Arthur Road House

Pawson’s house is a delightful, robust addition to just another inter-war London surburbia of semi-d’s — truly an ‘ornament’ to Wimbledon. He makes the most of the narrow, sloping site and provides a fitting end to the street and a most elegant plan (which he describes, enigmatically, as ‘a modern reworking of Sir John Soane’s terrace in Lincoln’s Inn Fields’ (meaning a series of inter-locked volumes that play with perceptions of space, compressing and then opening out in unexpected directions to create a sequence of changing and ambiguous volumes).

At 5m (one room) wide and 80m long, the house has a concrete substructure, with timber framed and clad tower, and steel framed rear section clad in engineering brick. The rear has a vaulted and grassed roof, with a fully glazed end, opening out into the garden.

St Mary’s Church Garden Hall

St. Mary’s is a 230 sq. m. building that provides a nearly square hall divisible into two separate rooms and is for use by the church and the local community. The main space is arranged to make visual connection to the lawns in front of the hall and a new curved walled garden to the rear.

The design of the hall draws material cues from the adjacent grade II listed St. Mary’s Church. The hall echoes the knapped flint and limestone of the church by using smooth white ashlar limestone, with a contrasting base of slate dry-stone wall facing onto the road. The scheme incorporates a ‘light-bar’ constructed from translucent glazing, an element that is inspired by the powerful use of light by church builders of the past, and provides a glowing counterpoint to the massive stonework.

Ted Cullinan’s Lambeth Health Centre of 20 1984 (Monkton Street SE11; Tube: Lambeth North / Kennington) was exemplary as a local hospital building, but also served as the nearest anyone in this country ever got to ‘deconstruction’ as an architectural aesthetic. (Which is not too close.) It is full of the old Cullinan touches and caring attitude, including local-made ceramics on the exterior depicting healing herbs. On the south-facing garden side there is a strong relation between building terrace and the garden itself.

Updated: 5th November 2014 — 12:43 am