Forsyth House, Pimlico Tram Public House and garden walls

Forsyth House (Numbers 73 and 75), Pimlico Tram Public House and garden walls

A block of sixty maisonettes with a public house on the corner of Charlwood Street, located on the east side of Tachbrook Street in Westminster. The design won a competition in 1961 by architect John Darbourne and was built between 1964 and 1970 by Darbourne and Geoffrey Darke for Westminster City Council.

The structure uses in-situ reinforced concrete beams and floors, which are exposed on the elevations and projecting balconies, combined with load-bearing brick crosswalls. The elevations are faced in multi-red hand-made bricks with raked joints, topped with a flat felted roof. The complex scissor plan is particularly intricate because the block is divided into two sections.

The northern section rises six storeys to Tachbrook Street with a basement car park beneath; the southern section has its ground floor set below street level and rises five storeys to the garden front. The maisonette layout is similar in both sections, though the northern section is raised over the garage. Access to the lowest level is from Tachbrook Street, while those in the northern section are reached via a raised walkway. The access gallery to upper flats is consequently on the third floor of the northern section but the second floor of the southern section. Both have a broad planting trough running their length. The block steps to follow the line of Tachbrook Street. Most maisonettes contain three bedrooms, though ground floor units include some with four bedrooms and all have private gardens; some upper level units have roof gardens. A large double-height opening into the gardens at the north end of the block shares a dog-leg stair with Repton House. The two sections are linked by a shared lift lobby and stairs. The elevational treatment follows the distinctive Lillington Gardens idiom with particularly powerful effect.

The northern section features a blind brick wall at ground floor level to Tachbrook Street. Approximately every pair of units steps forward along the street line. The middle maisonettes have balconies. Stepped elevations appear also on the garden elevation, which masses towards the corner with Repton House with more overhanging floors. Projections at fourth floor level contain overflow shutes in the style of Le Corbusier's Maisons Jaoul in Paris, a popular motif of the period. The change in levels between the two halves of the block is particularly clearly visible on this elevation; in the southern section the projecting floor is at third level. Windows are dark stained timber double-glazed (original), with vertical opening casements. All doors were originally of black stained timber, and most remain.

Public spaces are lined with brick paviours and feature shallow brick walls to the planting troughs. The staircase rises in long flights from a high lift lobby with timber balustrade. Original metal signage has black lettering on silvered backgrounds. The garden walls, some with timber balustrades, and black stained gates form an important part of the composition. The interiors of the dwelling units are not of special interest.

The Pimlico Tram public house occupies the corner of Charlwood and Tachbrook Streets beneath the north end of Forsyth House. A single bar with a large timber window to Tachbrook Street, the interior defines separate spaces through two central columns and changes in ceiling height. An angled glass brick clerestory provides light. Boarded timber ceilings line the lower areas. Angled supports to the main window box in concrete supports. The pub is timber lined, with vertical boarding in the main space and horizontal varnished boarding in the corner snug. The lowest part contains the bar, with a curved corner counter clad in vertical pine boarding. The original main bar features a fine counter stand complete with fretwork and the sign 'Welcome to the Pimlico Tram'. This is an unusually complete survival of a 1960s public house interior—at once modern yet executed in traditional materials.

John Darbourne won the 1961 competition for rebuilding Lillington Street and formed a partnership with Geoffrey Darke to develop the scheme. The Lillington design took its cue from the Church of St James the Less (grade I listed), a striking Victorian red brick structure which the estate surrounds.

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, but not at such a scale, with such intensity of colour, or with such complexity of form. Martin and his associates had theorised low-rise high-density housing in their Bloomsbury project and college work at Cambridge, but Lillington was the first low-rise, high-density public housing scheme to be built. As the first example of its type, Lillington Gardens was epoch-making. The Architects' Journal noted in 1970 that 'the blocks are more reminiscent of the college campus than of municipal tenements', and The Times wrote in 1972 of 'an elegant and exciting environment for young and old'. The scheme influenced council housing style from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s. Forsyth House lies partly in Phase I and partly in Phase II of the development, but maintains broadly consistent style and planning despite changes in levels.