Golden Lane Estate
[1] The estate provides residential accommodation to the north of Cripplegate, following destruction by Nazi bombing of much of the City of London during the Blitz of the Second World War.
At a time when post-Second World War recovery was still slow, this rare opportunity for architects in private practice to design such an estate attracted many entries.
[3] The three partners-to-be of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon were all lecturers in architecture at Kingston School of Art, and had entered into an agreement that if any of their separate entries won the competition, they would share the commission as a team.
This image was a photomontage of well-known figures who had been featured in a newspaper at the time, including Marilyn Monroe and her then partner Joe DiMaggio, French actor Gérard Philipe, and the first prime minister of Independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru.
The population density, at 200 persons per acre, was high—but 60% of the site area is open space, a figure made possible by building taller structures than was common in 1951.
[5] The Golden Lane Estate was commissioned and paid for by the City of London Corporation, which remains freeholder of the site and acts as its manager.
However, it is distinguished from the bulk of the City of London, which is today the largely non-residential European financial services capital.
However, some of the concrete surfaces which are today painted - for example on the narrow elevations of Great Arthur House - were originally unpainted but later coated when they suffered early on from staining and streaking from iron pyrites in the aggregate.
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 its completion briefly the tallest residential building in Britain.
[7] The names of structures on the Estate are a mixture of references to historic site features and individuals associated with the City of London.
The roof garden of Great Arthur House is a fine vantage point towards St Paul's Cathedral and the Barbican Estate and has panoramic views across London.
Today the estate is home to approximately 1,500 people living in 559 studios and one-, two- or three-bedroom units.
Though once common in post-Second World War local authority planning and housing, this idealism, commitment to quality design and a holistic vision of urban living have in many cases been abandoned by municipalities.
[citation needed] After two decades of abortive proposals to repair the two bespoke curtain walls of Great Arthur House, John Robertson Architects was finally selected by tender to replace them.
This saw the original design generally respected, but involved the conversion of residents' social facilities and a former police office into a commercially-run membership gym.
In 2006/2007, in part to address this erosion, Listed Building Management Guidelines were developed with Avanti Architects and a panel of residents and stakeholders to ensure the continued maintenance of the property.
