Liverpool Road displays two windows in a shallow bay extending from ground to third floors. The ground-floor windows have 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 is of four lights with stone surround and cornice. Stone sill- and storey-bands run across the elevation, and the mansarded gable features stone cornicing. The east end is treated similarly but with a stone cornice replacing the pediment and ornament above the ground-floor window.

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