28 Field trip
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This is the modern way North London boasts two treasures of early modernist architecture. Umbrella took the Northern Line to ponder how time has treated these jewels of 1930s utopia Highpoint, Highgate, London N6 Like Hampstead, its slightly larger sibling across the Heath, Highgate seems to have been transported from the Cotswolds and dropped into the middle of north London. The village, and it really does feel like one, is made up of Georgian villas, rows of elegant Victorian terraces and several modernist blocks, the best of which is Highpoint. As an example of urban(ish) living it really takes some beating. Highpoint is made up of two blocks (‘1’ built 1933-35, ‘2’ 1936-38), both designed by the architect Berthold Lubetkin, a Russian emigre who arrived in England during 1931. An enthusiastic disciple of Le Corbusier, Lubetkin designed other buildings infused with the French architect’s modernist philosophy, like the Genesta Road terrace in Plumstead, south London and the Finsbury Health Centre in Clerkenwell. Influential though these
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structures may be, they cannot match the timeless simplicity of Highpoint. Like the Lawn Road flats in Hampstead (see 2), Highpoint benefits from a stunning location (the highest point in London, hence the name) and a large percentage of painfully tasteful residents, who pretty much define the ‘smug metropolitan elite’ tag. According to one, St Etienne’s Bob Stanley, the block… “comes into its own in summer. Lubetkin based the layout on nearby Kenwood country house, and the building looks most spectacular when seen from the sloping lawns. The swimming pool is always busy on sunny weekends — it’s your chance to meet your neighbour’s Russian cousins you’ve heard so much about — while the tennis courts are used by octogenarians who look so fit you feel ashamed to take them on. Lubetkin was obsessed with blurring indoors and outdoors; each flat is heated from the ceiling to give the impression of the sun beaming down. The sense of community is heightened by the building’s bi-plane layout, which means the flats overlook each other.” However, not everything Lubetkin designed was as elegant and livable as Highpoint. His block in Bethnal Green in the East End looks like the sort of place you’d want to throw yourself off rather than live in.
www.umbrellamagazine.co.uk
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However, if you do want go and see Highgpoint you’ll find it about ten minutes walk from Highgate Tube station. And the pub across the road isn’t bad either. Lawn Road flats, Hampstead, NW3 While Highpoint boasts a stunning location that overlooks the capital, the flats at Lawn Road sit on a pleasant, but ordinary, street just south of Hampstead Heath. It’s only on further inspection that you realise just how beautiful they are. Built between 1932 and 1934 by the London architectural practice Isokon for ’20s yuppies and their Bakelite telephones, the flats were described by one resident, the novelist Agatha Christie, as looking “like an ocean liner”. We don’t know about that – Umbrella certainly couldn’t find any retired hairdressers blowing their pensions – but it does have an elegance undimmed by time. Its principal architect Wells Coates said: “My scheme provides a place which every actor in this drama can call his own place, and further than that my idea of property does not go. This is where I sleep, this is where I work and this is where I eat. This is the roof garden where everyone can turn out...This is the garden where everyone goes. It’s like a park.”
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