Celebrating London’s mansion flat
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The aspirational dwelling of the British has always been the mansion, the big old house being the thing to have. Which made living in cities a bit of a problem, unless you were a royal.
The solution was simple. Just put the word “mansion” in front of that most modern and compact of living arrangements, the flat. Problem solved.
The mansion block was a phenomenon of London, a city that had never quite come to terms with the purpose-built flat but which, by the middle of the 19th century, was casting envious glances at the French apartment blocks of Baron Haussmann’s radical rebuilding of historic Paris. The centre of London was largely already spoken for, with Georgian terraces and squares clustering around the palaces and parks. Developers were looking out towards the edges of the city and at the suburbs with their small semi villas, their modest evocations of the country house.
The idea of the apartment had been historically absent in the upper echelons of the English market. Though popular in Scotland with its tenements, it had not caught on south of the border and the idea of a gentleman sharing his family’s space with others was disdained, even though high rents meant that most houses ended up in multiple occupancy anyway.
But a few innovations in the middle of the 19th century coalesced to catalyse change. One of these was the luxury hotel. Grand hotels with restaurants, extensive staff and grand spaces for events dissolved some of the prejudice against shared spaces and living in vertical proximity to others. Another was the arrival of the lift, with Elisha Otis’s first passenger elevator installed in New York in 1857.
And, finally, there was the acute shortage of land in central London and the size of houses, which made them expensive to rent and maintain for anything less than a large family. There was little accommodation for bachelors, for instance, although Albany, a three-storey apartment complex in Piccadilly, is a rare early exception.
All this made the mansion block, occasionally referred to as “French flats” (before you think that sounds quite classy, remember that in the 19th century a “French” prefix was often derogatory), made them a particular archetype of the capital. But most surprising was that the first apartments were built as charitable dwellings for the poor. The mansion block is among the rare strata of architectural inventions to have filtered from the bottom up.
A new book, At Home in London: The Mansion Block by Karin Templin throws light on this rather neglected yet perennially successful London mode of living. Templin outlines the history right through to what she sees as a bright future for a typology that seems to have enjoyed its heyday more than a century ago. I asked her to define exactly what a mansion block was: “mid-rise, multiple doors to the street” she says, “shared stairs and lobbies, shared gardens and a sense of collective civic grandeur”.
The first mansion blocks appeared in the 1850s, mostly around Victoria, in Westminster, which became fashionable when Queen Victoria moved into Buckingham Palace. The arrival of Victoria train station made travel practical (from the colonies or just from a country seat). The demolition of the notorious Devil’s Acre slum near Westminster Abbey cleared a tranche of land and Victoria Street became mansion flat central.
The next burst arrived in Kensington with the construction of Albert Hall Mansions in 1876-86. Designed by Richard Norman Shaw, one of the great domestic architects of the era, they represented an attempt to formulate a language for apartment living particular to London.
Although Shaw had travelled to Paris to study its new apartment buildings, something different emerged in his Kensington designs. Built in brick rather than stone and with facades that blend bays, balconies, Dutch gables, arches and recesses, they avoid the classical detailing of Paris in favour of something more Queen Anne (then in vogue), a little gothic in their verticality and perhaps more Amsterdam than Haussmann.
They were horizontal translations of the English house with one reception and one dining room, servants’ spaces and bedrooms off corridors (as opposed to the continental enfilade model of rooms opening off one another).
The mansions were a huge success and Shaw’s look stuck. For the next half century or so, red brick blocks with theatrical gables, bays and ornate porticos sprouted across the city. By the 1880s hardly any large family houses were being built in the centre of London. Mansion blocks had become the only game in town. Templin suggests that one of the big differences between mansion blocks and houses was that the former were designed by architects; the latter were the designs of jobbing builders and developers. It shows.
My father was born in a mansion block on Victoria Street (later destroyed in the Blitz) and my own children too were born in a mansion flat. I spent the biggest chunk of my adult life in just such a block and can attest that they represent one of the most civilised modes of London living. Tall ceilings, big bay windows, generous shared gardens, good sound insulation. In a city renowned for strange conversions, damp basements, awkwardly split communal spaces and insane rents, mansion flats are a breath of fresh air.
They were an almost perfect solution to the city’s density, creating a solid baseline of six-storey heights (with lifts but still mostly do-able via the stairs), greenery in the courtyards and urbane streets enlivened by their elaborate ironwork and terracotta details.
They have also proved flexible and durable. Some of the first mansion blocks in London had large communal dining rooms, like in a grand hotel restaurant, so that residents wouldn’t need to cater for themselves. As a result, kitchens in flats were often small, meant more for maids than residents. A shortage of domestic staff — as new clerical jobs in offices and sales positions in department stores opened up for women — added to the shift to easily maintained flats, while doormen and porters added a sense of luxury and service.
Mansion blocks became popular with single men, retired people, returning colonial types and those with large country residences who needed a London pied-à-terre — much the same demographic, extraordinarily, as when I moved in to my flat in the 1990s, when there were no children or families at all.
All that has changed now. The gardens are buzzing with kids and picnickers, young families and Europeans who feel more at home in an apartment designed as an apartment as opposed to a weirdly mutilated house. They were also, in another reflection of continental tastes, mostly rented. It was only from the mid-20th century that tenants began buying leaseholds.
Not all blocks were a roaring success. Queen Anne’s Mansions, for instance, was a monster. The site in Petty France was bought by Henry Alers Hankey in 1873 and he went about building what was described as a Babylonian block of flats which eventually went on to reach 14 storeys, becoming London’s tallest building. Overlooking Buckingham Palace and blocking Queen Victoria’s view of parliament (and with New York-style water-tanks on the rooftops) it was a shocking lump, ironically replaced on its demolition almost a century later by Basil Spence’s even-more hated Brutalist Ministry of Justice Tower.
From Maida Vale and Finchley to Battersea and Putney, the late 19th century was the zenith of mansion block building but their construction continued until it was killed off by the first world war. There were mansion blocks for women (York Street Ladies Chambers in Bloomsbury, catering for the new office workers) and there were failed blocks that were turned into hotels (like the St Ermin’s in St James’s).
Yet the type proved resilient. The 1930s saw a new rash of mansion blocks, some luxurious, others more modest but incorporating not only the in-vogue styling of Art Deco but modern amenities such as squash courts and swimming pools. A number even accommodated petrol stations.
Dolphin Square in Pimlico, perennially fashionable with MPs and spies, was the apotheosis of the mansion movement, a 1,310-apartment Thameside behemoth with all mod cons and a restaurant. Templin points out that 1930s flats were less grand than their Edwardian forebears, sometimes even eschewing a kitchen as residents (often single) would have meals sent up. There was nothing new in this (Grosvenor Court Gardens had fully serviced flats in the 1860s) and it took off in the Soviet Union as Modernists designed new ways of communal living. But it also meant less space for servants, the supply of which had dried up after the first world war.
Despite its success, the mansion block fizzled out after the second world war. Most new London housing took the form of towers set in landscaping, neglecting the traditional street frontage of mansions. Templin’s book points out, however, that they have returned as architects and developers seeking denser ways of living have found inspiration in the city’s past. Certainly architects like Peter Barber, David Chipperfield and Sergison Bates have attempted credible revivals in various forms.
But are these really mansion blocks? We might like to imagine revivals and see the influence of the mansion block in contemporary architecture but I think it could be wishful thinking. Everything is now billed as luxury apartments, yet how many really are? Few new buildings manage the urbane spectacle of the best mansion blocks. But it’s good that we are still, at least, trying.
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic
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