Very nearly called Lenin Court
Lubetkin’s Modernist Icon Bevin Court in the ‘Socialist Republic of Finsbury’
Bevin Court entrance
Bevin Court is a sought after London home in a Modernist icon designed by the enigmatic giant of architecture Berthold Lubetkin. It was very nearly called Lenin Court and there’s a secret buried under the striking central staircase.
An emigre, Berthold Lubetkin came to Britain in 1930. For many years his true origins were a mystery, even to his own family, for whom he laid a false trail of crumbs that led to a Tsarist admiral, Admiral Makarov, as his father. But that wasn’t the truth or anywhere remotely near the truth.
Of two things there’s no doubt; Lubetkin was a brilliant architect and, secondly, a committed communist. Both these key elements of his character brought him to the London Borough of Finsbury AKA the People’s Republic of Finsbury, and to Bevin Court.
Bevin Court courtesy of copyright owner Dr Rajiv Shah
In London Lubetkin established, with a group of new architects, the Tecton practice. This practice, working with the gifted engineer Ove Arup, went on to become the country’s leading architectural firm. With Walter Gropius, head of the Bauhaus, moving to London in 1934 and a number of its leading lights including Maholy-Nagy and Breuer, there was an all too brief flowering of avant garde architecture and intellectual thought, a desire to bring to the working class modern, healthy homes in harmony with nature informed by the socialist ideals of the circle. The Bauhaus in London coalesced around the Lawn Road Flats, the Isokon. Lubetkin was a member of MARS, the Modern Architecture Research Group, a group that included Wells Coates the designer of the Isokon. But Lubetkin and Gropius didn’t work together, barely encountered each other and they followed quite different paths to modernism.
Lubetkin and the Tecton had made a huge impact with the Gorilla House and then the Penguin House at London Zoo, Dudley Zoo followed by Highpoint in Highgate, Highpoint I and II, Modernist apartment blocks that were, perhaps curiously for such an uncompromising communist, luxurious and bourgeois.
The Penguin Pool in London Zoo, Regent’s Park ©
However, the next development fell four square with Lubetkin’s ideals and took him to the London Borough of Finsbury.
Bevin Court ground floor
The Finsbury Health Centre is a beautiful Modernist design to provide for the physical and social health of ordinary people. It was a decade and a world war ahead of the National Health Service.
And then as war loomed, in 1939, Lubetkin gave up his business and social success and became a farmer, an occupation about which he knew nothing. He moved to a rundown farm and learned how to farm the hard way. His connections with London Zoo did mean that he cared for some rather exotic evacuee animals. For a time the farm received as guests intellectuals from Lubetkin’s circle but that seemed to be that.
When Germany invaded, the Soviet Union became the UK’s ally and Winston Churchill’s loathing of Communism gave way to his even more powerful hatred of Naziism and the UK made common cause with the USSR. Lubetkin was asked to return from the country and here there are competing accounts, one where he was commissioned by Finsbury Council and the other by the Russian Embassy in London to design and erect a monument to Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov who had lived at 30 Holford Square in Finsbury from 1902 to 1903. V. I. Ulyanov is better known to history as Lenin. There’s no irony in that he lived in Finsbury. It has always been a progressive part of London. The first ethnic Asian Member of Parliament was elected there, in 1892. In fact, as confirmed by John Allan, Lubetkin’s biographer, while Finsbury commissioned the monument the bust of Lenin was donated by the Soviet embassy.
British Pathé News 1942 ‘Lenin Memorial Unveiled’ courtesy of and copyright owned by British Pathé
But not everyone was as prepared as Churchill to bury their hatred for the Bolsheviks and the memorial was repeatedly vandalised so Lubetkin and his collaborators removed the statue.
Abram Games 1943 propaganda poster of Berthold Lubetkin’s Finsbury Health Centre for the British government’s war effort banned by Winston Churchill. By kind permission of the Imperial War Museum from Art.IWM PST 2911
The Finsbury Health Centre featured in wartime propaganda poster by Abram Games. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, didn’t like the socialist aspect of the poster’s message, that the Britain worth fighting for was the newer Britain of Finsbury and not the image of the working-class child with rickets that the Finsbury Health Centre was built to banish. So the poster was banned.
After the war ended the work of slum clearance and the reconstruction of London began. Finsbury wanted decent homes for its people and there was an urgent need. Lubetkin returned and designed the Spa Green Estate. It is another Modernist masterpiece and Lubetkin sought to incorporate as much of the lux feel of Highpoint as possible. For example, there are rubbish chutes and an aerofoil roof where residents might dry their washing. Nye Bevan, the left-wing Labour politician who, as Minister for Health, headed the creation by the post-War Labour government of the National Health Service, laid the foundation stone.
After the next project, Priory Green, was Bevin Court, close to Spa Green and, again, in Finsbury. It was finished in 1954 but money was by then very short. So Lubetkin had to scale back his ambitions; no balconies to the flats and no shared social facilities for the residents. But the result was nonetheless immensely pleasing. Clean, angular lines, an understated design style with the two blocks that comprise the estate set in a landscaped area with, now, mature trees and lawns.
Built over where Lenin had lived, the development is named after another Labour politician, Ernest Bevin, who served as Foreign Minister and was most definitely no communist. The original idea of calling the development Lenin Court was dropped – by the time of the estate’s construction we were in the midst of the Cold War – but, beneath the staircase, the central staircase that Lubetkin called a ‘social condenser’, that memorial to Lenin is buried.
Looking down through the Bevin Court central stairwell
Bevin’s bust is displayed in a niche in the entrance lobby of Bevin Court. While it may appear to be a bronze it is, in fact, an artfully 3D printed version of a bust of Bevin.
On the ground floor Peter Yates painted a mural but the open access the building allowed to the ground floor made it a target for vandals and in the dark days of the estate’s neglect until its through and careful restoration.
The restored Peter Yates mural, ground floor Bevin Court
Lubetkin didn’t pursue other projects. He died in 1990 but eight years before that RIBA awarded him its Gold Medal and in his acceptance speech displayed not only his immense intellect but made a searing defence of Modernism against its critics:
‘The epigones, the rearguard reactionaries, specialise in attacking what they like to call International Style which I think is the greatest innovation since humanity discovered the roulette wheel.”
A surprising simile? Louise Kehoe, Lubetkin’s daughter, who wrote an uncompromising and award-winning account (In This Dark House) of her deeply unhappy childhood with a father who she describes as a domineering and unsympathetic bully, tells how Lubetkin became devoted to gambling in casinos in the final years of his life. Louise solved the mystery of Lubetkin’s true background, one that might explain much of the man’s contradictions. He was Jewish and his parents, trapped in Warsaw, were like millions of other Jews, murdered by the Nazis while Lubetkin worked his farm.
We are hugely indebted to Rajiv, who lives in Bevin Court for his photographs. Rajiv has a fascination for architecture and his thoughtful insights about living in Bevin Court show why it is such a fabulous design and would, we believe, please Lubetkin.
Rajiv told us he looked at council properties as they were the most economical way of getting a foothold on the London property ladder. He says ‘I felt so lucky walking up the staircase on my first arrival. Like being in a living museum.’ when he first rented a one bedroom flat in Bevin Court.
Rajiv continued, ‘Having lived in ex-council properties for all my 12 years in London as a medical student and a doctor, I find they are generously proportioned. These properties allow for modular, multifunctional living. Living in a council property encourages more social connectivity with your neighbours, which is increasingly important, especially in our ever-fragmented society.’
‘I am very proud of where I live and enjoy the multiple different spaces that it offers. It is built on the bomb cleared remains of a grand square with a large bowling green at its historical centre. The high rise is now centred in a plot that has extensive gardens tended to by our residents gardening association and a public park. My flat and most of the others in this building, that are above ground level, have clear lines of sight and a dual aspect, and a Y shaped flat configuration, that looks like a 3 sided helicopter blade from the air.’
Rajiv quotes Lubetkin who said, ‘nothing is too good for the ordinary man.’
‘Bevin’s bust was 3D printed by my friend and future architect Mustafa Yasser Raee while he was staying with me at Bevin Court in the cramped 1 bedroom. We reworked the original interiors of a 3 bedroom property, four storeys below, to suit my needs. My visits to Erno Goldfinger’s Willow Road and even the penthouse of Lubetkin’s Highpoint, would satisfy my desire that my flat is a space that Lubetkin would have enjoyed. Plywood is used generously to make functional, space-creating and space-saving design solutions that I feel complement the ethos of the Bauhaus design collective that propagated at the Isokon.’
Interior of Bevin Court apartment, courtesy of the copyright owner Rajiv
We asked Rajiv to describe what is special about the experience of living in an architectural icon?
‘I enjoy the space. I enjoy the light. I enjoy the tranquillity of living in central London surrounded by greenery and a feeling of living in a tree house with lime green parakeets’ playing outside. It is particularly amazing when there is white cherry blossom 5 feet from my window. Not so great is the dawn chorus at 5 am. I enjoy the colourful sunsets over London with its clear lines of sight to King’s Cross and the city. I enjoyed taking people on the convoluted trek up to the staircase which presents them with different aspects of the city. I like the communal walkways and the interconnected living we have with our neighbours.
Interior of Bevin Court apartment, courtesy of the copyright owner Rajiv
Rajiv works in the NHS which he describes as, ‘full of dilapidated, chaotic and uninspiring spaces. Lubetkin’s health centre was pioneering but I wish that more spaces would be made that would creatively address the needs of those that use the building the most; its STAFF. By meeting the needs of the workforce, in providing a comfortable, functional and relaxing environment, this ultimately promotes their ability to offer good patient care.’
We asked Rajiv if he has a favourite building, and he’d love to visit Wright’s Fallingwater. As a Londoner we asked him to recommend the best spot for a drink and view in his city and he described the rich experience of standing on the terrace of the Royal Festival Hall, five storeys up, overlooking the Southbank, with a bottle of wine.
