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Buildings where the building is the reason to go: the inside-out, the Art Deco, the concrete, and the ones that make no sense at all until somebody explains them.
The first low-rise high-density council estate ever built, in red brick chosen to match the Victorian church it surrounds.
Modern movementFree
John Darbourne won the competition to rebuild Lillington Street in 1961, formed a partnership with Geoffrey Darke to do it, and between 1964 and 1970 they put up something that had not been built before. Everyone else answering the housing numbers was going up; Lillington went along and across instead - flats and maisonettes stacked in scissor plans, reached by broad walkways planted with troughs, over in-situ concrete beams left exposed and load-bearing brick crosswalls.
The brick is the part people notice and the reason is next door. The estate wraps around St James the Less, G. E. Street's church of 1861, and Darbourne and Darke took their cue from its striking Victorian red - multi-red hand-made facings, laid with raked joints so the wall reads as texture rather than surface. A 1960s estate and an 1860s church are the same colour because one of them was asked to be.
It worked, and the trade said so. The Architects' Journal in 1970: the blocks are more reminiscent of a college campus than of municipal tenements. The Times in 1972: an elegant and exciting environment for young and old. It took a Housing Design Award, a Ministry award, an RIBA Award and an RIBA commendation, and it set the style of council housing from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s.
One part is worth knowing about specifically. Charlwood House carries a hostel for eighty older people threaded through blocks of ordinary flats, because the competition brief reflected new thinking that the elderly should be housed inside a development rather than beside it, and near the people they already knew. Darbourne and Darke were among the first to build to that idea, and what they gave it was lavish for the date.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.