Hatfield House, Including Garden Walls To Rear, Golden Lane Estate Designed Landscape, City of London, London, EC1M (Grade II)

TQ 3282 SW 627/3/10165

BALTIC STREET (East side) Hatfield House, including garden walls to rear

GV II Block of fourteen flats and 42 maisonettes, with ramp to underground car park beneath, and garden walls to south. Design won in competition in 1952, site extended 1955 and this block built 1958-61. Competition won by Geoffry Powell, design developed and built by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon.

Pink brick crosswall construction with pink mortar, reinforced concrete floor and roof slabs, concrete balconies. Cladding of blue panels, some of opaque glass. Seven storeys. Basement flats with their own gardens, with three tiers of two-storey maisonettes above.

The maisonettes set in pairs along two rows, fourteen per pair of floors. Balconies to south elevation, now painted, reached by lifts and stairs at corner of Crescent House (q.v). The flats and maisonettes reached by access galleries on north elevation. Escape stair near eastern end. The maisonettes mostly with two bedrooms with three-bedroom flats either side of escape stair, the flats are bedsits. To south the crosswalls project forward to give privacy to each unit, and the block reads as a series of terraces set one above the other. Aluminium windows with timber facing to living room. The aluminium system repeated on north front and continues as the framework for the bright blue cladding panels set in bands under the windows. Upper floor bedrooms project; set-back staircase windows to each unit on lower levels; continuous bands of glazing and blue panels to top floor of uppermost maisonettes. Blue-clad projection to maisonettes at rear of escape stair. Concrete balconies have steel top rails. Brick piers to north elevation mask timber doors set in pairs. Access galleries with steel railings, wired glass balcony fronts on first, third and fifth floors serve fire escape balconies between bedrooms, and escape stairs. Original signs survive.

Interiors simple. Staircases with solid risers developed to the rear as a series of shelving. Parquet floor to living room, which is separated from the kitchen by a partially glazed screen. Original fitted cupboards of interest where they survive. Staircases on lower levels rise from the body of the living room; on the top level they rise from opposite the door, and top floor has bathrooms set centrally under clerestory windows. Kitchen and bathroom fittings not of special interest.

Subsidiary features. Garden walls of pink brick continue the lines of the main block. Brick and concrete ramp to north serves underground car park under the later part of the scheme, and the service road to the shops in Crescent House.

Special features. Hatfield House forms a backdrop to the tenants hall and recreation centre, with the children’s playground. It occupies a particularly important place in the design of the estate, as it forms the northern boundary. It is also significant in being intermediary between the early and later phases.

HISTORY AND ANALYSIS The development and importance of the Golden Lane Estate is explained in the entry for Great Arthur House. (Architectural Review: January 1956: 34-7)