No. 269 Leigham Court Road and associated patios, paved surfaces and walls

No. 269 Leigham Court Road and Associated Patios, Paved Surfaces and Walls

A sheltered housing scheme designed between 1968 and 1973 by Kate Macintosh for the London Borough of Lambeth. The building provides accommodation for up to 76 people and comprises 44 flats arranged across seven blocks, together with a common room, shop, laundry, guest room, warden's flat and office, all linked by a covered walkway.

The external walls are constructed of fair-faced concrete blocks, chosen in part for their ready adaptability to metric planning and for the sculptural focus which their regular surface gives to the architectural form. Lightweight concrete blocks are used for the inner leaf of cavity walls and some internal partitions. Windows and patio doors are dark-stained timber, balcony balustrades are tubular steel, and the roofs are felted.

The site is a long narrow rectangle, approximately 140 metres by 37 metres, with its long axis running east to west. A vehicular access to the north leads to limited parking. The building line is set back from the pavement, providing space for planting beds interspersed with a flight of steps and a low-gradient ramp giving access to the slightly elevated scheme. Some elements of the hard landscaping to the front have been altered with replacements or additions in yellow stock brick.

The scheme consists of five identical two-storey flat-roofed blocks, each containing eight flats (four two-person flats at ground floor, and two two-person flats and two one-person flats at first floor), along with two atypical blocks. One atypical block houses the common room, boiler room and warden's office at ground floor with the warden's flat above. The other contains the shop, guest room, laundry and covered parking at ground floor, with four flats above.

The blocks are arranged in a staggered and slightly irregular formation either side of the covered walkway which runs along the east-west axis of the site. The spacing between blocks creates informal garden courtyards. The positioning and modelling of the residential blocks mean that views are not revealed from any single point but unfold gradually as one moves through the scheme. The staggered arrangement, with wider and narrower sections, set-backs and dog-legs along the covered walkway, prevents sightlines along its entire length, avoiding the institutional character of a corridor. The covered walkway has a cloister-like quality and Macintosh described it as being like "a stream of water, with spaces for little eddies to occur off the stream… Carving out places for people to sit and gossip". Each block is entered from the covered walkway to either the north or south, with flats principally facing east and west across the garden courtyards. All flats have private open space: balconies for first-floor flats and patios for ground-floor flats, the majority facing south with the remainder facing east or west.

The seven blocks have a distinctly modernist aesthetic with a sculptural character. They appear as a series of cubes with sections taken out of the corners and sides to create set-backs for balconies, stairwells, patios and apertures for windows and doors; there is no particular front or back to each block. Window openings vary in size, housing chunky stained timber windows of one, two or three lights. The windows and patio doors are set in from the face of the walls with a plain wide chamfer along the window sill courses. At ground floor the lintels are subtly expressed with the facing blocks laid end-on. At first floor the window and door openings extend to the top of the roof parapet, the space being filled with dark-stained horizontal timber boarding.

The blocks are linked by the covered walkway, constructed of dark-stained timber with a deep fascia clad in horizontal boarding and supported on square-sectioned uprights. The walkway is paved in smooth-faced concrete slabs, and along its length are several runs of lock-up stores with solid timber doors. Large diameter piping associated with the boiler system runs the length of the site above the walkway canopy, supported on steel brackets attached to the buildings and in one location by a steel "table" straddling the walkway. These are later additions not of special interest. The site is largely level, though variations in some parts are managed with low retaining walls of concrete block for garden borders and patios.

The interior of each block enters through a communal hall with untreated fair-faced concrete blockwork walls. Doors to the flats are arranged in pairs and run from floor to ceiling with rectangular fanlights. All ground-floor flats have flush thresholds. The hall stairwell is lit by two pitched skylights, one over the stair and one over a void in the first floor landing. The stair is cast concrete with balustrades of three parallel hardwood handrails carried on white steel brackets. The first floor landing has a concrete block parapet wall around the top of the stairwell and void with inbuilt planting troughs, topped with a two-bar hardwood balustrade matching the stair. At the west end of the site where the communal facilities are located, the covered walkway becomes an enclosed hallway with glazing. Doors into the various facilities are either solid flush-panel timber or part-glazed.