This year's Stirling Prize for architecture has just been awarded to a project in London, way down south in Coulsdon off Lion Green Road. Previously the site was a large car park, but housing needs are tight so they've shrunk that to a really small car park and replaced the rest with mixed housing. It's understatedly impressive. [RIBA video]
This is a well connected site, close to the shops and the station, but also a challenging site being on a noticeable slope. The original plan was to include 80-odd flats but they actually managed 157, which is one contributary reason why the project got shortlisted. Also it's a mixed development that's mostly affordable housing, which is another, also it's not surrounded by a miserable fence it all merges seamlessly into the surrounding area.
This high density mash-up was designed by Mary Duggan Architects who must be very pleased this week. They created fivesquat pinwheel towers, all brick-faced and multi-faceted, like a jagged update of a set of gasometers. Every resident gets a dual-facing flat with a potentially twinkly balcony, all the blocks are separated out between lawns and congregational areas, while scattered around are a little playground, a few raised planters, also steps and ramps and the odd bench.
I liked the open nature of the place, also that they're not just the usual boxy cuboids, also the fact that grass and paths have trumped cars, also the fact it's only five storeys high (it'd totally dominate the skyline from the town centre if it were seven), also that you can walk through without feeling you're intruding, also that it's not just private housing, indeed the last time social housing won the Stirling Prize was way back in 2019 with a Norwich street. A London project's won the prize four years out of the last five and perhaps they should share it around a bit more.
What's truly strange here is that the arms-length body who commissioned the project have already been wound up. They were Brick by Brick, Croydon's attempt to build savvy housing on council land, but who failed to fix finances in advance and whose liquidation problems were fundamental in bankrupting the council in 2020. The planned deal on this site promptly fell through losing millions, then the new administration sold it off on the cheap, and it's frankly amazing that such an omnishambles should have won so prestigious a prize.
What you might like if you turned up, over and above the architecture, are the information boards for the Surrey Iron Railway. This was arguably the world's first public railway and, amazingly, part of its embankment forms the rear of the site. I found three information boards, each highlighting a different part of the nine mile route, strangely with the Wandsworth board in prime position up front and the Coulsdon board tucked away higher up and further back.
Turn up on the day after awards night and the estate's not exactly normal. I tried hard to keep out of the way of the film crew wandering round, also dodged the four serious-looking folk waiting for a chat to discuss how they built it. I guess there isn't always a scale model of the development on the terrace outside the uppermost block, it was brought in purely for publicity purposes, but it was fun to see small- and full-size simultaneously.
And in amongst the mild fuss actual residents of Lion Green Road continued their lives unabated, one walking home with shopping, one sitting in the window and one exiting in a pushchair. The proof of the design is in the living.
