Priory House Lillington Gardens Estate With Attached Walls And Steps

Priory House, Lillington Gardens Estate with Attached Walls and Steps

A block of 22 flats and maisonettes built between 1969 and 1972 by the architects Darbourne and Darke for the City of Westminster. The building is five to six storeys high and constructed of red brick walls with exposed concrete slab floors painted as bands, and a felt roof clad in white with distinctive mansards of artificial slate and metal edges. The complex uses a scissor plan arrangement, with maisonettes located to the front and back behind walled gardens. The rear maisonettes are set lower than those to the front and include an extra kitchen and dining room (numbers 6 to 10). All living rooms face the street, and all units have bedrooms on the garden elevations. Above these are one-bedroom and studio flats arranged around a rooftop street in the sky (numbers 11 to 22). Some of these upper units are reached via external stairs, while the larger units occupy two levels facing the garden, with internal stairs beneath separate sloping felted roofs. Access features brick steps at the east end and a concrete staircase shared with Wisley House to the west. The building is detailed with blue balconies to the upper living rooms, grey metal sash windows, and black doors, some with glazed panels. There are slabbed walkways and concrete and brick steps throughout.

This building forms part of the third phase of the Lillington Gardens Estate, which was developed following John Darbourne's competition win in 1961 for the rebuilding of Lillington Street. The original design took its cue from the striking Victorian red brick of the nearby Grade I listed Church of St James the Less, which the estate surrounds. The early phases of Lillington pioneered low-rise high-density solutions for public housing, with Darbourne rejecting symmetrical free-standing blocks in favour of a contextual approach where each resident would have a distinctive element to associate with. The development became successful and award-winning from the outset and was widely imitated.

For this third phase, the architects revised their original designs to introduce more maisonettes for families with their own front door. In the revised scheme, nearly half the units feature a front door and small garden at ground level, with more private than public open space. The slate mansards, which became a characteristic feature, were introduced here for the first time and would later appear prominently in their Marquess Estate at Islington. The Architects' Journal recognised in October 1969 that these revised plans achieved considerable family accommodation at densities of 255 persons per acre. The Times in September 1972 considered it an elegant and exciting environment for young and old. This scheme arguably spawned even more imitations than the original, including by Darbourne and Darke themselves. The building won an RIBA Commendation in 1973.