Wyndham Court Including Raised Terrace And Ramps Wyndham Court Including Terraces And Ramps

Wyndham Court is a block of 184 flats with three cafes or restaurants and thirteen shops, built between 1966 and 1969 on Commercial Road in Southampton. It was designed by Lyons Israel Ellis, with E D Lyons as partner in charge, Frank Linden and Aubrey Hume as job architects. Hajnal-Konyi and Myers acted as consultant structural engineers, and G Minter was the builder.

The building is constructed in reinforced concrete with a carefully detailed white board-marked concrete finish. Horizontal painted bands separate the windows and partition walls of the balconies. The structure rises to six storeys facing Commercial Road and seven storeys to the south on Blechynden Terrace, built on pilotis over an underground carpark developed from earlier basements. This carpark forms a terrace to the south. The shops and restaurants are mostly positioned to the north and west on Wyndham Place, where a service road to the basement is also located. The main block is set around a private garden built over the carpark.

To the east, an L-shaped spur flanks a public terrace. The frontage to Commercial Road sits on pilotis, with a dramatic wing breaking forward to Blechynden Terrace, featuring tall piers at the corners. The building accommodates 61 one-bedroom flats and bedsits on the first and second floors, facing Blechynden Terrace and extending over the whole site. There are 122 two and three-bedroom maisonettes reached by access decks and one flat above, all served by high-speed lifts whose motor rooms are expressed as prominent vertical features in the composition.

The irregular facades are sculptural and expressive, particularly reflecting the changes in function of the ascending floors. Access decks on the third and fifth floors feature distinctive parapets to their balcony fronts, while the fourth and sixth floors have more solidly detailed private balconies. The lift towers are recessed and denoted by small windows, contrasting with casement windows set in horizontal bands as part of the overall composition. Originally these windows had regular vertical glazing bars, but when mostly renewed in UPVC in spring 1996, a more square form was adopted. The access ramps and public terraces are finished to the same exemplary standard as the building, with similar balustrade details.

Shopfronts to Commercial Road were largely renewed, except for the Hobby Lobby, which retains its 1960s frontage and signage with little alteration. The interiors of the shops and flats are not of special interest. The prestressed floors contain underfloor heating. The internal courtyard was landscaped in 1970 to a revised design by Lyons.

Wyndham Court was built as part of Southampton City Corporation's post-war housing programme, which was among the most enlightened in the country. It is the finest of three estates developed by Lyons Israel Ellis and was carefully designed to fit a sensitive site close to E Berry Webber's civic buildings, which dominate the city centre. For this reason, a relatively low building was suggested, despite the brief calling for something urban in scale. The architects chose white concrete as a sympathetic response to the older surrounding buildings while maintaining strong urban character, creating one of the most successful uses of the material. The design won an Architectural Design Project Award in 1966. When completed in 1969, the flats and maisonettes were leased at economic or above average rents, reflecting the prestige nature of the development. Lyons Israel Ellis specialised in the design of educational buildings and established an enviable reputation confirmed by the listing of key examples of their work. Wyndham Court is their most successful housing scheme.