An imposing brick wall runs in a sweeping curve alongside the sting of the North Round highway in Finchley, lined with arches and topped with crenelations, trying like a fraction of an historic walled metropolis. A cartoonish pair of towers poke up at both finish of the 200-metre lengthy construction, dotted with projecting lookout balconies, as if maintaining watch over all who enter London. Located amongst all of the mock Tudor semis lining the suburban streets, this nice brick bastion is an arresting factor to behold.
The constructing bears the unmistakable hallmarks of Peter Barber, one of the country’s most distinctive housing architects, who has simply been named winner of the celebrated 2022 Soane medal. His leaping brick arches, crenelated terraces and quirky vaulted rooflines can now be discovered remodeling unpromising aspect streets and leftover backland sites across London. Whereas a lot modern housing has converged in the direction of nameless slabs of identikit flats, with single-aspect flats organized off lengthy, double-sided corridors, Barber’s tasks draw on the wealthy number of vernacular housing from pre-modern instances, respiratory new life into centuries-old methods of residing which have stood the take a look at of time.
He has revived the back-to-back, blended it with the Tyneside flat (pairs of single-storey flats stacked inside a two-storey terrace), and spliced it with courtyard housing and the Scottish walk-up tenement, to create a assorted vocabulary that feels each acquainted and strikingly its personal. Organized in slim streets, mews lanes and cosy courtyards, his tasks have a timeless air, drawing on the fundamental ideas which have made good locations for so long as streets have been constructed – incomes him an OBE final 12 months. “It’s an strategy that basically appeals to individuals,” says Alex Kuropatwa, consumer of the Finchley mission. “Peter makes the type of public-spirited housing the place individuals really wish to dwell.”
Edgewood Mews, that nice fortified flank on the sting of the North Round highway, is Barber’s most formidable mission but. It has been designed on a sliver of land, a leftover verge from a road-widening scheme that by no means occurred. In its programme of promoting off small websites to small builders, Transport for London imagined that it could be potential to suit round 50 properties right here, probably in a trio of condo blocks.
Approached by Kuropatwa (for whom he designed a stepped, tenement-style mansion block in 2020), Barber took one have a look at the positioning and noticed, as a substitute, the best form for a brand new road. His dense, Dickensian imaginative and prescient would create a crescent-shaped mews, lined on both aspect with terraced homes, little sunken courtyard properties and stacked maisonettes, organized in a mild slope – creating greater than 100 properties within the course of, half classed as inexpensive in step with TfL’s necessities.
“It’s firstly concerning the road,” says Barber, wheeling his bike down the lane, which might nearly stand in because the set for a modern-day Hovis advert. “We all the time attempt to create the form of compact, convivial locations which may encourage individuals to fulfill and get to know one another. Everybody has their very own entrance doorways, and the roof terraces and patios are organized to miss the road and create a social surroundings.” Architecture can’t create a neighborhood, but when individuals are extra seen to at least one one other, the Barber logic goes, they’re extra prone to meet, and friendships may develop.
Once you’re standing within the block-paved road, which rises in a mild mound to accommodate a sunken automotive park beneath, you might have little concept that the roaring six-lane North Round is simply steps away. The southern aspect of the mews presents a monumental five-storey edge to the principle highway, making a buffer that blocks site visitors noise, forming a car-free oasis withing for neighbours to speak and youngsters to play.
Seen from a shifting car, it’s a daring piece of freeway structure, the repetitive double-height arches forming a dynamic rhythm as you glide previous, with loos projecting out over the pavement like medieval citadel privies (solely with out the opening within the flooring). From the opposite aspect, the size is totally totally different, designed with a cottagey, backstreet really feel, the place Barber hopes residents’ planting will quickly engulf the brickwork (and conceal the clumsy array of meter packing containers fitted on the road – towards the architects’ designs).
“You’d by no means imagine that you’re residing proper subsequent to a freeway,” says Ihiri Haswani, who moved right here along with her three kids 4 months in the past. “The secluded world they’ve created means I can let the youngsters play out on the street, with out worrying about vehicles. Solely a handful of individuals have moved in thus far, but it surely already feels neighbourly.”
Barber skilled on the College of Sheffield, adopted by the Polytechnic of Central London, now the College of Westminster, the place he teaches. The architect started his profession working for Richard Rogers, an unlikely match. “On the time, I liked the concept of sunshine, framey buildings that hardly touched the bottom,” he remembers. However that quickly modified. He discovered himself designing a house in Saudi Arabia that was the polar reverse to Rogers’ strategy. “It was a world of heavy, huge partitions, enclosing courtyards,” he says. “Since then, it’s been about structure being a stable and everlasting factor.”
His studio is as unconventional as his trajectory. Housed in a Victorian shopfront in King’s Cross, its creaking flooring are linked by slim winding stairs, its street-facing window overflowing with structure fashions – a sweet-shop for constructing lovers. Belying the prolific output, the workplace ranges in dimension from simply six to 9 individuals. “I by no means wish to get greater than the variety of individuals that may match on the lunch desk,” he says. A drum package, electrical piano and guitar gas the common studio events that spill out into the road.
Barber plans to make use of the platform of his medal lecture, to be given on 8 November at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, to ship a political message. “We might finish the housing disaster in a single day, if we wished to,” he says. “We should always introduce personal sector hire controls, halt the selling of council houses under right to buy, and construct 150,000 council properties a 12 months funded by direct taxation.”
When I interviewed Barber in 2018, on the eve of an exhibition on the Design Museum in London, he was concocting a conceptual plan for a Hundred Mile City. It was a provocative concept for a “dense, intense” strip of land across the suburban fringe of London, that would match one million properties. How does he really feel about this now?
“I’ve fully modified my view,” he says, searching over Edgewood Mews from one of many balconies. “There isn’t a housing scarcity. There are over 400,000 empty homes within the UK, and about 200,000 homeless people. The overwhelming majority of empty properties are in elements of the nation which have grow to be depopulated due to financial decline – within the Midlands, the north, and coastal cities. So the answer to the housing disaster isn’t constructing tons of properties. It’s about reviving the financial system in these locations, launching a large retrofit marketing campaign, and bringing individuals again.”
He has named his newest speculative imaginative and prescient “8,000 Mile Island”. It imagines a “maritime industrial revolution”, within the type of a ribbon of tidal barrages, offshore wind farms, big floating tidal generators, and deep-sea fish and seaweed farms, tracing the shoreline from the Orkney Islands to the Isle of Wight and again. Such a mission, Barber posits, would carry renewed prosperity to our decaying, depopulated coastal cities and cities, whereas providing meals and power self-sufficiency, and an finish to the housing disaster.
His plan would make use of the infrastructure already current within the UK’s declining offshore oil and shipbuilding industries in Hull, Inverness and on the Clyde, and create 1000’s of recent jobs in such locations as Blackpool, Margate, St Leonards, Southend-on-Sea and Newhaven. “Consider the housing trade redeployed away from the south-east and charged with saving and restoring a whole bunch of 1000’s of empty properties,” he says. “Entire streets and neighbourhoods at present deserted, in decay, buzzing with new life, exercise and prosperity from the incoming workforce.”
Barber speaks with the fervour and conviction of a radical campaigner, the sort that makes you imagine another, optimistic, fairer imaginative and prescient of Britain is eminently potential. His formidable concepts would require a elementary governmental shift, far past the attain of any architect. So may a political profession be beckoning?
“I don’t suppose I’d final a minute in politics,” he laughs. “I simply say what I feel an excessive amount of.”