Post-war Housing and Leisure. (As opposed to Hammerson's proposal for an out-of-town cinema at Brent Cross. Just saying.)

Lambeth Towers, opposite Imperial War Museum
Link to The Guardian

"The architect George Finch has died, aged 82, at the height of a campaign to save his Brixton Recreation Centre, in south London, designed in 1971 and opened in 1985.

[In 1950,] he was appointed by the London County Council to ginger up a team of elderly surveyors, whose repetitive scheme for Spring Walk, Stepney, had been rejected.

"Finch's design exemplified the best of mixed development, the dominant ideology for housing in the 1950s, with a 10-storey block of flats that gave space for old people's flats and two-storey houses, unique in central London at the time. Flats at the top of the tower had roof gardens. It was followed by work on the Suffolk Estate in Haggerston, an early low-rise, high-density scheme, again with houses as well as flats.

"The halcyon days for LCC housing ended with the reorganisation of London government in 1965, when responsibility for most house building passed to the boroughs. Finch joined the new architect's department created at Lambeth in 1963 by Edward Hollamby, also from the LCC. 

"Hollamby adopted a pre-cast system for six tower blocks on landmark sites to relieve the borough's most urgent needs, while his department explored low-rise solutions and refurbishment. Finch made a detailed study that refuted system-building's claims to be quicker and cheaper than conventional construction, but he contributed to the heavily articulated towers, giving them a distinctive profile and setting them at angles he described as 'dancing around'."

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Link to Lambeth Towers, on 'Utopia London'

George Finch - Brixton Rec from utopialondon on Vimeo.