25-30, Langham House Close

Block of six flats, designed in 1955 and built in 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, accounting for some variation in the flat interiors. Constructed from second-hand stock brick and in-situ reinforced shuttered concrete, with a flat felt roof. Two storeys.

The building comprises three asymmetrically placed units, each containing a flat on each floor, arranged around a long central two-storey entrance hall with a suspended access gallery serving the upper flats. Each unit features a central brick stack. Roof and floor levels are expressed externally by concrete bands running across the facades.

The entrance facade contains a narrow central bay with entrance doors in margin-light surrounds; the first floor is fully glazed with margin-light at skirting level. Projecting bays flank either side, their fronts fully glazed with a strongly horizontal composition of three lights below and four above, set in a wide surround with narrow full-height sidelights in the returns. Windows throughout are thick timber with strong horizontal sill bands; double doors have glazed panels. The east elevation clearly separates each pair of flats, linked only by a central staircase hall set back but with a slightly projecting bay of full glazing. The sides feature fully glazed returns matching those in the entrance facade projections, while the remainder comprises brick crosswalls with three small casements to each side, one featuring a narrow toplight with a concrete infill panel below. The rear facade is strongly asymmetrical, with the rear pair of flats projecting to the left, their fronts fully glazed to match the entrance projections. A long return incorporates a two-storey hall window with the concrete floor slab exposed between sections, and narrow windows in the return; the L-shaped pair have opening top lights with concrete panels beneath.

The interior balances the external material palette. The entrance hall is built from stock brick with a shuttered concrete ceiling, gallery and stairs, and quarry tile floors. A steel balustrade serves the stairs and gallery. Within the flats, living, dining and kitchen spaces are planned around a fireplace set in an exposed brick wall with pre-cast concrete mantelpieces and corbels and a squint to the side of the stack. Kitchen surfaces and handles are made from iroko, a substitute for teak. Other walls are plastered, as are the ceilings.

Nos. 25-30 form an integral part of a group with Nos. 1-18 and Nos. 19-24 Langham House Close, to which the last it forms a mirrored pair. 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 that was well built would sell better than the conventional mediocrity of traditional speculative building then being widely derided.

In September 1955 and March 1956, Stirling had published 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 Stirling and Gowan had 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 were related to a calculated structural minimum and to the warehouse buildings of Stirling's native Liverpool. This combination of vernacular and early modern movement influences with raw Corbusian concrete—far better finished here than in Le Corbusier's own work—heralded a new style of architecture in Britain which, acknowledging the massiveness of many nineteenth-century industrial revolution buildings, represented a truly British contribution to the international modernist canon of the late 1950s. It gave an appropriate aesthetic to the term 'New Brutalism', hitherto claimed by the Smithsons as an ethic rather than a style of building. Stirling and Gowan had little regard for such a tag and were in no way followers of the Smithsons; rather they offered an alternative course. The conscious over-design of the Langham House Close flats represented a fully developed reaction against the curtain-walled public housing of the period. This was also Stirling and Gowan's first major work in partnership together.