Gilbert House

Details

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TQ 2877 SE
1900/108/10111

WESTMINSTER
LUPUS SREET (East side)
Gilbert House

GV
II

Includes: Gilbert House, CHURCHILL GARDENS ROAD

Block of 80 flats. Design won in competition 1946, built 1951-4 to revised design. Powell and Moya, architects, for Westminster City Council under Parker Morris, town clerk. Painted concrete frame with buff and blue brick infill, rendered side elevations, flat roof. Ten storeys over basement. Ground to eighth floor with two-bedroom flats, each with projecting cantilevered concrete balcony (the central ones paired) overlooking rear garden. Ninth floor has one- and two-bedroom flats set behind continuous access gallery with continuous balconies at rear. The flats, eight per floor, arranged in fours off two short galleries facing Lupus Street, each of which served by one stair with lifts, and one escape stair with refuse shute.

The backs of these galleries lined with blue bricks and with smaller windows, serving kitchens and bathrooms; original doors half glazed. The flush faces of buff brick with bands of timber windows with galvanised steel opening lights giving asymmetrical pattern of mullions. Some piecemeal renewal. Original doors half glazed. Galleries and balconies with steel balustrades infilled with wired glass, continued as a tripartite pattern in panels forming added glazing in stairwells. Staircases with straight, steel balustrades. Refuse shutes painted olive green, a unique example of the estate's original colour scheme to survive. To each stairwell a cantilevered concrete porch hood. Rooftop liftcage and water tanks set in rendered drums that are a distinctive feature of the estate. Interiors not of special interest. Original nameplates.

Gilbert and Sullivan Houses were the first blocks of the Phase II development of Churchill Gardens, at the opposite end of the estate from Phase I, but where land had already been cleared by bombing. Information from the 1951 census and cuts in government funding led the City of Westminster to request more smaller flats, so that the design was revised. Powell and Moya reintroduced access galleries to a careful plan that ensured they only went past kitchen and bathroom windows. Gilbert and Sullivan Houses are the most successful of Powell and Moya's later housing at Churchill Gardens. The horizontal grid of galleries and balconies is carefully contrasted with the vertical grid of the window mullions, whilst the bands of glazing give a translucent quality to the blocks. The projecting rear balconies are among the most generous of those in the later phases. These are the only blocks not on a staggered plan, and the near-continuous wall of banded brick and glass along Lupus Street is a powerful advertisement for the estate. The design was much repeated by Powell and Moya at Churchill Gardens and at Gospel Oak, but not again on so generous a scale nor with so successful a cumulative effect.

Listing NGR: TQ2889778063

Legacy

The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.

Legacy System number:

472014

Legacy System:

LBS

Sources

Books and journals
Architects Journal in 12 August, (1954), 190

End of official list entry

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