1-18, Langham House Close

Block of eighteen flats designed in 1955 and built 1957–8 by James Stirling and James Gowan for the Manousso Group of Companies. Stirling designed the main block and Gowan the two pavilion blocks, which accounts for variation in the flat interiors. Constructed in second-hand stock brick and in-situ reinforced shuttered concrete with a flat felt roof. Three storeys high.

The building has a rectangular plan with three projections on each long facade, each containing a brick stack. The flats are two and three-bedroom units in interlocking plan arranged around a structural spine wall. Three entrance halls feature dog-leg stairs. Roof and floor levels are expressed externally by concrete bands.

The windows are thick timber framed with top-opening casements, arranged in an irregular pattern that is identical on each storey except where noted. Timber doors are similarly substantial. The entrance front on the south side has glazed double entrance doors to the left of each projection, with full-height staircase windows of four horizontal lights per storey above. To the left of the entrance are bedroom windows in an upside-down L formation. In the angle sits a large living room window with smaller windows of upside-down L formation facing the road, and inset balconies with glazed panels set in thick timber balustrades. Concrete panels sit beneath most of the smaller windows. The balconies are drained by concrete gargoyles derived from Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp and his Maisons Jaoul. The north front is similarly glazed but with staircase windows on two half storeys, each of four horizontal lights, with recessed glass panels above and below. The end facades project to the left with full-height windows of two lights in wide timber surrounds in the returns.

Inside, materials match those used externally. The entrance hall is constructed of stock brick with shuttered concrete ceilings and stairs, and quarry tile floors. The flats have living, dining and kitchen spaces planned around exposed brick fireplaces. Kitchen surfaces and handles are made from iroko, a substitute for teak. Pre-cast concrete mantlepieces and corbels are used throughout. Ceilings and walls are plastered. This block (numbered 1–18) forms an integral part of the group with flats 19–24 and 25–30 Langham House Close.

The thirty flats were built as a speculative development on 999-year leases in the garden of a late Georgian house. The unusual long, narrow shape of the site largely predetermined the layout and daylighting of the blocks. The developer believed that a good modern design, well built, would sell better than the conventional mediocrity of traditional speculative building then widely derided. In September 1955 and March 1956 Stirling published two articles in the Architectural Review on Le Corbusier's recent work, one on the Maisons Jaoul and the other on the Ronchamp chapel. At the same time both he and Gowan studied the 1920s work in brick of the Dutch de Stijl group. It has been suggested that Ham Common represents a correction of the forms of the Maisons Jaoul according to their own rationale. Unlike the Maisons Jaoul, the load-bearing brick walls of Ham Common were related to a calculated structural minimum and to the warehouse buildings of Stirling's native Liverpool. This mix of vernacular and early modern movement influences with raw Corbusian concrete—far better finished here than in Le Corbusier's work—heralded a new style of architecture in Britain. With its acknowledgement to the massiveness of many buildings of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, it was a truly British contribution to the international modernist canon of the late 1950s, and gave appropriate aesthetic expression to what became known as 'New Brutalism', hitherto claimed by the Smithsons as an ethic or way of seeing things rather than a style of building. Stirling and Gowan had little time for such a tag and were in no way followers of the Smithsons; rather they offered an alternative course. Yet the conscious over-design of the Langham House Close flats was a fully developed reaction against the curtain-walled public housing of the period, and represented Stirling and Gowan's first major work in partnership together.