Since the Olympics, irresistible forces have at work in Hackney Wick and Fish Island replacing employment with accommodation. Where once were warehouses, factories and workshops now stand large brick cuboids packed with flats. What once were edgy quarters beloved by Time Out are becoming dense dormitory suburbs lauded by Foxtons. So Saturday was a chance to meet some of the architects responsible for this increasing conformity, and to look behind the facades to see if it was just as bland back there. It wasn't quite.
Monier Road, the development, is at the tip of Monier Road, the road, on Fish Island immediately opposite the Carlton chimney. That new road bridge from the Olympic Park, replacing the old footbridge, is being prepared close by. According to the architects' blurb "the vertically articulated brick building is reminiscent of warehouse buildings found in the local area", which is utter guff, but empty words get projects moving. You could have guessed what it looked like without me showing you a photo, so ubiquitous are gridded windows and recessed balconies these days. In this case the ground floor has been divided up into seven units for start-up fashion brands, but they're all empty at present while the flats above are all full.
For those blessed with an electronic key, the interior of the block looks rather finer. Most of the flats are arranged on six floors around a horseshoe atrium, with full-on deck access and a spiralling central staircase for anyone who doesn't fancy taking the lift. The ground floor flower bed is looking a little unloved, thanks to minimal sunlight, but on higher levels things do get rather brighter. Family accommodation has been provided in two lower wings, already with trampoline-filled back gardens, the architect pleased to pass on how they repurposed unnecessary staircases to increase overall living space. He was less impressed by certain cost-saving tweaks the developers have made to the original design, but I doubt that many of the residents have noticed.
We also got to go inside a two bedroom flat thanks to some kindly residents. The main living space had a bright dual aspect, with a sliver of Olympic Park visible between the buildings opposite. The balcony linked the two ends of the apartment creating a practical outdoor asset. The gas boiler will one day be redundant once a pipe can be laid across the Lea from the Energy Centre, a delayed project which should one day service most of Fish Island. And although the general impression was "quite spacious", any of you who live in semi-detached houses or far beyond the capital would laugh at the extortionately poor value such flats command, but that's the price we Londoners pay.
It's only right that the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings should be housed in an ancient building. Since 1980 they've been based in an early 18th century silk merchant's house in Spitalfields, almost surrounded by the destructively redeveloped. When they moved in it was run down and in need of rescue, but they've since stabilised and repaired the structure, which is just as well given much of their role is to advise others how to do the same. Staff were out in force to show us round, from the librarian to the director, and a delightful little booklet helped us spot the original balusters on the staircase and the lead water cistern in the back yard. Small, but spabulous.
The study of disease has long merited its own professional organisation, especially for sharing good practice and overseeing training. They were previously settled in the West End, but this summer the Royal College relocated to a brand new building on the Aldgate fringe, which they were only too happy to show off for Open House. It's quite bricky, because most buildings are these days, in this case stretching to various internal walls and features. We got to explore the Meet, Socialise and Touchdown spaces, specifically the lower three and uppermost floors. These are very spacious, very skeletal and very brown, featuring multiple slabs and open timber staircases, with portraits of all the former Presidents arrayed around a central void.
The sixth floor has two outdoor terraces, one facing the City and the other Whitechapel. The view from the latter isn't that exciting, and the view from the former isn't as exciting as you'd think (because everybody else's upper floors get in the way, tarnishing that key Cheesegrater/Gherkin alignment). But with its row of shrubs and mini tables, and conveniently-located adjacent function space, it's really part of the strategy to make the building totally events-friendly. To stay solvent in this day and age your new college building has to double up as somewhere for others to hold meetings, host conferences and generally "provide excellence and innovation in hospitality". The one disease the Royal College of Pathologists couldn't keep at bay, it turns out, is financial viability.
Not officially part of Open House, but piggybacking on the success of the day, Tower Hamlets decided to open up a former workhouse near Mile End station for public view. The South Grove Workhouse opened in 1871 as the second such facility in the Whitechapel area, with dormitories on three storeys accessed off long central corridors. It could accommodate over 800 inmates, one wing male, one wing female, with a twin-gabled entrance block in the centre. The facility survived as an institution, then a residential lodge, for almost a century before being taken over by the council and used as offices. It's been empty since 2006. A much fuller description of its history can be found here.
You could tell it was a council-organised open day because all the instructions about hard hats, closed toe footwear and bringing a bottle of water were just a fraction too earnest. That said, I did bump my head almost as soon as we entered the basement, so maybe they had a point. The basement corridor was a gloomy affair, and climbing up to ground floor level not much brighter. Most of the rooms had been sealed off with tape, including one that was half full of leaves and others amok with trunked cables. The most impressive space was a double-sized annexe tacked on to act as a canteen, for which think council employees ladling out lunch rather than Oliver Twist asking for more.
We got to see an impressive amount of the building, notably the full length of the second floor and its former dormitories, since subdivided into offices, with the occasional safe left lying around. It was hard to look beyond recent municipal use to picture how the building might have functioned as a workhouse, and easier to look forward to potential future transformation. The site has been pencilled in for housing, current plans suggesting 36 market rent homes within the workhouse itself, and a taller block of 50 affordable rented homes replacing the adjacent 1980s Veolia office building. In a reversal of fortunes it'll be the rich moving into the workhouse, because they can afford to pay for its upkeep, and the deserving poor stacked up outside.
The Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability is a much better name than The Hospital for Incurables, which is how this place started out in 1854. It's less a hospital, more a turbo-charged convalescent home for those whose brain injuries mean they may never lead an ordinary life. A bad traffic accident might bring you here, or a neurological condition like multiple sclerosis, but the rehabilitation you'd get here in Putney is as good as ever. It's still a charity too, so was never absorbed into the NHS, which is why a lady in a mouth-operated wheelchair might be waiting in reception with a collecting tin.
The hospital faces a substantial portion of West Hill near Putney Haath, and has been sympathetically extended several times. Reception is the original Georgian mansion, with its classical reliefs, ionic columns and hand sanitiser dispensers. Additional wings were added in 1868 and 1879, with long institutional corridors and hand-cranked lifts, and the Queen opened a new block with the latest facilities in 1985. Having a hairdresser and dental surgery on site, for example, enhances patient wellbeing and helps keep transport costs down.
Chris the archivist was the driving force behind opening up the building for Open House. He laid out a selection of historical treats in the De Lancey Lowe Room, including a letter from Florence Nightingale and a Royal Charter with a whopping great red seal, then attempted to lead us around the ground floor and across the garden. We popped into the canteen. We admired the facilities in the art therapy room. We walked amongst the raised beds where patients in wheelchairs enjoy high-level gardening. We saw a 500 year old oak tree. But mainly, we just got in the way.
The RHN remains operational even on a Sunday morning, so two dozen tourgoers blocking a corridor to look at some stained glass windows isn't ideal. Staff pushing patients to church in the Assembly Hall waited patiently while we shuffled over, while a latecomer squeezed through so he could start his shift cleaning the floors. In one of the dayrooms we disturbed a family come to visit mum, so she wheeled out to the verandah (where we interrupted them again quarter of an hour later). I don't like to stare, but I couldn't help but be impressed by the care, the technology and the stoicism that was in evidence for these very special patients. Sometimes it's less about the buildings and more about the people, and my trip to Putney has left an indelible mark.
I couldn't describe Park View Road in North Ealing as a typical suburban street because the houses are mostly on the larger side, but number 46 is in a totally different league. It's called the White House, and it gleams, and it was built here by a self-made Polish businessman as a blinging tribute to his parents. That's not even the house you can see from the road, that's a massive entrance arch topped off by classical statues with a driveway through the centre.
The house itself is supposedly a recreation of the palace outside Warsaw where 'Prince' John Zylinski's family lived until the start of WW2. It took seven years to build, not least because the decoration is so ornate, with gold leaf on the walls and ceilings, polished birchwood for the internal doors and marble all the way up the stairs. The salon has a Steinway piano painted gold to match the decor. The dining room seats more people than might ever need to be simultaneously impressed. Britney Spears once filmed a video in the bathroom with the forest-effect marble, not the bathroom with the alarmingly angled mirrors. Ask nicely and the White House might be available as a wedding venue.
I think it's fair to say that yesterday's visitors were impressed, or at the very least amazed. A lot of jockeying for prime photographic positioning was taking place, and one family went round taking repeated selfies against increasingly glitzy backgrounds. Those present at 2pm would have been treated to a self-indulgent snatch of Swan Lake performed by John's ballet-dancing partner, so keen are the couple to showcase their artistic talents. But the view from the library balcony is irrevocably of lowly Acton, and just over the fence is a bland grass-topped covered reservoir, so the sumptuous ambience doesn't really stretch beyond the house.
If you voted in the last London Mayoral elections, John was one of the outsider independent candidates, indeed he limped home in 11th place. Having experienced his house, and been dazzled by his ego, his 2016 candidature suddenly makes perfect sense.
Once upon a time, for which read 100 years ago, Perivale was a tiny hamlet beside the River Brent with a 12th century church. Then Western Avenue was built, inspiring much suburban development but all on the wrong side of a roaring dual carriageway, and St Mary's became superfluous to demand. In 1972 its parish was disbanded, leaving vacant a Grade I listed building, after which a group of volunteers took over and transformed it into the West London Arts Centre. It still looks and feels very much like a church, admittedly a very small one, but it now has a grand piano in the chancel and a sound mixing desk up the tower.
The volunteers are just as devoted, as I discovered when I popped in, be that to preserving the history of the building or promoting the series of regular concerts that takes place within. Had I been local and/or with a penchant for classical music, I would have been hard pressed into attending future recitals. Thank you, I said, but I see you livestream many of them on YouTube so I shall obviously check in there starting this Tuesday afternoon.
Another volunteer showed me a brass in the nave dated February 1500, also the tiny leper window, then invited me up the stairs to see her exhibition. A few cases of ecclesiastical ephemera fill a small space in the tower, along with various paintings of the church in its former sylvan setting. Today the churchyard abuts a golf course, immediately alongside the 12th tee, where you might find a lost golf ball amongst the graves and winged memorials. I was also invited to ring one of the bells, from a peal of three installed after the war, and proved impressively inept at getting the rhythm right. The music will be a lot better tomorrow.
When Open House weekend comes round, it's always a treat to visit a housing estate. It's even more of a treat to visit a housing estate that still thrives, that Right To Buy never touched and whose residents clearly think the world of it. And when that housing estate is hidden in plain sight in the midst of a town centre, high above Sainsbury's and a multi-storey car park, even better. That'll be Page High.
We're in Wood Green, where in the mid 1970s Haringey Council decided to create a neighbourhood centre worthy of their new borough. They built The Mall, then called Wood Green Shopping City, and developed a penchant for 'layer cake' development - building things on top of other things. The Mall got Sky City plonked on top, a village of 201 pitched-roofed houses and flats, while a separate project stepped back from the High Road on the eastern side. Sainsbury's and Woolworths joined the consortium which saw two layers of public car park built above the shops, then above that a secluded "street in the air". That'll be Page High.
The entrance isn't over-promising - a doorway up a sidestreet beside a Matalan Clearance Store opposite a Lidl. There are stairs, but once you've been living here a while you know to plump for the lift. And this brings you out at one end of a long street lined by 92 flats and maisonettes, but not a street any car will ever drive down, more a shared community walkway. The irregular redbrick construction is appealing. The chimney for the communal heating system draws the eye. But what immediately impressed yesterday's first-time visitors was how impossible it was to tell that the whole thing was somehow six storeys above ground level.
A posse of Page High residents showed us round, their enthusiasm palpable. They recounted the day in 1975 the Duke of Edinburgh came to open the place, his royal visit fulsomely reported in the Hornsey Express. They smiled as they told how concerted action had fought off the threat of the council's recent Wood Green Area Action Plan, which would have seen the entire site redeveloped and residents decanted elsewhere. They promised to show us inside one of their flats so we could see how spacious it is, and delivered. And they bemoaned their regular battles with the housing company who manage the site, often doing too little but sometimes blundering in and doing too much.
A lot of the signage is fabulously retro, for which read utterly authentic.
These house numbers, for example, are written in a splendidly outmoded typeface on a bright orange background.
This map of the estate, with its bold black arrows, resembles a prop from a Gerry Anderson animation.
And if you step down into the car park, it seems every iteration of Haringey's logo appears somewhere.
Only on level 2 of the car park do you get a proper idea of how the architects put Page High together.
All the flats and the central street are supported on a long linear deck hoisted straight down the middle of the car park. Additional parking spaces are aligned along each side. Pipes extrude, and sometimes leak, forming large puddles on the concrete. A back staircase provides additional access for residents, because in 1975 it was crucially important that everyone had somewhere to park their vehicle. These days the car park's upper level is woefully empty, even on a Saturday afternoon, and you can see why the council might have thought this was an inefficient use of space.
And the views from the balconies are splendid. Depending on which way your flat faces you might see Alexandra Palace, or Docklands, or the City, or the chimneypots of the Noel Park estate stretching off past the courthouse towards the foothills of Essex. Little of the rest of Haringey is highrise, so the panorama rolls on in all directions. But on that central secluded street none of this is visible, just the sense of a focused community strengthened by living together, and long may it remain.
» The posterless one (where nothing seemed to be open, and maybe that was the intention)
» The unplanned one (which I pre-booked half an hour before the tour set off)
» The take your shoes off one (where I was the only person who wasn't an architect)
» The very new one (which I conveniently scheduled as a toilet stop)
» The very old one (with the loveliest staff, and most irregular staircases)
» The minimal one (oh, just the foyer, and then be off with you)
» The hard to find one (which turned out to be right alongside the previous one)
» The financial one (where everyone needed a pass, solely so they could give it back again)
» The elusive one (where a tour would have taken 10 minutes longer than I had, dammit)
» The pointless one (because these buildings are always open, so why bother?)
» The eye-opening one (where I sidled up to one of my readers and said hello)
Open House 2019(Sunday)
» The hourly tour one (but scheduled on the half hour, so I got up too early)
» The blingtastic one (where I hid from the rain amid the gold leaf)
» The early medieval one (where they let me ring the church bell)
» The I'll never make it one (ah well, best head home, maybe next year)
