Golden Lane Estate - Architecture

Architecture

The maisonette blocks are faced with panels in primary colours (red and blue on maisonette blocks and yellow on the tower block). There is less use of unfaced concrete than in the Barbican. However, some of the concrete surfaces which are today painted were originally unpainted as they suffered early on from staining and streaking from iron pyrites in the aggregate.

Inside, most maisonettes display open tread terrazzo staircases projecting from the party walls as a cantilever. This, and the fact that the bedrooms are suspended, structurally speaking, without supports over the living rooms gives very compact planning with a surprisingly spacious feel to small flats, in spite of the fact that they were built under severe Government building restrictions of the post WW II years. The engineer was Felix Samuely. Some maisonettes retain their hour-glass shaped hot-water radiators, visible in windows. Crescent House, the last of the blocks to be completed in 1962, runs along Goswell Road and shows a tougher aesthetic that the architects were developing at the adjacent Barbican scheme, the early phases of which were by then on site.

The architects kept to their brief of providing the high density within the 7 acres (28,000 m2) available. The visual anchor of the design is the tower block of one-bedroomed flats, Great Arthur House, which provides a vertical emphasis at the centre of the development and, at 16 storeys, was on completion briefly the tallest residential building in Britain. It was the first residential tower block in London that was over 50 metres in height, and also the first building to breach the 100 foot height limit in the City of London.