The Geffrye Museum is a pleasant London oddity. Formed from almshouses (1715) and devoted to the history of our domestic interiors. It sits on the edge of the East End, on a busy arterial road, but offers a village-like setting: tall trees define the boundary; beyond them is a green forecourt, and arrayed around three of its sides are the cottage-like former almshouses, calmly dominated by what was once a chapel at the architectural focal point of the grouping. The visitor approaches the Museum off busy Kingsland Road and enters in one corner. From here they progress along the frontage of the almshouses, following an architectural promenade on a temporal theme, through what was once an individual series of homes, now transformed into room sets displaying domestic interiors from different historical periods, beginning in the C17 and ending at the new C20 gallery by Branson Coates. The promenade terminates at a place where a new focal space has been created between three brick gables.
This space – formed beneath a roof that spans between the gables and conceived as if it were an exterior place — houses a restaurant and shop, and it is also a foyer space that leads on to the C20th. gallery itself. One of the three gables is a termination of the almshouses, where they turn the corner; two of the gables are actually the ends of the same, horse-shoe planned building. One leads into the shop the other forms an entrance to the restaurant kitchen. Entering between them into the new gallery, the visitor has the C20 sets arranged in an arc, all around. The backwall is solid masonry and the roof structure is a heavy, open timber truss. At the centre of this top-lit space is a grand, curving concrete and glass staircase that leads down to a lower set of rooms mostly used for educational purposes. From the outside, the new addition is a blank, two-storey, brick-clad building, with a sheltered ramp wrapping around the outside. Try and go here — you’ll enjoy it.
7ft There was a time when London was proud of 78 its welfare housing programme, begun with schemes like the Arts & Crafts Boundary Estate (1897-1900), at Arnold Circus, E2, just north of Broadgate, an estate of 5500 people at a density of 200 per acre, designed byLCC Architects. The programme ran right through to the 1970’s and, even though the Boundary estate is now a sadly neglected and decrepit example, it still speaks of values to be proud of. Laid out as a series of apartment blocks radiating from a central, landscaped roundabout, it is comparable with the better preserved Millbank estate of the same date, behind the Tate Britain. (And it is pleasing to see that the estate is at last undergoing renovation.)