An affordable housing block inspired by Hercule Poirot has distinctive curving brickwork that brings a touch of class to a grey and constrained urban site in London’s East End. Stephen Cousins reports on a challenging project.
Fans of the Agatha Christie TV adaptation Poirot will be familiar with the many British modernist and Art Deco buildings that acted as backdrop to the Belgian detective’s murder investigations in well-to-do neighbourhoods.
One of the most notable Grade II-listed Florin Court in Charterhouse Square, Clerkenwell, central London served as the location for Hercule Poirot’s flat ‘Whitehaven Mansions.’
The mansion block’s elegant curved brick facade, ornate metalwork, and cleanly-detailed windows perfectly capture the essence of 1930s glamour, and provided the unlikely inspiration for a new affordable housing project on a much less well-appointed former industrial site in a congested part of the capital.
Bulrush Court is the second phase of the major 956-home Leaside Lock residential redevelopment by The Guinness Partnership in Bromley-by-Bow. The 144-home scheme was designed by Pitman Tozer Architects to provide a mix of one, two and three-bedroom affordable and social-rent units and 213 m2 of commercial space in a mid-rise mansion block positioned at the centre of a new masterplan for the area.
U-shaped in plan, the building encloses a communal landscaped courtyard and was conceived as a “new city block, defining new streets, squares and courtyards.” The intention was to create a human-scale environment in an urban high-density area intersected by numerous transport arteries.
Christie’s moustachioed detective would no doubt doff his hat to the building’s contemporary take on modernism, characterised by clean horizontal lines, a precise curving brick facade and brick-clad cantilevered balconies that project like diving boards into the central courtyard.
The project encountered bumps of a less satisfying kind during design and delivery, including a post-planning redesign to accommodate a tenure change, new fire safety requirements in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, and the shock of main contractor Henry Construction going bankrupt mid-way through the build.
“The biggest challenge was the nature of the design and build process in an environment where legislation was changing and the client was, rightly, very focused on fire safety,” explains Luke Tozer, one of the founding directors of Pitman Tozer Architects. “It’s a success that, despite the uncertainty, we were able to meet requirements and stay ahead of legislation, yet still retaining an architectural quality that will endure for the long term.”
Olympic regeneration
Leaside Lock stands on the site of a former scaffold yard within a regeneration of the wider Bromley-by-Bow South area, part of the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) zone established by the Mayor of London in 2012 to reinvigorate Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and surrounding areas in east London.
The development was masterplanned by KCA and Pitman Tozer’s involvement dates back almost a decade, having originally worked with architect BPTW to secure planning consent for 450 homes for developer Lindhill.
After the site was sold to Guinness in 2018, the practice was retained to redesign phase two of the development as a single block of 100% affordable housing.
Assael had designed the first phase comprising 500 homes spread over five linked blocks, which vary in height between nine and 28 storeys and define the edges of a new public square.
Bulrush Court encloses the northern side of this square, its accommodation arranged over a more modestly-proportioned seven to nine storeys.
The original master plan, when Lindhill was developer, proposed the building as three separate blocks of different heights arranged in a C shape, with a north-facing space to the rear. Pitman Tozer challenged this strategy, instead proposing a single block turned on its axis to create a sunny south-facing courtyard.
Pitman Tozer’s design pushed the building height up by two storeys, which according to Tozer “needed justification” if the scheme was to gain planning consent from LLDC, the local planning authority at the time. A much greater emphasis was therefore put on design quality to demonstrate an intention “to create good-quality homes and good-quality spaces.”
The building’s design and massing took shape through collaborative workshops and sessions with LLDC’s Quality Review Panel.
When the Guinness Partnership took charge of the project in 2018 it introduced a new set of Employers’ Requirements, including the transition from mixed tenure to 100% affordable and social housing. Bulrush Court effectively provides 50% of the overall affordable housing provision at Leaside Lock.
The housing crisis is particularly acute in Tower Hamlets, a recent report by the Big Issue found that 28% of 21,884 people on the council’s housing waiting list have been on it for at least a decade.
In addition, the developer wanted the overall number of homes reduced from 152 to 144, and a greater variety of dwelling sizes, including a higher proportion of family units.
Studios and apartments range in size from 50.1 m2 to 97 m2 with the larger units positioned on the corners and benefiting from a dual-aspect and cross ventilation. Access corridors run internally north-south through the centre of the wings, meaning smaller studios and one-beds only have a single aspect.
Other design changes were introduced in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. Although Dame Judith Hackitt’s review of Building Regulations and fire safety had not yet been published, triggering major changes to legislation, the developer was keen to upgrade fire safety, particularly with the introduction of a second staircase for evacuation – now a legal requirement in blocks of flats 18 metres or more in height.
“The developer was extremely cautious and rightly concerned about fire safety,” said Tozer. After submitting a non material amendment, planning permission was granted and the architect developed the scheme ready to tender, also working on behalf of the client during project delivery to monitor quality.
Focal point
The strong architectural character of Bulrush Court was influenced by mansion blocks of the 1930s, which sprang up as London went through a period of densification as the city’s geography and the railway network expanded.
Praised for providing high density living at a human scale, the typology is familiar to Pitman Tozer. Mint Street, a 67-unit block in Bethnal Green, as a 21st-century reinterpretation of the traditional mansion block and The Reach, a block of 66 homes in Thamesmead also wraps around a central courtyard with generous balconies overlooking the space.
“The mansion block typology is something we’ve been sympathetic to for a while in terms of the language of architecture,” says Tozer, “Today we’re in an era where land, money and carbon are very precious, so the need to build densely and at a high level of quality make this a good model to replicate.”
Rather than being an ‘object’ building, Bulrush Court was conceived to counteract the fragmentation of the local area by hard transport infrastructure. The site is close to Bromley-by-Bow tube station, bound to the south by the railway line, to the east by the River Lee navigational canal and to the north by Imperial Street and a Tesco supermarket.
“There’s lots of infrastructure around it, so this was about trying to use the building to create a higher quality set of urban spaces,” said Tozer. These include an open public square to the west, and the courtyard for building residents, the building will also form part a walk between the underground station and the canal, when phase three, currently on site, is finished.
The building’s four different edge conditions respond to the adjacent buildings, landscape, and the river, with brick being fundamental to the architectural identity, used to add colour, texture and depth.
A plinth of dark violet/purple engineered bricks wraps around the entire base of the building up to around sill level, disguising level changes and aligning with the tradition of darker bases to brick buildings in London.
The civic face, fronting onto Imperial Street, is the most formal, featuring alternating bands of deep red and brown bricks, resulting in a linear form, intersected vertically by a regular grid of windows and inset balconies. There are two sizes of opening across the facade, and two pier sizes, designed to instil a rational sense of order and rhythm.
This banding partially wraps around onto the courtyard elevation before transitioning, where the entrances to the cores are located on each wing, into a lighter mottled red brickwork designed to improve light levels and signal a more relaxed semi-private space for residents.
Curved brickwork at the corners of the building, on the internal corners of the courtyard and on cantilevered balconies projecting over the communal area, add to the sense of informality.
“The curved internal corners of the courtyard are resonant of Florin Court, although the proportions are different we were very pleased that that fed through,” said Tozer.
“An economy of means” made the suave 1930s-inspired look possible on a relatively tight budget. The red and brown bricks were more cost effective than using blonde or London stock bricks and all the curves were created by cutting standard bricks rather than paying extra for specials. “It’s good to keep skills alive in the industry by getting good brickies to show off what they can do,” says Tozer.
The architect’s oversight of construction helped ensure build quality was maintained with minimal scope for value engineering. Key to getting it right was providing a fully coordinated set of information when doing to tender for the design and build contract, says Tozer.
Full scale on site mock ups of key details helped ensure the specified bricks were not substituted for inferior products. “We try to design things that are architecturally robust, avoiding classic errors like punctuating the elevation with vents or running rainwater downpipes in an uncoordinated manner,” says Tozer.
The modernist flourishes were confined to the exterior, with the interiors standardised and prescribed by The Employer’s Requirements. The scheme was ultimately delivered for £34m, equivalent to £2,900 per m2.
Not everything went smoothly on site, Tozer recalls some “fairly challenging conversations” with Henry Construction over the contractor’s attempts to change some of the principles the architect had established and ensuring it delivered on the quality standards.
Henry was experiencing financial difficulties and sadly sank into administration three quarters of the way through the build. It was replaced by Lovell who “did a very good job of finishing it off,” says Tozer.
The success of the completed building is testament to the tenacity of the project team, which through diligent attention to detail and budget-friendly design was able to deliver a distinctive building and give residents a taste of 1930s-style mansion block living within the hustle-bustle of 21st century London.
Sustainability performance
Bulrush Court delivers a 44% reduction in regulated CO2 emissions, surpassing Part L 2013 requirements, which applied when the project was designed.
Low carbon heat and power is supplied by integrated photovoltaic panels on the roof and connection to an existing district heat network, powered by a central energy centre.
Key energy-efficient design strategies include upgraded insulation, low U-value double-glazed windows, low-energy lighting, and mechanical ventilation heat recovery systems that help reduce operational carbon.
Embodied carbon was not measured, but the project exploits low-carbon materials such as recycled steel and low-carbon concrete, while modular construction techniques helped minimise waste and transportation emissions.