1-12 GRAY COURT

Block of twelve flats designed 1954-6 by Eric Lyons for Bargood Estates Ltd (subsequently Span Developments Ltd), with Geoffrey Paulson Townsend as developer, G Scroble as project architect, and Wates as builders.

The building comprises brick end and partition walls with concrete tile hanging and Eternit block cladding, set beneath a flat felted roof with brick stacks. It rises three storeys in an H-plan arrangement with a central entrance to the stairwell, accommodating four flats per floor.

The entrance elevation features a striking centrepiece of four fully glazed bays in metal frame, with an open entrance to the right side. The ground floor is partially masked by a covered timber walkway bearing the block's name. Flanking these windows are concrete lattice ventilation panels. The rear elevation's centrepiece is composed of a tripartite arrangement of concrete lattice ventilation panels, with timber-framed windows elsewhere.

The flank walls display continuous horizontal glazing. The principal rooms overlook these side elevations across four bays. On the upper floors, each group of three windows includes two deeper bays to the right with window boxes, divided at sill level by top-opening lights. The ground floor features full-length French windows in place of the shorter openings. Tile hanging distinguishes each storey, and the brick end walls carry a single square window towards the centre on each floor.

The staircase hall forms an impressive internal space with a paved ground floor, grey terrazzo stairs and landings, and a steel balustrade with timber panels.

Parkleys represents the first, largest and most influential of Eric Lyons's schemes for Span Developments. Lyons and Townsend first met in the late 1930s and renewed their partnership after wartime service, developing small private schemes across south west London and the north Surrey borders. When Townsend established himself as a developer in 1954, he relinquished his RIBA membership. This was their first mature collaborative work and their inaugural project as Span Developments Ltd.

Built on the site of a nursery, the blocks were carefully positioned to retain existing trees. The nursery's stock and gardener were retained as part of the development. The layout comprises a series of cul-de-sacs with taller blocks positioned as distinctive focal points within a grid of lower-rise development around the site's perimeter. The combination of two- and three-storey blocks is distinctive to Parkleys, as is the use of brick and tile hanging—a combination later repeated in subsequent Span works, particularly at Blackheath. The mixture of traditional materials employed in a modern manner created a particularly humane environment that attracted considerable admiration. The tall blocks' concrete patterned panels make them the most distinctive of Lyons's works in the contemporary 1950s idiom.

Parkleys was developed for first-time buyers, and Span was among the first companies to promote the endowment mortgage. The development pioneered Span's system of residents' management companies, a structure that has maintained most of their developments in exceptional condition. Each leaseholder contributes to funding paid maintenance staff and serves as a member of the management company governing the estate.

Lyons was admired for bridging the gap between speculative development and the creativity his architectural generation typically found only in the public sector. As the Architectural Review noted in February 1959: "Twenty years ago he would have been regarded as barely respectable, today he is important. He may even come to be looked back upon as a key figure." Close partnership with a sympathetic developer enabled Lyons to pursue his own ideas in materials, layout and design. However, the blocks necessarily remained simple in conception, as the architect had to "design and organise so that buildings can be produced at the same cost as a builder's scheme providing the same accommodation," as Townsend explained to the Architects' Journal on 20 January 1955.