Thorndike House Lillington Gardens Estate With Attached Walls And Steps

Thorndike House is a block of 48 flats and maisonettes on the Lillington Gardens Estate, built between 1969 and 1972 by architects Darbourne and Darke for the City of Westminster. It stands on Vauxhall Bridge Road.

The building rises five to six storeys and is constructed with red brick walls, concrete slab floors exposed as painted bands, and a felt roof clad with distinctive mansards of artificial slate with metal edges. The complex scissor-plan blocks feature maisonettes arranged with units to front and back behind walled gardens; those to the rear are set lower and include extra kitchen and dining room spaces. Living rooms in all units face the street, with bedrooms on the garden elevations. Units with entrances on the garden elevation (numbers 10-18) have projecting garden rooms of glass and grey metal panels, with the entrance door set into the side return. Above these, one-bedroom and studio flats are positioned off roof-top streets in the sky (numbers 19-48), some accessed via external stairs, with larger units on two levels to the garden front and internal stairs. Brick stairs at the southern end form a particularly impressive long straight flight. All windows are grey metal sashes, most flats have black stained timber doors, some glazed, and slabbed walkways connect with concrete and brick steps throughout.

Thorndike House formed the third phase of Lillington, a major public housing scheme that began when architect John Darbourne won a competition for the rebuilding of Lillington Street in 1961. He subsequently formed a partnership with Geoffrey Darke. The design was conceived in dialogue with the grade I listed Church of St James the Less, a striking Victorian red brick structure which the estate surrounds. The earlier phases pioneered low-rise high-density solutions, with Darbourne rejecting symmetrical free-standing blocks in favour of contextual design that would allow residents to identify with distinctive elements of their homes.

For this third phase, the architects revised their original approach to introduce more maisonettes for families wanting their own front door and garden at ground level, with nearly half the units featuring such arrangements and more private than public open space. The distinctive artificial slate mansards were first introduced here, later becoming characteristic of their Marquess Estate at Islington. The scheme achieved a population density of 255 persons per acre while providing substantial family accommodation. The building was recognised as successful and award-winning; The Times in September 1972 called it "an elegant and exciting environment for young and old". Lillington 3 won an RIBA Commendation in 1973 and proved highly influential in subsequent public housing design.