From the Archive: Inside London’s Pioneering Prefab Housing Complex

As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s April 2001 issue.

In a London gripped by a feverish surge of lottery-funded, bread-and-circus building that has given the city everything from the ill-fated Millennium Dome to the Tate Modern, and against a background of an economic boom whose imminent end is now clearly being signaled by a deluge of ultra-high-rise skyscrapers, Murray Grove is so modest as to be almost invisible.

It’s a simple L-shaped block of flats, just five stories high, in a scuffed and worn-out neighborhood near London’s financial district. The flats are not large; the smallest are no more than a couple of rooms totaling less than 600 square feet. And yet Murray Grove, in the year since it was completed, continues to collect awards of every description. It has turned into an essential stop on the London architectural tourist trail. It is the subject of a raft of studies and evaluations to determine just why it has been such a success, and how its lessons can be applied to affordable new housing elsewhere. And, most importantly, it is a place in which people who can afford no more than the modest rent of $225 a week actually want to live. With its heavy concentration of twentysomethings, it would make a perfect set for a British version of Friends. 

Under the direction of a 140-year-old housing charity, Murray Grove is a project that has attempted to tackle all the great sacred cows of English housing. And remarkably, it has somehow contrived to kill them off, one by one, with a deftness that borders on ruthlessness. England’s housing, it should be understood, is still at the stage that English food was at not so long ago, before the country discovered green vegetables and extra-virgin olive oil. For the most part, it is the architectural equivalent of Spam. It doesn’t have to be this way, and certainly Murray Grove offers richer flavors. 

In the 1960s, many of the best and most idealistic of Britain’s architects devoted their careers to designing high-minded contemporary housing for the welfare state. Precisely because of their efforts, good design found itself fatally tainted with the stigma of welfare housing. Public housing was linked with modernism and so-called good design. So the private sector set out deliberately to make its housing look as un-architect-designed as possible. That meant fake Tudor, Kentucky Fried Georgian, and tacky layouts. Nobody, it seems, ever lost money underestimating the taste of the British public.

It’s a legacy that has persisted. To this day, there is a belief in Britain that when it comes to designing crowd-pleasing homes, high kitsch is a better bet than high tech.

There is an equally pervasive preconception that no self-respecting Englishman is going to opt for a flat when he can live in a house with a garden. Then there is the belief that the British want their homes built using so-called traditional building methods, preferably involving bricks laid by hand. The conviction that a prefab is not a proper home runs deep. In Britain the very word "prefab" is indelibly marked with the distant memory of wartime austerity, when returning servicemen were expected to start civilian life with their families in prefabricated houses erected on bomb sites. These homes, then, are about as welcome in the more prosperous Britain of today as wartime recipes using powdered milk.

Murray Grove has set out to demolish all of these myths. Architecturally it may not quite be Zaha Hadid, but it has clearly been designed by an architect with ability. James Pickard is a 38-year-old partner in the recently established firm of Cartwright Pickard. Interestingly, he had never designed a house of any kind before he entered the competition to build the Murray Grove Apartments. For 15 years, though, he had been convinced that Britain was not going about building houses the right way. "The northern Europeans make us look primitive," he says. Murray Grove is the result of his personal crusade to show that there is a better way of doing things.

Pickard has given the building a terra-cotta cladding on the street facade and a cedarwood skin on its garden front. It boasts a lift tower topped by a steel hat and energetic exposed steel diagonal bracing that can trace its ancestry to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It makes no concession to the image of the traditional house. You get to your front door on an external walkway. Apart from the communal lawn, the nearest the flats get to a garden is a modestly scaled balcony—which also serves as an excuse to sheath the south and west facades of the block in undulating waves of perforated steel.

Most startling of all, in the British context, is that the greater part of the building has been prefabricated in a factory. Murray Grove is an exercise in proving that prefabrication does not have to be shoddy or cheap looking. Indeed, it has succeeded well enough for at least one of its tenants to have not had the faintest idea that she was living in a prefab until she was asked by a researcher what she thought about it. The individual rooms were assembled by Yorkon Limited, a British company that specializes in making budget hotels and fast-food restaurants. It has adapted these building techniques to housing for the first time.

The prefabricated modules—74 steel-framed boxes in all—were trucked down to London on a stream of lorries, and craned into place. There is no structure as such; the boxes are simply stacked up one on top of the other and supported on a simple concrete strip foundation. "We were able to build a prototype in the factory to make sure that we got it right," explains Pickard. "The money we were able to save by building fast could go into good-quality doors and windows, fixtures and fittings, that were all screwed into place in the factory." Technologically, this is not rocket science, but it did cut the building time in half to just 27 weeks, compared with the year a conventional building program would have taken. And the most dramatic part of the installation was done in a matter of days. Patrick McKinney, one of the tenants, remembers working next door while construction was underway and seeing the whole five-floor block take shape in the course of a single week. "I was impressed enough to call up to find out if I could get one of the flats," he says.

All the tenants moved in at the same time. Most had come to an open house where they were asked to provide evidence of their earnings—not so low that they couldn’t afford the rent, but not so high that they could afford market rent in the neighborhood. McKinney recalls the whole process as being surprisingly easy and unbureaucratic, and "it got me out of a damp, dark basement." The experience of creating an instant community has clearly left the tenants curious about how others have arranged their identical flats. "You can look out of your window and see how some people fill their places with plants, other people have lots of their old furniture," says McKinney. "I think that somebody has painted all his walls pink."

As a place to live, Murray Grove, of course, is shaped by the tenants as much as by the ambitions of its architects and its owners. Pickard could not have known that the place he designed so carefully would be occupied by so many people who could be expected to lean over his shoulder at the drawing board. Architects and designers seem to have become a new category of key worker in London, and they are well represented among the tenants. Joanne Stevens, who is training to be an architect, lived in one of Murray Grove’s single-person flats for almost a year, and even though she has moved out now, she is still positive about the experience. "The flat was very thoughtfully put together and I wouldn’t have changed the plan. For me the real trouble was that it still is too expensive. It works for two people, but not for one." McKinney lives with his Swedish partner in one of the flats designed for couples. You can tell that he is a designer—there is a Tom Dixon lamp in the living room, and there are Eames chairs at the kitchen table—and he is impressed by Murray Grove. "The carpets are a bit dodgy, but the place really works," he says.

Murray Grove was made possible through The Peabody Trust, one of the products of Britain’s great wave of 19th-century philanthropy. Originally known as The Peabody Donation Fund, The Peabody Trust was born from the profound sense of shock of the British middle class when confronted with the reality of life in the underbelly of London as portrayed by Charles Dickens and others. The Trust was established in 1862, a time when 26,000 Londoners were documented as living six or more to a room. By 1900, it had built more than 11,000 so-called hygienic flats. They had to be cheap, if the people that the Trust was targeting could afford to live in them. London’s inner ring is still marked by the grim blocks of tenements that the Trust built to deal with the problem. They weren’t pretty but they worked, mainly because The Peabody Trust set an exemplary standard in managing its properties and looking after its tenants.

The Trust has continued to flourish, and now, with its energetic development director Dickon Robinson (himself an architect), it has become one of the most innovative housing providers in the country. Just as it has always done, it seeks to house people who cannot afford to pay market rents. But in 2000 those people are as likely to be young professionals like teachers, policemen, mechanics, and nurses as the traditionally disadvantaged. At Murray Grove, Robinson was driven by the conviction that a city in which teachers and policemen can no longer afford to live is on the edge of becoming dysfunctional. So with a site provided by the local authority, the Trust set out to build accommodations that would attract the so-called key workers, the modestly paid who make a city function, and to build flats at a price that they could afford to rent.

The site was key to the success of the project. It’s an easy walk to the City of London and the newly fashionable hot spots of Hoxton. There are fragments of Georgian terraces here, but most of the area is characterized by the legacy of Britain’s daunting social housing from the 1930s, old factories and boarded-up shops. The block is called Murray Grove by the Trust but the address is really Shepherdess Walk, which despite its picturesque ring has until recently been one of London’s tougher neighborhoods. This was an area that didn’t take kindly to outsiders, particularly gentrifiers. It’s a place where the dislocations of London’s transition from the old economy to the new took their toll on a working-class community that found its skills no longer in demand. To add insult to injury, the neighborhood’s proximity to London’s financial center meant not only that the old community found itself starved for work but also that it was priced out of its homes. Private rentals and houses for sale started to take a vertiginous turn upward a decade ago.

The other side of the great London boom has been that, as in other successful cities, its very success has undermined its original appeal. Central London and vast areas of what were once seen as workaday suburbs have become too expensive for people to live in, unless they’re dot-com millionaires or bankers. In a modest way, Murray Grove attempts to demonstrate how central London can avoid the fate of Manhattan or San Francisco, by not turning into a ghetto for the affluent who will one day find that there is no one to work in their restaurants or teach their children. 

See more from the Dwell archive on US Modernist.

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