Forward with Finsbury

Finsbury Health Centre

From 1934 until its dissolution in the London Boroughs reorganisation of 1965, the Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury proved a radical and far-sighted body. After the 1936 Public Health (London) Act gave local authorities more power to control healthcare within their boundaries, the Labour run council introduced its “Finsbury Plan”, an attempt to eradicate the problems that plagued the borough both in health and education. To do this they commissioned modernist partnerships such as Berthold Lubetkin & Tecton and Emberton, Franck & Tardew, to produce housing estates, health centers, libraries and other buildings to enhance and protect the lives of the population of the borough.

Your Britain, Fight for it Now by Abram Games

The first building in this plan was Finsbury Health Centre, opened in 1938, after Dr. Chuni Lal Katial, Chairman of Finsbury’s Public Health Committee, had seen a design for a health centre in East Ham by Tecton at the 1933 British Medical Association Congress, (that centre was not built in the end). Lubetkin and the other Tecton architects produced a centre in a H-Plan with two wings with glass bricks flanking a curved entrance. This plan was used to allow sunlight into the building all through the day, avoiding the Victorian style of central courtyards that usually produced dark, gloomy views. Inside, the centre featured TB and foot clinics, a solarium, a dentist, a decontamination zone and a mortuary, as well as a lecture theatre and murals by Gordon Cullen. The centre’s ethos was summed up by Abram Games’ 1943 poster, “Your Britain, Fight For It Now”, featuring the shiny new centre in front of a dilapidated yard containing a malnourished child.  

The Spa Green Estate. Image from RIBApix.

Lubetkin and Tecton would also design three new housing estates for Finsbury as well as the health centre. Before that building had been completed, Tecton was given the commission for an estate between Rosebery Avenue and St John Street, to be called the Spa Green Estate, replacing an area of slum housing. Like the other estates, building for this scheme was postponed at the outbreak of World War II, with Spa Green not completed until 1949. The estate has three apartment blocks, two of eight storeys and one of four storeys, containing 126 flats of varying sizes. They are formed from concrete egg crate box frames, developed by Ove Arup & Partners as consultant engineers, with the flats in the blocks arranged so each one has an aspect on each side of the building, increasing the amount of sunlight it receives through the day.

The Priory Green Estate. Image from RIBApix.

To the north of Spa Green, another estate was built from 1947, replacing the Busaco Street slum with the Priory Green scheme. The new estate had 12 blocks of flats laid out to match the previous street pattern, along with a circular laundry and boiler house. The estate contained 279 flats housing over 1000 inhabitants, including space for all of those displaced by the previous clearance, with no flats facing north, ensuring they would receive some portion of direct daylight each day. 

Tecton also designed a scheme on what was Holford Square, just to the south of Pentonville Road. The estate's most striking feature is Bevin Court, an Y-shaped block of 130 flats, with a stunning central staircase, which Pevsner calls “one of the most exciting C20 spatial experiences in London”, as well as an entranceway mural by Peter Yates. The block was to originally have been called Lenin Court, in recognition of the fact that the Soviet leader had lived in Holford Square during his exile in London between 1902-03. The ardently socialist Lubetkin had designed a memorial to Lenin which stood on this site from 1942, but it had been repeatedly vandalised and damaged. The remains of the memorial were eventually incorporated into the block's foundations. 

The staircase at Bevin Court. Image from RIBApix.

Tecton disbanded in the late 1940s, as Lubetkin started his ill-fated tenure as chief planner to Peterlee New Town. The reins in Finsbury were taken first up by venerable ‘30s modernist Joseph Emberton, who designed the austere Stuart Mill House in Killick St in 1951, the Stafford Cripps Estate on Old Street in 1952, with its three Y-shaped blocks of 12 storeys and the Brunswick Close Estate on Percival Street in Clerkenwell. Built from 1953, this scheme was even larger with three blocks of 14 storeys, with a total of 207 flats, arranged with green space between the towers. ​

Emberton passed away in 1956 and ex-Tecton partner, Carl Ludwig Franck became principal architect, with the company renamed Emberton, Franck and Tardrew. The practice would design a swathe of new estates for Finsbury before it became part of Islington in 1965. They began with Mulberry Court on Tompion Street (1962), a curved block of six storeys with an aerofoil drying station on the roof, then the Pleydell Estate on Radnor Street with two blocks of 17 storeys and the O.M. Richards Estate (1962-65) on Donegal Street, where prefabricated units were used for the first time. ​

The interior of Finsbury Library. Image from RIBApix.

The last two estates of the Metropolitan Borough era were the largest, the schemes at Kings Square, Goswell Road (1961-65) and on Skinner Street (1964-68). The Kings Square estate is dominated by the 20-storey Turnpike House, whose size is alleviated by the archway at the bottom of the tower allowing transit underneath and into Kings Square Gardens, with a direct view of the 19th-century St Clements church. Smaller blocks of six storeys and two storeys are placed on the north and east sides of the square, and a paved shopping area borders Lever Street and Central Street. The Finsbury Estate between Skinner Street and St John Street was the borough's last hurrah. The central feature is the 25-storey Michael Cliffe House with the lower Patrick Coman House and Central Library with its convex facade behind, and the long Charles Townsend house to the south (all the blocks were named after members of the council). Franck included a pedestrian pathway through the estate right under the large tower block and out onto Skinner Street through a concrete gateway. 

The entrance to Rahere House on the Kings Square estate. Image from RIBApix.

The Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury became part of the new London Borough of Islington on 1st April 1965. Franck continued his work in the area, now in partnership with Douglas Deeks, designing tall blocks such as Peregrine House and Kestrel House, very much in the vein of his Finsbury work. The Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury pioneering spirit to tackle poverty, disease and ignorance through new buildings were taken up by the new boroughs such as Camden under Sydney Cook and Lambeth under Edward Hollamby, now considered exemplars of the golden age of social housing.