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Also in the film is the first block of flats to be built in Britain
in reinforced concrete - Lawn Road Flats in Belsize Park, London.
Commissioned by Jack Pritchard and designed by the Canadian architect,
Wells Coates, the flats were opened by the film star, Thelma Cazalet,
in 1934. Agatha Christie, one of the first tenants, said that the
building looked like 'a giant liner'. Pritchard still lived in the
penthouse when I first visited him in the 1960s but, a decade later
(and probably loath to raise the money needed to restore the flats)
he sold Lawn Road Flats to the New Statesman. In 1972, the
magazine sold the building to Camden Council, which failed to look
after it, so that by the 1980s, the block of flats had become a
graffiti-scarred eyesore.
Today, a £2.3 million project undertaken by the Notting Hill Housing
Trust has been completed which has restored Lawn Road Flats to their
original splendour. Under the government's 'key workers' scheme
for public service workers, 25 of the 36 flats will be made available
to teachers in Camden schools under shared ownership while the remaining
ten flats and the penthouse are being sold on the open market. Prices
range from £185,000 to £500,000. This is an arrangement that would
have pleased Pritchard since the flats were originally designed
for young professionals. As Pritchard wrote in his appreciation
of Coates in The Architectural Review, the flats were designed
for 'a new type of man who likes not only to travel light but to
live light (a bit like Coates himself), unencumbered by possessions
and with no roots to pull up. For such a person the multiplication
of spaces, such as the more expensive architecture usually provides,
is not the ultimate luxury but the perfection of service arrangements
so as to reduce domestic obligations to the minimum.'
Thus, in 1934, the rents (from £96-£170 a year) were aimed
at the young professional earning around £500 a year and included
rates, service, central heating and essential Isokon equipment (of
which more later). Also, though the flats had their own kitchens,
a restaurant on the ground floor meant that the tenants did not
even have to cook their own meals. This was a way of living that
predated Le Corbusier's village in the sky - his unites d'habitation
- by more than a decade!
The opportunity for Pritchard and his wife Molly to consider building
a block of flats arose when he inherited £5,000 from his barrister
father. He owned a site behind the London underground station at
Belsize Park, which, in fact, had the underground railway running
below on either side.
Initially, the Pritchards had considered building a single house
but, because of Jack's interest in contemporary design, the idea
of a grander scheme emerged. As the advertising manager at Venesta,
a company specialising in plywood with close ties to Finland, the
Baltic nations and even Moscow, Pritchard commissioned Le Corbusier,
Coates and Lubetkin to design stands for the company in 1930, 1931
and 1934 respectively. He had also visited Finland to see buildings
by Alvar Aalto and had heard about the Bauhaus. Indeed, in 1931,
accompanied by Coates and Serge Chermayeff, he visited Eric Mendelsohn
in Berlin before going on to the Bauhaus in Dessau - although
it was deserted at the time following the dismissal of Hannes Meyer
in July 1930. Meyer had become director when Walter Gropius resigned
in 1928 The Bauhaus itself was briefly re-established in a former
telephone exchange in Berlin under the direction of Mies van der
Rohe until Hitler closed it in July 1933. Seeing the Bauhaus only
confirmed Pritchard's belief in the need for good design - and,
in fact, in the belief that good design had to work socially as
well as functionally.
However, the decision to commission a block of flats was also influenced
by an exhibition of British industrial art held at Dorland Hall,
Regent Street, London in 1933. Here, Pritchard's own recently established
company, Isokon (Isometric Unit Construction) showed a 'minimum
flat' designed by Coates to demonstrate the kind of accommodation
that could be designed for the young professional and stir up interest.
Among its features was a small, built-in kitchen. Indeed, such was
the interest that Pritchard acquired a list of prospective tenants
and, on the strength of that alone, obtained a bank loan of approximately
£14,000 to provide the rest of the money needed to build the flats.
Coates was given a very flexible brief, requiring him to design
20-30 flats which provided 'space for living, eating, cooking, dressing
and bathing' - and the services already mentioned - as well as garaging
for eight to ten cars, a flat for a porter and his wife, a staff
sitting room and lavatories. The result was a four-storey reinforced
concrete block whose 4.5 inch thick walls were insulated internally
using one inch compressed cork slabs cast into the shuttering and
then plastered which to give a high degree of heat insulation. Externally,
the walls were given two coats of waterproofing and a pink-tinted
cement wash that made no attempt to conceal the shuttering.
Internally, the block contained four double flats, with rooms divided
by birch plywood sliding screens, three studio flats, smaller flats,
offices and storerooms and, on the fourth floor, the Pritchards'
penthouse flat with (amazingly) an adjoining but self-contained
apartment for their two young sons. Both flats were additions to
the original design. On the ground floor were staff quarters, a
kitchen and a small restaurant. The kitchen was later remodelled
by Marcel Breuer to become the Isobar. Lawn Road Flats' first chef
was Philip Harben who, after the Second World War, became the first
chef to appear on British television.
In many ways, the design of the small flats in Lawn Road predated
Coates' studio flat in 18 Yeoman's Row, London of 1935. Here, most
of the limited space was used for the living area with a kitchen
and bathroom underneath a small mezzanine gallery reserved for sleeping.
It was an arrangement that also reflected Le Corbusier's views on
internal planning which were influenced by the disposition of space
on transatlantic liners, where public areas were maximised and private
spaces kept to the minimum.
Nevertheless, although the basic concept of Lawn Road Flats was
clear from the beginning, construction did not proceed smoothly.
Indeed, such were the arguments between Pritchard and Coates that
Pritchard’s wife, Molly (who was having an affair with Coates),
often had to act as go-between. The delays meant that most of the
tenants who had signed up at the Dorland Hall exhibition withdrew
their options.
Initially, Lawn Road Flats struggled to find tenants, but only
until the outbreak of the Second World War, when it was realised
that reinforced concrete buildings were good at withstanding bomb
blast. Esteemed occupants included Nicholas Montserrat (later to
be author of The Cruel Sea), the architectural critic Diana
Rowntree and her husband, and Paul Reilly, director of the Council
of Industrial Design in the 1960s and 1970s. They were joined in
October 1934 by Gropius, who was invited by Pritchard to live in
Lawn Road Flats and who managed to leave Germany by attending an
architectural conference in Italy before travelling to London where
the Pritchards were amazed to meet his new wife, Ise. As they know
nothing of his remarriage, having known only that he was divorced
from Alma Mahler, a single flat had been provided, so Molly had
to rush back to rearrange the accommodation while Jack took the
Gropius' on a slow tour of London's sights!
After Gropius came other refugees from Germany including Breuer,
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Arthur Korn, with the result that Gropius
became design director of Isokon (and designed a desk, stool and
metal wastepaper basket) while Breuer became its principal designer,
producing the famous Isokon Long Chair and nesting tables. Pritchard
was also responsible for introducing Gropius to Maxwell Fry so that
for three years they jointly ran an architectural partnership that
designed Impington Village College in Cambridgeshire, the Shepperton
film studios and a house in Old Church Street, Chelsea, London,
before Gropius (who would have liked the vacant chair in architecture
in Liverpool) accepted an invitation to teach at Harvard -
Britain's architectural establishment was delighted that a German
did not succeed Professor Charles Reilly. By then, Pritchard had
commissioned Gropius and Fry to design a block of flats in Windsor
Great Park outside London. Had the flats been built, they would
also have predated Le Corbusier's unites d'habitation by
more than a decade.
Sitting (in a Long Chair, of course) in Pritchard's living room
in Lawn Road Flats in the 1960s, I witnessed his continued interest
in design as the post-war director of the Furniture Development
Council. He also retained his interest in modern architecture by
commissioning his daughter (the result of a wartime liaison when
Molly and the boys were in the US) and her husband, Jennifer and
Colin Jones, to build a truly modern house in Blythburgh, Suffolk.
Pritchard also retained his interest in modern furniture. Hence,
Isokon furniture, which included a Penguin Donkey designed by Egon
Riss (and redesigned after the war by Ernest Race), was put back
into production by John Alan Designs. Today, the furniture is made
by Isokon Plus.
So, when Avanti Architects (who have recently restored the Lubetkin-designed
penguin pool in London Zoo) began working on Lawn Road Flats, they
salvaged and restored as many of the original fittings as possible.
This included putting back sliding doors, door handles and letter
boxes, and installing light fittings from Heals and Best & Lloyd,
and rugs from Woodnotes in Finland, that were as close to the original
fittings as possible. Furniture for the flats has been supplied
by Isokon Plus. The result is that, despite a period of slow decline
and a decade of serious neglect, both the exterior and the interiors
of Lawn Road Flats look once again just as they did in the second
half of the 1930s.
Footnote
Richard Carr did research into Lawn Road Flats and
Isokon with Jack Pritchard from 1968 until the early 1970s, and
talked to Walter Gropius about his period in London from 1934-1937
when Gropius was in London in 1968.
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