9. Golden Lane Estate

16 November 2021

Geoffry Powell won a competition in 1952 for a housing estate for key workers in the City of London and thus was formed the firm of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, better known as the architects of Barbican next door.  This earlier estate epitomises the best of 1950s architecture as its successor does that of the 1960s and the landscaping is equally imaginative.  The tiny site, subsequently extended, was intensely urban, surrounded by dereliction and covered in rubble which, when removed, revealed deep Victorian basements.  How Geoffry Powell treated the spaces between the housing blocks, and a rooftop, is an interesting study of an architect with an enthusiasm for landscape design rather than a landscape specialist. 

Clem Cecil lived on Golden Lane Estate for ten years from 2010, and she says, every day was a privilege. It is a manifestation of the best aspects of modernism. Thanks to the architects' ingenious design approach, the units, even the small ones, feel spacious and full of light. There is an openness inherent in the design of the Estate - thanks to which there is an incredibly strong community. It is a harmonious and stimulating place to live, although management, overseen by the City of London, can be problematic, and alas the City doesn't have the same respect for the design integrity of the estate as many of its residents.

Elain Harwood is a senior architectural investigator with Historic England and undertook the organisation’s research on the post-war landscapes added to the Gardens Register in 2020.  She is also the author of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon published by the RIBA with the Twentieth Century Society in 2011.

Clementine Cecil is an architectural historian, campaigner and writer. In the early 2000s she was Moscow Correspondent for The Times, and in 2004 co-founded the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society (MAPS) that published several reports about threatened heritage in Russian cities including Moscow, St Petersburg and Samara. She was Director of SAVE Britain’s Heritage, and SAVE Europe’s Heritage (2012-2016) and Pushkin House, London (2016-2020). She has recently finished a book about a wooden neoclassical city mansion in Moscow that will be published in 2022.