Fairchild House And Garden Walls

This is a block of six maisonettes with six bedsit flats above, built between 1964 and 1968 as part of the Lillington Street redevelopment scheme in Westminster. Designed by John Darbourne, in partnership with Geoffrey Darke, the design won a competition in 1961 for the rebuilding of Lillington Street. The structure utilizes in-situ reinforced concrete beams and floors, with the concrete beams and floors exposed on the exterior surfaces, and it incorporates load-bearing brick crosswalls. The exterior features multi-red hand-made facing bricks with raked joints, and a flat felted roof.

The building complex comprises two-storey four-bedroom maisonettes arranged with a scissor plan, where the rear rooms are situated on a half-floor level below the upper rooms. Each maisonette has walled gardens both at the front and rear. Above the maisonettes are bedsit flats, accessed via an external staircase and a rooftop walkway. These flats incorporate enclosed private patios. The front elevation has a forecourt bordered by walls, with slightly overhanging first and second floors. The rear elevations feature projecting garden walls and alternating, projecting bedroom windows on the first floor. Bedsits are accessed through a rebuilt staircase, including paviours and a short external staircase to the front doors. Original dark-stained timber double-glazed windows with vertical opening casements remain, as do most of the original black-stained timber doors. Public spaces and private forecourts, excluding the patios, are paved with brick. The interiors are not considered of significant architectural interest. The garden and courtyard walls, including their black-stained timber gates, are integral to the overall design.

The design took cues from the Grade I listed Church of St James the Less, which surrounds the estate, particularly using its striking red brickwork. The scheme, alongside other contemporary projects, explored combinations of brick and concrete but on a notably larger scale and with more intense colour and complex form. Lillington Gardens was a pioneering example of low-rise, high-density public housing, inspiring council housing design from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. It received several awards, including a Housing Design award in 1969 and a RIBA Architecture Award in 1970, and was described as “more reminiscent of the college campus than of municipal tenements.”