Parkinson House

Parkinson House is a block of one hundred bedsit flats on Tachbrook Street in Westminster. The design was won in competition in 1961 by John Darbourne and built between 1967 and 1970 in phase II by Darbourne and Geoffrey Darke for Westminster City Council.

The structure employs in-situ reinforced concrete beams and floors, which are exposed on the elevations and project as balconies, combined with load-bearing brick crosswalls. The elevations are faced in multi-red hand-made bricks with raked joints beneath a flat felted roof. The plan is complex, with most of the block standing five storeys, rising to seven storeys at the end facing Tachbrook Street.

The bedsits are arranged in two rows either side of a broad, stepped access gallery that functions as a street on the upper levels. Many flats are arranged in pairs, creating a distinctive pattern on the northern front towards the main gardens, with openings between these groupings to light the access galleries. Only a single row of bedsits occupies the lower ground floor, where the land rises on the opposite side. Staircases and lifts are positioned at each end of the block.

On Tachbrook Street, the elevation comprises four bedsits in width, with the outer two flats set a half-level higher than the inner pair. Each bedsit has its own store with a separate external door. The stepped profile is particularly distinctive within the Lillington Gardens idiom, notably in the pairing of flats and the alternating pattern of windows and open balconies on the northern front. A projecting staircase sits on the garden end. The Tachbrook Street elevation presents a strong, symmetrical composition of alternating windows and balconies at contrasting half-levels, forming a formal, high intrusion into the long, organically planned line of Forsyth and Stourhead Houses that extends along Tachbrook Street. Narrow entrances lead to internal streets below.

Original dark stained timber double-glazed windows feature vertical opening casements, with most doors originally of the same black stained timber, and most remain. Public spaces are lined with brick paviours, whilst rooftop street decks are finished with non-slip tiles. Original metal signage comprises black lettering on silvered backgrounds. The interiors are not of special interest.

John Darbourne won the competition for the rebuilding of Lillington Street in 1961 and formed a partnership with Geoffrey Darke to develop the scheme. The design drew inspiration from the significant Victorian red brick Church of St James the Less (grade I listed), which the estate surrounds. While 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 exploring combinations of brick and concrete, Lillington was the first low-rise high-density public housing scheme to be built at such a scale, with such intensity of colour and complexity of form. Martin and his proteges had theorised on low-rise high-density housing possibilities through their Bloomsbury project and college work at Cambridge, but Lillington was the first such public housing scheme to be realised. As the first low-rise high-density scheme, Lillington Gardens was epoch-making. It influenced the style of council housing from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s, with contemporary commentators noting that 'The blocks are more reminiscent of the college campus than of municipal tenements' and describing it as 'An elegant and exciting environment for young and old'.