Repton House

Repton House is a Grade II* listed block of residential flats forming part of the Lillington Gardens estate in Westminster. The building comprises sixteen scissor-plan three-bedroom flats, two one-bedroom flats and two bedsits arranged over a basement garage.

The design was won in competition in 1961 by John Darbourne and built between 1964 and 1968 in phase I by Darbourne and Geoffrey Darke for Westminster City Council. The structure employs in-situ reinforced concrete beams and floors (exposed on the elevations and projecting balconies) combined with load-bearing brick crosswalls. The elevations are finished in multi-red hand-made facing bricks with raked joints, and the roof is flat felted.

The plan is complex, with the ground floor open over the basement garage, the block being supported on concrete pilotis. The flats above are arranged in a scissor plan, with six floors facing Charlwood Street and five overlooking internal gardens. The second floor on the Charlwood Street elevation comprises an access gallery with planting boxes, but there is no corresponding level of flats on the garden front. An access gallery on the fifth floor corresponds with the level of one-bedroom flats and bedsits on the garden front. At the southern end, Repton House abuts Forsyth House and the Pimlico Tram Public House, sharing with Forsyth House a dog-leg stair with tiled steps and timber balustrade.

On the Charlwood Street elevation, the access galleries project very slightly with overhanging planting. On the other floors, the smaller alternating bedrooms project while the master bedrooms are recessed. On the garden elevations, balconies are inset parallel to the kitchens, whilst the extra bedrooms to each alternate flat are recessed. All windows are dark stained timber double-glazed windows with vertical opening casements, all original. All doors were originally of black-stained timber, and most remain. Public spaces are lined with brick paviours, with shallow brick walls to the planting troughs. Original metal signage features black lettering on silvered backgrounds. The interiors are not of special interest.

John Darbourne's competition-winning design for the rebuilding of Lillington Street took its cue from the important Grade I listed Church of St James the Less, with its striking Victorian red brick, which the estate surrounds. Architects including James Stirling and James Gowan at Ham Common, Richmond; Leslie Martin at Cambridge University and Basil Spence at Sussex University, Brighton, had begun to explore combinations of brick and concrete, but not on such a scale, with such intensity of colour or complexity of form. Martin and his protégés had also theorised on low-rise high-density housing possibilities in their Bloomsbury project and college work at Cambridge, but Lillington was the first low-rise high-density public housing scheme to be built. Lillington Gardens was epoch-making: 'The blocks are more reminiscent of the college campus than of municipal tenements' (Architects' Journal, 1 July 1970). It influenced the style of council housing from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s. The scheme won a Housing Design award in 1969, a Ministry of Housing and Local Government award for good design in 1970, an RIBA Architecture Award in 1970 and a further RIBA commendation in 1973. The Times described it as 'An elegant and exciting environment for young and old' (13 September 1972).