The Lillington Gardens Estate, Westminster: ‘civilizing, elegant and exciting’

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1960s, 1970s, Westminster

A council estate which has been described as ‘ruggedly romantic’ and as a ‘civilizing, elegant and exciting environment for young and old’ is probably one worth seeing or, better still, living in. (1) That’s the much-praised Lillington Gardens Estate in Pimlico for you.  It’s won four major architectural awards, it’s Grade II listed, and it’s a conservation area.  What’s all the fuss about?

In terms of the bare facts, Lillington Gardens was built, in three phases, between 1964 and 1972, and comprises 14 blocks, mostly between three and eight storeys high, providing 540 homes for around 2000 people.

But what you notice, firstly, is red brick.  The blocks are constructed of reinforced concrete but are faced with handmade red-brown brick.  As you venture further, you register the Estate’s complex overall design which is spectacular but never overbearing – ‘a craggy cliff…that projects and recedes, rises and falls, as it winds alongside Vauxhall Bridge Road’, in Rowan Moore’s words.  All that drama is, in any case, offset by careful landscaping which creates a series of intimate green spaces and enclaves, giving this particular public housing scheme a strong sense of privacy.

Before the Estate, the area comprised a series of run-down Victorian streets.  Heavily damaged during the war, it had been marked out for redevelopment in the 1955 County of London Development Plan and in 1960 the City of Westminster compulsorily purchased 13 acres of land.  Eventually some 400 homes would be demolished to make way for the new estate.  The church of St James the Less, designed by George Street in 1860, would remain.

Conservative-controlled Westminster City Council had a proud record of building high quality council housing.  The Churchill Gardens Estate, built between 1946 and 1962, was one of Britain’s finest and its architect, Phillip Powell, was selected as the judge of a competition to design the new development.  The winner was 26-year-old John Darbourne who would form a partnership with Geoffrey Darke to complete the plans.

For Rowan Moore, the finished product represented ‘a determined reaction against the sterility of modern architecture’.  For others it is a pioneering example of the ‘new vernacular’ or, more voguishly, ‘ratrad’.  Nicolaus Pevsner thought it ‘admirable – admirable in itself and admirable for its understanding of High Victorian values’: a tribute to the Estate’s integration of Street’s church and its subtle echo of that church’s exuberant brickwork. (2)

That was clearly deliberate but Darbourne offered a refreshingly pragmatic case for the choice too – rendering would have been expensive to replace and good-looking concrete (on the Barbican model) would have cost ‘a fortune’: (3)

…with brick you can get the mortar over the face and the joint out of place, but even done poorly it is just about acceptable.  That is not the case with concrete.

There was a similar pragmatism in the evolving design of the Estate.  The three phases are distinct – though always unified by materials and overall appearance – and the third, at the southern end of the Estate, is distinguished by its inclusion of private gardens.

The Estate was unusual already in the richness and texture of the open space it provided but the architects had concluded that ‘parents were reluctant to allow their children play at ground level when their home was several storeys up…children went deprived’.  The inclusion of private gardens was a conscious corrective to some of the problems associated with tower blocks then becoming apparent.

That said, this is a high-density development – at around 218 persons per acre.  This is a density which easily matches the high-rise schemes of the period, not least because many of the latter were placed in what became, in practice, rather bleak and open terrain.

It was also a mixed development, intended to function as a community and feel like a neighbourhood.  The original brief specified the inclusion of schools and playgrounds, a community hall, 90 sheltered homes for the elderly and other housing adapted to those with special needs, two doctors’ surgeries, a range of shops and several pubs.

Architectural descriptions of Lillington Gardens are abundant – more eloquent and descriptive than mine.  But it was Ian Nairn – understanding that good design resided in an alchemy of people and place – who took the time to study the community of the Estate.  He praised the integration of accommodation for old people and the council’s allocations policy – he interviewed an older resident  who liked that her neighbours were also elderly and that less able tenants had been given bedsits.

Typically Nairn also spent time in the pub – designed by the architects, a proper pub in Nairn’s terms but not a ‘pastiche’.  In that, it might stand for the Estate as a whole. (4)  The pub itself – the Pimlico Tram (recently renamed The Cask) – is Grade II* listed.

Despite the plaudits, Lillington Gardens is not without critics. The architect David Mackay slams ‘a warped aesthetic of crumpled facades and disordered dwellings’ and design priorities which created awkward internal layouts and poor integration of external space. (5)  In general, however, it is probably precisely the lack of clean lines and ‘rational’ or machine-like design which creates what most perceive as the more ‘humane scale and detailing’ of the Estate. (6)

Tachbrook Street

To English Heritage, as ‘the first low-rise high-density scheme, Lillington Gardens was epoch making’. (7)  And it’s widely credited with pioneering the break with the tower and slab block designs which dominated in the sixties’ rush to build.  In fact, Darbourne and Darke would go on to apply the same principles in their design for the Marquess Estate in Islington, completed in 1975, but here the same complex layout, walkways and separation of pedestrians and cars encouraged vandalism and, in conjunction with a number of construction faults, led to the development becoming a notorious ‘sink’ estate.

Lillington Gardens conversely remains ‘much sought after’ – popular with MPs since Right to Buy for its proximity to Westminster.  It’s a reminder that we should resist any simplistic approach which ‘explains’ the problems of some council estates as a simple function of their design whilst ignoring the often determining social and economic realities that shape all our lives – for good or ill.

Vauxhall Bridge Road

In 1978, Colin Amery and Lance Wright wrote in a much-quoted appraisal that Darbourne and Darke had: (8)

pioneered a new view of living in the public housing sector. It could be argued that what they have done is to middle-classify the council house, but there is more to their achievement than that. Their approach should be seen as an expression of the idea that the egalitarian society is more easily realised by building on the ‘middle class’ than it is by building on the old notion of the ‘working class’.

It’s a beguiling piece of writing though hard to decipher when looked at closely.  It certainly lacks historical perspective.   The writers can be forgiven for not knowing of socialist Bermondsey’s inner city garden estate of the 1920s but to ignore the interwar garden suburbs of Becontree, Downham, Wythenshawe and elsewhere seems strange.  Perhaps they simply mean that working people shared a ‘bourgeois’ desire for privacy and a bit of outdoors space.  In this Darbourne and Darke were not so much pioneering as returning to earlier ideals of the quality and style of housing that working-class people desired and deserved.

Lillington Gardens is novel though in respecting these earlier aspirations whilst doing so in a high-density and defiantly non-suburban setting.  It offers architectural bravura whilst, most importantly, providing good homes in a high-quality environment. That is an egalitarianism we can respect and it comes – or should come – without class labels.

Sources

(1) The two quotations come from, respectively, Rowan Moore, ‘Nice Places: Lillington Gardens Estate, SW1’, Evening Standard, 2 December 2008 and Tony Aldous, ‘Achieving a communal identity’, The Times, 13 September 1972.  The architectural awards are the Housing Design Award 1961, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government Award for Good Design 1970, a RIBA Award in 1970 and a RIBA Commendation in 1973.

(2) ‘Ratrad’ is ‘rationalised traditional architecture’. The term is used to describe the Estate in Graham Towers, Building Democracy (2003).  The quotation from Nikolaus Pevsner is from ‘Victorian Society Annual Report, 1972-73’ quoted in Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (2012)

(3) Quoted in John R. Gold, The Practice of Modernism: Modern Architects and Urban Transformation, 1954–1972 (2007) which is also the source of the quotation which follows.

(4) Ian Nairn on Pimlico in ‘No Two the Same’ (1970) – also broadcast as ‘The Pacemakers No.19’

(5) David Mackay, Multiple Family Housing: from Aggregation to Integration (1977)

(6) Westminster City Council, Conservation Area Audit: Lillington and Longmoore Gardens (2012).  This offers a full and detailed, and easily accessed, architectural and design assessment of Lillington Gardens.

(7) As described in the listing text of a number of the Lillington Garden blocks including, here, Stourhead House and the Pride of Pimlico public house

(8) Colin Amery and Lance Wright, The Architecture of Darbourne and Darke (1978) quoted in the English Heritage listing of Wisley House.

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The Churchill Gardens Estate, Westminster: ‘like moving into heaven’

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1950s, 1960s, LCC, Westminster

There are plenty of things that make the Churchill Gardens Estate in Westminster a bit special.  In 2000 the Civic Trust voted it the outstanding building scheme of the last forty years. When it was built it was the largest urban area to be built to the plans of a single firm of architects. But let’s begin with its founding inspiration.

‘Luxury flats, Pimlico’. The caption and image are taken from a Picture Post article of 1955

Churchill Gardens – the Pimlico Housing Scheme as it was originally designated – was the only major project within the visionary Abercrombie Plan for the post-war reconstruction of London to be completed.   Its scale – a 30 acre site, 1661 homes, 36 blocks, a population of some 5000 – and its design gives some indication of the ambition of post-war hopes.

Aerial view, 1960s

Charles Latham, then leader of the London County Council, acknowledged the Plan would ‘certainly cost a great deal’: (1)

but not more than unplanned building and a lot less than war. In a way, you know, this is London’s war, against decay and dirt and inefficiency. In the long run, plans such as this are the cheapest way to fight those enemies. What a grand opportunity it is. If we miss this chance to rebuild London, we shall have missed one of the great moments of history and shown ourselves unworthy of our victory.

In the event, London grew in a typically unfashioned way and we might not, on balance, regret that but we should lament at least the loss of those dreams of a humane environment, community living and decent homes for all.

Churchill Gardens stands as a worthy reminder of those dreams.  It was built – another indication of the world we have lost – by a Conservative local authority, Westminster City Council.

The site was an area of decayed terraces which had been scheduled for redevelopment in the 1930s.  Hitler’s bombs added their own urgency to rebuilding and, in their way, an opportunity for design on a grand scale.

Westminster organised a competition for the scheme which attracted 64 entries. It was won by two recent graduates from the Architectural Association, Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya, then aged just 24 and 25 respectively.  They were influenced,  it is said, by the Dutch housing projects of the 1930s and the Weissenhofsiedlung workers’ housing scheme of 1927 in Stuttgart. (2)

What is striking to any visitor to the Estate is – despite its size – its intimacy and humanity.  Powell himself described his ‘mistrust of conscious struggling after originality…of the monumental approach’.  And it seems clear that the Estate has worked – it has prospered as a decent place to live even as many other, superficially more grandiose post-war housing schemes have failed.

In bare descriptive terms, Churchill Gardens comprises a series of nine to eleven-storey slab blocks interspersed by smaller blocks of three to five-storeys.   A seven-storey block, with ground floor shops, encloses the Estate along its Lupus Street frontage.  Two terraces of three-storey town houses run along the Thames-side Grosvenor Road front of the Estate.

De Quincey House, Lupus Street

Paxton Terrace, Grosvenor Road, with Sullivan House to rear

Mixed development

It was a mixed development which embodied post-war planning ideals both structurally – in its range of building forms – and sociologically.  The Estate was intended to accommodate a balanced cross-section of society.  In this, it reflected the principles of Labour’s 1949 Housing Act which had removed the stipulation that council housing cater only for the working class and captures post-war visions of a classless society.

The taller blocks follow the Zeilenbau arrangement developed by Bauhaus architects in the 1920s – set in a parallel north-south axis, perpendicular to the river, which maximises the sunlight each home receives.

But the overall layout escapes any rigidity or that monumentalism that Powell decried.  Its main road curves through the Estate, placing the main blocks slightly irregularly, and the overall configuration creates a series of open spaces, courtyards and play areas which provide a human scale. (3)

Naturally, the housing blocks get most attention but the landscaping, also personally designed by Powell and Moya, deserves recognition too.  It’s disarmingly simple – Powell recalls they worked with a former head gardener at Kew ‘who was sufficiently diffident not to put a herbaceous border everywhere’.  Elain Harwood describes ‘small quadrangles with neat hedges or foot-high railings … careful patterns of paving and grass, which felt natural to the clients and themselves’. (4)

Keats House, first phase of construction

Projecting staircases, first phase of construction

The first four blocks completed towards the eastern edge of the Estate – Chaucer, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley Houses – in 1950 won Festival of Britain Architectural Awards.  Their concrete cross frame construction is offset by an applied brick facing and the eye-catching full-height, glazed staircases provide a vertical line to break up their horizontal mass.

Bramwell House, built in the second phase of the Estate’s construction

In the second phase, staircases were replaced by gallery access which allowed a larger number of smaller flats and larger windows.  The ‘piloti’ (stilts) on which the central blocks are raised gives a greater sense of openness to the overall design while ‘the subdivision and extent of glazing means many of the large blocks retain a delicate appearance, some with an almost translucent quality’. (5)

The final phase, back towards the east, facing Calverton Street, completed in the early sixties, reflects the changed architectural ethos of its time.  The five-storey block which bridges Churchill Gardens Road with its facing of white glazed brick echoes the stuccoed nineteenth-century terraces opposite and joins the Estate as a whole with its surrounding townscape.

The detail comes from Westminster City Council’s conservation audit.  The Estate was designated a conservation area in 1990. reflecting the earlier recognition it had received – two Civic Trust awards in 1962 (one for building, one for landscaping) – and that which was to come.  Six blocks were Grade II listed in 1998.

An early photo of the Estate showing the accumulator tower with Battersea Power Station in the background

So was the glazed accumulator tower – designed once more by Powell and Moya – which marks Britain’s first district heating system. Initially, it collected surplus heat from Battersea Power Station via a tunnel under the Thames. Battersea Power Station closed in 1980 and since 2006 heat has been supplied by the boilers in the Estate’s own pump house.  To Ian Nairn, the architecture of the heating system was the highpoint of the Estate: (6)

The best single building is the crisp and elegant boiler house at the bottom of the big polygonal tower…the machines and their fine-drawn glass and steel cage which surrounds them are a perfect match.

Of course, ultimately – whatever the architectural accolades – the Estate must stand or fall as a place to live, as a home.  And, in this, it seems to have served well.  For one resident, who moved in in 1952, ‘it was like moving into heaven’.  For another, who moved there as a child in 1963, it:

seemed endless and full of variety; a couple of pubs, the huge water tower, playgrounds, lots of green, the view of Battersea Power Station across the Thames. There was a school, the social club, the adjacent bombsite. There was nothing like it anywhere else in London.

Residents in the elite Dolphin Square flats nearby complained, facing a rent rise in 1962, that ‘many of the flats are not as nice as those put up by the Council in Churchill Gardens opposite’.  (7)

Nowadays about half the Estate’s homes have been purchased under Right to Buy.  Flats sold for as little as £13,500 now sell for much, much more – one agent is currently listing a two-bed flat on the estate at £535,000.  Or as one writer puts it (with an offensiveness to be expected from a property writer for the Daily Telegraph perhaps but with a surprising blindness to the real quality of Churchill Gardens): (8)

nowadays high-end estate agents visit Churchill Gardens more often than police officers…String vests and hole-ridden socks once dangled from balconies; now, it’s petunias and clematis. Yuppies have replaced the old municipal lino and Formica fittings with high-design interiors, a bit like putting a Porsche engine into a Vauxhall Viva.

In fact, the Estate has paradoxically – though in ways very far from those imagined in the heady days of post-war social democracy – become a mixed community…but not a classless one.

Managed by City West Homes since 2002, it suffers from problems that you would expect to find in any inner-city estate which still, disproportionately, houses some of the least well-off in our society.   There are complaints about drug-dealing, dangerous dogs and antisocial behaviour.   One of its two pubs now stands derelict. (9)

But in general residents like the Estate – they experience it as a friendly and safe community and a pleasant place to live.  The words of Westminster’s planners ring true:

Today it remains a testament to the optimism and spirit of renewal which characterised the post-war period and the belief in the possibility of provision of higher standards of housing for all.

That should be a call to action, not an epitaph.

Sources

(1) Interviewed in The Proud City: a Plan for London (1946)

(2) Philip Powell, Dictionary of National Biography

(3) Christine Hui Lan Manley, Churchill Gardens, Pimlico, Twentieth Century Society Building of the Month, August 2013

(4) Elain Harwood, ‘Post-War Landscape and Public Housing’, Garden History, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Summer, 2000)

(5) City of Westminster, Churchill Gardens Conservation Area Audit (ND)

(6) For details and images, see the Pimlico District Heating Undertaking page on the 28DL Urban Exploration forum.  The quotation from Ian Nairn is in the English Heritage listing

(7) Quotations from Giles Worsley, ‘Estate of grace’, Daily Telegraph, 25 March 2000, ‘Churchill Gardens, London – Living the high life’, The Independent, 13 February 2000 and ‘Rent Shock for Tenants’, The Times, April 30, 1962 respectively

(8) Catherine Moye, ‘Square deal that turned sour for the well-to-do’, Daily Telegraph, 5 July 2003.

(9) Residents’ complaints are taken from City of Westminster, Churchill War Profile (July 2012) – Churchill Ward also contains the Ebury Bridge Estate as well as areas of private housing – and Churchill Gardens News, April 2014

The Millbank Estate, Westminster: ‘a stirring memorial to the committed endeavours of local government to improve the quality of Londoners’ housing’

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LCC, Pre-1914, Westminster

If you’re visiting Tate Britain take a little time to walk just to the north and have a look at the Millbank Estate.  It represents another aspect of Britain’s artistic heritage – the impact of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late nineteenth century – and it speaks, moreover, of a vital moment in our social and political history.

The Millbank Penitentiary in the 1860s

The Millbank Penitentiary occupied the present site of the gallery and estate from 1816 to 1890.  This was the first national prison, designed supposedly on ‘model’ lines.  In practice, it was beset with problems and scheduled for closure by 1885 when a Royal Commission recommended that 11 acres of its land be set aside for housing.  This area was acquired in 1896 by the new London County Council (LCC).

The LCC had been established in 1889, replacing a variety of local ad hoc bodies and the rather inert Metropolitan Board of Works.  Just one year later, the Housing of the Working Classes Act gave the Council the power not only to clear slum areas but to build municipal housing for displaced residents. It happened that the first elections to the new body had returned a reforming majority ambitious to use its new-found powers.  Progressives, a largely Liberal grouping which also included some labour leaders and Fabians such as Sydney Webb, formed a majority on the Council till 1907.

In 1893 a new department was established in the LCC’s Architects’ Department, a branch dedicated to the Housing of the Working Classes.  It possessed a permanent staff of eight, of whom most had drawn inspiration from the design classes of the Architects’ Association and the influence of William Morris, Philip Webb, Norman Shaw and WR Lethaby.

Lethaby outlined his philosophy of design in Art and Workmanship in 1913:

Most simply and generally art may be thought of as the well-doing of what needs doing…

If I were asked for some simple test by which we might hope to know a work of art when we saw one I should suggest something like this: Every work of art shows that it was made by an human being for an human being.  Art is the humanity put into workmanship, the rest is slavery.

The opportunity, then, was not only to build accommodation for the working class but to do so with some style – with an eye to aesthetics and beauty.  This was a reaction to not only the slums in which most working people lived but against also the barracks-like starkness of the philanthropic Peabody Estates which had represented the largest attempt to rehouse the poor of London to date.

Erasmus Street © Stephen Richards and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

The new estate, largely designed by R Minton Taylor, was intended  to accommodate 4330 people, in principle mainly those displaced by the redevelopment of Clare Market in Holborn.  It represented an advance on the LCC’s first housing scheme, the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch, as none of the new tenements were to share both a WC and a scullery and the large majority were self-contained.

The design itself was a little plainer than the Boundary Estate but any uniformity of appearance was offset by variations of window placement and rooflines and by the disposition of the blocks to each other and around generous courtyard space and tree-lined streets.

The blocks are generally five storey with the ground storey in dark brick punctuated by some impressive doorways.

The upper storeys are medium red brick with stone dressing.  The dormers, gables and rendered brickwork of the top storey offer more visual interest and clearly show the influence of both the Arts and Crafts movement and the Queen Anne style discussed in relation to contemporary London schools in last week’s post.

Hogarth House – all the blocks are named after British artists – was the first to be finished in 1899: 54 tenements,  24 entirely self-contained and 30 self-contained with private, detached WCs  It is now Grade II* listed.  The estate as a whole was completed by 1902.

It was widely praised in the architectural press, the Architect’s Review concluding that (1):

there is a reasonableness and picturesqueness of disposition as well as a certain simple refinement of treatment about these dwellings which is very pleasant.

But with rents ranging from 7s to 13s (35p to 65p) a week for two and three-roomed flats, the Estate was generally beyond the reach of the unskilled working class for whom it was nominally intended.  This, of course, was the prevailing problem of the new council housing and would remain so for some time to come.

The Turner Buildings were severely damaged by German bombs in May 1941 (and some 25 killed) but the Estate has generally worn well.   Now the Estate comprises 561 flats of which around half are council tenancies and half leasehold.

The estate agents will tell you that a ‘well-presented one-bedroom property with contemporary furnishing located on the first floor of this established, secure development’ can be had for £450,000.  A three-bedroom flat is available for rent at £600 per week.  The pressures on affordable housing in London, and social housing in particular, are obvious.  Meanwhile, Westminster City Council spent over £2m in a nine-month period in 2012 housing homeless families in three- and four-star hotels.(2)

The Estate is managed on behalf of Westminster City Council by the Millbank Estate Management Organisation (MEMO), ‘run by and for the residents’.  The Estate looks well cared for though there were mutterings about enforced ‘gentrification’ when MEMO recently attempted to remove clothing line poles that had been in use for 70 years. (3)

For Susan Beattie, however, Millbank remains (4):

a stirring memorial, not only to the Housing branch, but to Victorian social conscience and to the committed endeavours of local government to improve the quality of Londoners’ lives.

Given the money spent on housing some of our poorest and most vulnerable families in bed and breakfast accommodation, we might wish for a return to such Victorian values.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Susan Beattie, A Revolution in London Housing: LCC housing architects and their work, 1893-1914

(2) Karl Mercer, BBC News, ‘Homeless Westminster Families in Four Star Hotels‘, BBC News Online, 7 February 2013

(3) Mark Blunden, ‘Residents get shirty in battle to save their washing lines‘, Evening Standard, 20 May 2013.

(4) Susan Beattie, A Revolution in London Housing: LCC housing architects and their work, 1893-1914

Other detail for this post is taken from City of Westminster, Millbank Conservation Area Audit, ND