Court Appeal

Combining typological invention with a strong urban expression, Peter Barber Architects’ McGrath Road scheme gives a unique twist to ordinary London housing, finds Murray Fraser

Words
Murray Fraser
Photos
Morley von Sternberg

The blurring of divisions between public and private life in contemporary British cities, intensified by trans-spatial technologies, has exerted a significant effect on notions of domesticity. Our attitudes are now paradoxical: we resent surveillance and the invasiveness of social media networks, while wanting our homes to be penetrated as strongly as possible by fast broadband and mobile phone signals.

Some futurists predicted the end of the ideal of the private home, yet this has not transpired. If anything, we seem to have a stronger desire for settled domesticity, finding ourselves afloat within a post-Welfare State condition in which the comprehensive commodification of housing in Britain is clearly failing to provide adequate dwellings for those on lower (or even middle) incomes. It is a situation made worse in London by what are among the highest land values in the world.

Given such pressing issues for mass housing, it is concerning that only a few British architectural practices choose to devote their energies to this building type. Of these, it is Peter Barber who is the most outspoken and ambitious housing designer of all. Three things mark out his work. Firstly, Barber is always keen to remind us that at least 70 per cent of any city is comprised of dwellings, and that there is a concomitant need for architects to conceive a strong new urban imagery for otherwise ordinary housing. Secondly, he believes that British cities would work better socially and environmentally at a far higher density of inhabitation. And thirdly, even at higher density, his aim is to ensure that each dwelling has its own front door onto the street and its own private garden or open-air terrace: in this regard, Barber follows openly in the wake of the late, great Neave Brown.

Barber’s first acclaimed housing project was the Donnybrook Quarter in Bow, won in a competition run by the now-defunct housing association Circle 33, which opened in 2006. It remains the most vivid expression of Barber’s initial hybrid fusion of Le Corbusier, Àlvaro Siza, and the Middle Eastern or Mediterranean casbah. Donnybrook’s white render still looks good today, but worried that his other early schemes have not been nearly so well maintained, Barber has since shifted to brick as a more durable London material.

The latest example is the 26-unit design at McGrath Road in Stratford, about 10 minutes’ walk from the hyper-intense cluster that is rising around Stratford International station and the Westfield shopping centre. In urban form, the scheme is a classic perimeter-block-and-courtyard layout, with eight trees (on grid) peppering its paved communal courtyard. Yet in terms of its urban image and housing typology, the design is unique: a standardised scheme that equally manages to be a one-off.

Taking first the scheme’s visual appearance, the aesthetic is a mixture of London’s Victorian brick railway arches and a scaled-down version of the multiple arches and notched roofline of Karl Marx-Hof in interwar ‘Red Vienna’. The twist at McGrath Road from both these precedents is the adoption of parabolic rather than rounded arches along the three higher sides of the courtyard (with rounded arches only on the lower fourth side that abuts onto adjacent housing). As such, it represents a more ambitious version of Barber’s earlier designs for Worland Gardens in Stratford and Ordnance Road in Enfield.

The main material at McGrath Road is not actual London mixed stock brick – it comes from Surrey – but certainly looks much the same. The distinctive mottled appearance helps to introduce a subtle sense of variation within otherwise repeated facades, being offset visually by galvanised steel balconies and olive-green timber doors and window frames. The overall effect is to create the striking visual presence that Barber believes mass housing should express.

The housing types – 19 two-bedroom units, the other seven with three bedrooms – are even more innovative, albeit creating a few quirky moments. The most original features of the layout are the back-to-back arrangement of the front and side terraces, and the use throughout of tall thin units conceived explicitly as ‘tower houses’. Hence, each dwelling tends to have only one main room per floor – a kitchen/dining room entered directly from the street at ground level, then bedrooms on the intermediate floors (with adjacent or en-suite bathrooms), and a top-floor living room with roof terrace. A winding staircase links the various levels.

Breaking the mould are two units located above each of the archway entrances into the courtyard. These dwellings have the most vertiginous staircases you are likely to find in any social housing outside Amsterdam, with the pay-off being on the top floor over the main front archway, which consists of a single full-depth, double-aspect space – kitchen/dining room/living room/potential ballroom – which is nearly three metres high.

Occupancy at McGrath Road is 620 habitable bedrooms per hectare, some 50 per cent higher density than Donnybrook, although it doesn’t feel like that. In many cultures, courtyards have traditionally offered an optimal balance between compactness of area and expansiveness of feel, and this is also true at McGrath Road. It might seem inconceivable to provide houses at such a high density, yet Barber achieves this without scrimping in terms of room sizes. Indeed, room areas follow the Greater London Authority’s current guidelines – except for where sizes needed to be invented because the GLA clearly never conceived of there being four-storey, two-bedroom dwellings.

However, it is equally evident that this ultra-tall housing is for a particular type of person – young adults attempting to get onto the property ladder – rather than a one-size-fits-all solution. These are not really for anyone with impaired mobility (although they still surprisingly meet the adaptability requirements of the Lifetime Homes standard). More intelligently, the client – the London Borough of Newham – earmarked the scheme as shared-occupancy starter homes, with priority for youngsters in the locality, which wouldn’t require large deposits or high monthly repayments. Hence, the dwellings can be bought via the Newham Newshare equity scheme whereby purchasers split their payment between a standard mortgage and a cheaper council-supplied loan.

Having decided on this strategy, Newham had expected a typical flatted block, which Barber duly drew up to show how boring that would be, and how relatively expensive, given that around 25 per cent of volume in any apartment block is ‘wasted’ on shared staircases and internal corridors. Instead, there are no shared staircases in McGrath Road, and virtually no corridors to be found. Newham Council is to be applauded for supporting such a novel design, and praiseworthy too is the contractor, Mulalley, whose representatives that I spoke to were as proud as punch as to how well the scheme has turned out.

Given the poor standard of housing that most young people are able to buy or rent in London, Barber’s design for McGrath Road is outstanding. One might suppose that the back-to-back arrangement would be a negative, yet that is far from the case in reality. Indeed the lateral positioning of the top-floor terraces gives the dwellings a double aspect: not the conventional double-aspect arrangement of front and rear, but instead of front and side. Sitting in a quiet top-floor living room with a fully-glazed wall onto its terrace – the acoustics being helped by solid brick-and-blockwork cavity walls with integral sound dampener – it is hard to imagine there are any better new starter homes anywhere in London.