Spa Green Estate

[2] Spa Green adapted for working families many features from Lubetkin's luxury Highpoint flats, including lifts, central heating, balconies, daylight and ventilation from multiple directions, large entry spaces, and a roof terrace.

Well designed fitted kitchens, including slide-away breakfast counters and ironing boards, electrical and gas appliances, and a central waste-disposal system in stainless steel, exceeded the amenities enjoyed by most of the population in the austere late 1940s.

[4] James Payne concludes that ‘Spa Green remains exceptional for its success at an urban level, managing to combine the idea and scale of the London street and square with the modernist object in the park landscape.’[5] Nikolaus Pevsner called it ‘the most innovative public housing in England at the time’ and praised the ‘visual kick’ of the balconies, porches and façades, though he did grumble that ‘the buildings are placed in any old direction’.

[6] Spa Green embodies the qualities that the architect Richard Meier praises in Lubetkin: ‘a search for harmony, a rational procedure, a precision of detail, constructional integrity, a respect for human scale, and, most importantly, “the expression of faith in ideology … and the creation of architecture that contained a message for the future”’.

[8] The side facing the street, equally rectilinear, offers a suitably vibrant syncopated pattern of grouped windows and balconies, themselves divided into alternating halves of cream tile and cast-iron railing, a trellis-like grid rotated 45 degrees also used for the fence separating the Estate from Spa Green park.

The drama is accentuated by the colour, India red picking out the flanges that divide each balcony (and conceal the fire-escape stairs in the taller blocks), deep slate grey on the back walls giving an illusion of greater depth.

Both the taller façades are further enlivened by clerestories of glass brick marking the three entry halls and their corresponding lift housings, which punctuate the roof terrace and form beacons at night.

Accusations of ‘facadism’ seem dated, given how many Constructivist-influenced features of Spa Green have become staples of postmodern architecture – not only the floating roof canopy but the red/grey colour scheme, the stairwells marked by repeated clusters of square 'windows', and the acute-angled canted meeting lodge (originally the caretaker's flat), which emerges from Sadler House surreally fitted with traditional multipane and bow windows.

Within this overall orthogonal scheme, expressed in both plan and elevation since the buildings run parallel, experiments in curvature – parabolas, aerofoil sections, cylinders, ‘piano’ and ‘tear-drop’ forms - recur in the landscaping and in the entry ramps and porches.

In dialogue with Lubetkin's own Highpoint and Le Corbusier's Marseilles Unité d’Habitation, these graceful roof canopies in turn influenced many high-rise buildings, most immediately the coarser and more massive Finsbury Estate nearby (by another original Tecton member, Carl Ludwig Franck).

The brightly lit interiors, as mentioned, have the bedrooms on the ‘quiet’ side and a spacious living-room with direct access to the balcony; kitchen, separate WC and bathroom give onto this private recessed space.

Piecemeal refurbishments in the 1980s, when the estate needed repairs and upgrades, included painting, retiling and a secure entry system with ironwork that plays variations on Lubetkin's trellis grille.

After the Grade II* listing of Spa Green in 1998, Homes for Islington with English Heritage initiated a restoration of the entire exterior plus the kitchens and bathrooms of the flats still in council ownership.

[14] Comparison with Tecton's drawings in the RIBA collection reveals that, with a few exceptions, the external appearance and internal layout of Spa Green have been restored as closely as possible to Lubetkin's original vision – an 'exhilarating' architecture of civic responsibility and aesthetic pleasure.