I recently heard the designer Thomas Heatherwick talk about his ongoing project to “humanise” our physical environment. The event was under the Chatham House rule, but I don’t think it would betray any confidences to report that he called for care, craft and joy in the design of new buildings. It’s a sentiment with which I and most architects I know would wholeheartedly agree. A helpful next step in exploring this shared ground would be to find and celebrate examples where, often in challenging conditions, such plainly desirable qualities are achieved.
Take, for example, a new development in north London called Highgate Newtown Community Centre, that hollows out a calm and engaging public space, lively with architectural detail, while also providing bigger and better facilities for a successful local asset and as many new homes as could be expected on an intricate and complex urban site. The project’s primary aim is to serve Highgate Newtown Community Partners, an organisation that has, since the 1970s, been offering to disadvantaged people such multifarious activities as lunch clubs, drop-ins for under-fives, classes in pottery and cookery, trapeze skills, psychotherapy, affordable hairdressing and nail bars. Almost as importantly, the new building seeks to enrich the neighbourhood in which it stands.
The new development builds on the original home of the community partners – an ex-Territorial Army drill hall – and enables them to provide a restaurant and associated catering school, an indoor sports pitch and a low-price laundry. The organisation, which now operates in a number of venues, is not itself a provider of housing, but flats were added to the brief in order to raise the funds to pay for the whole endeavour, using the magic of property values to make up for the lack of public subsidy for such things. More homes meant more money meant more space for the community centre.
The architects are RCKa, a practice recently known for proposals showing how new homes can be built on golf courses and railway station car parks and marginal scraps of land. Here they worked out how to achieve roughly double the accommodation that their clients, the London borough of Camden, had thought achievable. They also had to reconcile the sometimes divergent wishes of many constituencies – both the users of community centre and the neighbours – to which end they engaged with 178 stakeholder groups and sought to explain what they were proposing, with the help of drawings and information, at every stage.
The project is in a neighbourhood, not far from the tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery, made up of successful propositions as to what the setting for a residential good life might be. On one side is the Brookfield estate, a miniature garden city of cottage-like houses and four-storey mansion blocks, built in the 1920s as part of the national campaign to provide “homes fit for heroes” returned from the first world war. There are also terraces with the easy brick-and-stucco dignity that Victorian developers found possible to combine with the pursuit of profit. To one side is a tough but tender early work of the great modernist housing architect Neave Brown, a row of five three-storey concrete houses that open up to a lush shared garden.
The new project builds on these traditions and forms new connections between one part of the neighbourhood and another, and between the users of the centre and other local residents. It consists of two four-storey blocks – one containing some flats, the other the workshops and studios of the community centre, connected at the base by a lower structure containing a hall for performances, sports and other activities. These form a rough U-shaped courtyard, inflected with angled walls, that expands into a through route crossing the site; on the other side is another block, four storeys high, containing most of the new homes. Shapes and territories join and merge with each other: the court serves the community centre and the wider neighbourhood, and big windows and glazed doors help the space flow into the hall and a high atrium inside.
The whole is greater than the parts. It feels like something carved out of a block, even though it’s made of the thin, brittle sheets of material standard in contemporary construction. Sunlight, despite the development’s density, finds its way deep into these spaces, and the blocks frame generous chunks of sky. This is not accidental, but the result of plotting the path of the sun and shadows in the process of design.
The architecture also takes its cues from the locality’s shifts in scale, material and shape. Solid-looking concrete balcony structures look something like the Neave Brown block, and walls in reddish brick refer to the Arts and Craftsy cottages. It’s a fat-thin, heavy-light, orderly-informal, messy-coherent, serious-playful sort of place. Skinny balustrades offset the concrete, speckles of white brick brighten the walls, and window frames are in what the architects call “banana yellow”. The paving – part of a design developed with the landscape architects Camlins – resembles overlarge pebbles on a riverbed, and rugged flag-topped boulders of solid stone invite you to sit and lean on them.
This is a place that allows for several futures. While the project was in progress, the crisis in Afghanistan prompted Camden to make all the housing on the site into temporary accommodation for refugees, with the help of funding from the Greater London Authority and central government, with a view to keeping it as affordable housing in the long run. This gives the court an unpredicted role, as a potential meeting space between newly arrived and older residents.
Little of the above has been easily achieved. The development of the Highgate Newtown Community Centre has been more than a decade in the making, with Brexit, Covid and the effect on construction prices of the war in Ukraine all making unhelpful contributions. The centre itself, after several delays, is not yet up and running. The exigencies of budgets and procurement methods make the buildings rough in parts. But, if you’re looking for design that humanises, here it is.
