Henry Wise House

Henry Wise House

A block of 96 flats designed by John Darbourne, who won a competition for the scheme in 1961. The building was detailed and constructed between 1964 and 1967 by Darbourne and Darke for Westminster City Council.

The structure comprises in-situ reinforced concrete beams and floors, which are exposed on the elevations and project to form balconies. Load-bearing brick cross walls provide additional support. The external walls are faced with multi-red hand-made bricks laid with raked joints, while the flat felted roof is concealed behind soldier-course parapets. The building rises eight storeys above a ground level of hard standing for cars. The change in levels across the site is expressed through exposed floor plates visible on the building's side elevation at the corner of Charlwood Street.

Access galleries run along the Vauxhall Bridge Road elevation on the first, fourth and seventh floors. These galleries are stepped in plan and incorporate deep planting troughs of considerable width, planted with large shrubs that are irrigated by downpipes from the floors above. The galleries serve bedsitter flats on their respective levels, with one- or two-bedroom split-level flats positioned on the floors immediately above and below, these latter having dual aspect. The second bedrooms project forward on to Vauxhall Bridge Road, creating a regular rhythm across the elevation. A projecting lift shaft rises at the centre of the composition.

The garden elevation displays a varying rhythm, with all flats featuring projecting balconies. Each balcony is partly enclosed by set-back glazing, forming an irregular pattern of projecting bands of brickwork. The windows are dark stained timber with double glazing and vertical opening casements (original). Most doors also remain in their original black-stained timber. Public spaces are lined with brick paviours and shallow brick walls defining the planting troughs. Original metal signage with black lettering on silvered backgrounds is retained.

Darbourne formed his partnership with Geoffrey Darke to develop the wider Lillington Street scheme, of which Henry Wise House was the first block to be completed. The design took inspiration from the striking Victorian red brick of the grade I listed Church of St James the Less, which the estate surrounds. While architects including James Stirling at Ham Common in Richmond, Leslie Martin at Cambridge University and Basil Spence at Sussex University had begun exploring combinations of brick and concrete, Lillington was undertaken on a larger scale and with greater intensity of colour. Martin and his associates had also theorised about low-rise high-density housing through their Bloomsbury project and college work at Cambridge, but Lillington was the first low-rise high-density public housing scheme to be built and proved epoch-making. From the mid-1960s until the early 1980s, Lillington Gardens influenced the style of council housing nationally. The Architects' Journal noted in 1970 that 'the blocks are more reminiscent of the college campus than of municipal tenements', an atmosphere that persists. The Times described it in 1972 as 'an elegant and exciting environment for young and old'. The scheme received 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.