Architectural historian Elain Harwood explains how architect Geoffry Powell and colleagues designed the Golden Lane housing estate for London’s key workers in 1951.
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Location: Golden Lane Estate, London, EC1Y 0RD Golden Lane Estate Landscape was added (August 2020) to Historic England Register of Parks and Gardens at Grade II
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The City of London Corporation held a competition in 1951 for the design of a housing estate for London’s key workers. It was for a bomb site surrounded by flattened buildings and a mountain of debris. Architectural historian Elain Harwood explains how architect Geoffry Powell had encouraged his colleagues Joe Chamberlin and Christoph Bon – all teaching at Kingston School of Architecture – to each submit an entry to increase their chances of winning, and on the understanding that if any of them won they would form a partnership. Powell won with his design of a series of squares, with a 10 storey tower, (Great Arthur House constructed with 16 floors) and inward looking courtyards. It was a high density development with a village-like quality.
It was also Geoffry Powell who was primarily responsible for the landscape at Golden Lane. He studied at the Architectural Association where architect, planner and landscape architect Frederick Gibberd was one of his tutors. Elain Harwood identifies a number of influences on his work, including Gibberd, the designs associated with the Festival of Britain, and Jean Canneel-Claes landscapes in Belgium, illustrated in Peter Shepheard’s Modern Gardens.
When the site was cleared of rubble in 1952, deep Victorian basements were discovered, and these were used for car parking, workshops and stores and also enabled more variation of levels within the landscape – with sunken more private courtyard gardens, and elevating the more public footpaths. One of the first courtyards includes a rectangular pond with stepping stones, and a series of small grass plats overlaid with a bold geometric paving pattern, a pleasing view from the windows above. There are playgrounds, tennis courts (originally intended as bowling green), a community centre at sunken courtyard level, with young children’s play on the roof; and a brick bastion as a reminder from Powell that the Romans were once here. Powell told Elain Harwood that when the practice closed down, they threw their archive of drawings and papers in a skip, fortunately some items were saved by Bon and Wood, these are now held at the RIBA.
Chamberlin Powell and Bon went on to design the neighbouring Barbican Estate. Clementine Cecil architectural historian was a resident at Golden Lane for ten years, introduced to the estate by a Russian architect. She found it a neighbourly place, and explains why the design is so successful. The key factors are the variety of the external levels; a porousness, mostly achieved through the use of glass, which allows waving to neighbours as you walk past, and the greenery. While the gardens are formal, she says the residents have brought a softening and playfulness to the rigid environments, and the simple expanse of lawn in the bastion courtyard lends itself as an ideal event space for the community. An active residents association has opposed the building of a new 14 storey residential tower block which will loom over this site, on a scale and with an impact that was never intended or envisaged by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon.
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