George Finch 1930-2013

Lambeth Towers, London

PHILIP BOYLE reflects on the career of the prolific municipal architect

First published Spring 2013

When you exit Stockwell Station in London you come out facing south. On a sunny day, because of the immediate glare and the wide pavement, you may well not look up. But if you do and look over the south horizon of terraced London roofline you come upon a series of jagged but flat shadowed silhouettes stepping away from you. They are as striking, modern and arresting as any shot from a film by Antonioni in the early sixties.

If you follow up these intriguing silhouettes you will find that they are the flat, almost windowless, north side of towers, of which the other three sides are highly articulated balconies and windows bathed in sunlight. Those familiar with south London will note that in height and mass they resemble the barrel vaulted Brandon Housing Estate (1955-61), familiar from views over the park at Kennington. If you know something about the history of public housing you may also know that the Brandon Estate was designed under Edward or Ted Hollamby (1921-99), first of the LCC Architects, then Lambeth Borough Architect. Like the Brandon, the blocks are angled in plan to reduce shadows to the north. However at Brandon there are only two mirrored elevations as opposed to Stockwell where there are three sunny elevations with cantilevered individual balconies.

Cotton Gardens Estate, Stockwell, London

These Stockwell towers, also designed under Ted Hollamby for Lambeth, are the work of someone who understands the need for sun and light learned from Le Corbusier's work (as opposed to the copying of it from pictures, so prevalent in post WW2 England). The architect was George Finch who as a student had gone to Le Corbusier in Paris, got a letter of introduction and comprehensively visited the 'Unité' in Marseille for himself. Unlike other high density urban housing, those schemes by George Finch respond to and celebrate the human need for sun and light as a priority, not as something that might happen along with all the other demands in the struggle for reasonable housing. They respond foremost and directly as always with Le Corbusier. George Finch's individual and grouped towers are optimistically triumphant places to live. They bring to London the natural large floppy beauty of Mediterranean Sunflowers.

To understand the unique character of George Finch and his architecture it is necessary to remember life just after WW2 in London. The profession of architecture was dominated by public school educated, pipe smoking upper middle class men. While 40 per cent of architects worked in the public sector, they were the 39 per cent who liked an easy life with a solid pension at the end, so the basic diet of council housing – it must be remembered – was not an area of edgy art. It was Span estates by Eric Lyons, Taylor and Green, HKPA, and Lubetkin at its best.

George Finch was born into humble circumstances. His father was a milk delivery man working for a private dairy in Tottenham. His mother, the eldest daughter of first generation Scottish immigrants, was denied higher education despite showing many talents which her son inherited. George determined from an early age that he was to become an architect. He explored his interest by building models of buildings. During WW2 Mrs Finch was evacuated with her son and daughter to Saffron Walden. The father remained in London working for the fire service during the blitz.

This move was a huge gain for George's education as he attended the excellent Newport Grammar School. He excelled in the Sciences and Maths as well as English and Art. The war ended and the return to Tottenham was a depressing experience, but George matriculated a year early in 1947 and was ready to start training as an architect.

The career advice at his school was mired in ignorance and an absence of aspiration. This resulted in his working as a trainee in the office of a hack architect and going to night class at North London Poly (NLP). He found the tutors there very uninspiring. They kept issuing dire warnings against a wayward and impractical college called the Architectural Association. This filled George with curiosity to explore whether the spark might he found wanting at NLP might be alive in the institution his tutors so loathed.

Once George crossed the threshold of Bedford Square he was sure this was the place he was seeking. He won the single available County Scholarship and joined the year which graduated 1955, which included Neave Brown, Patrick Hodgkinson and Roy Stout.

They must have been heady days as he was one of a group of students renting a flat on Christ Church Road, Hampstead, looking onto the Heath – how things have changed!

Angrave Street, Haggerston, London

Like so many radical young, idealistic architects of his generation who wanted to help build a better London out of the ruins of the blitz, George joined the LCC. He was interviewed by Kenneth Campbell who explained that he was putting him in a group of old hands, mainly surveyors, to ginger them up. The scope for innovation at that time was limited by standard plans but George introduced to the ubiquitous tower blocks, articulation at each floor and a heavy cornice giving a definite termination (as can be seen in his Whitechapel Road block). Also at Argrave Street and Manor Grove he designed high density two storey courtyard housing with rooms bridging the pedestrianised access way.

When the London Boroughs were granted responsibility for housing in 1964, Ted Hollamby was appointed Borough architect and planner for Lambeth. He invited George to join his staff as group leader and participate in setting up the structure of a new department. At the age of 33 George was given a measure of design freedom on major projects which would be rare today.

The combination of long housing waiting lists and a total absence of vacant sites lead to a policy of surgical interventions on relatively small building plots, inserting point blocks, always with some communal provision at the base and/or some low-rise terraces. These were to days of Sir Keith Joseph's insistence on industrialised building. George's design was the heavily articulated Wates blocks, at Hurley Rd and Cotton Gardens. George descibes the siting of the Cotton Garden blocks (1968) as 'dancing around'. Always there is a different event at the skyline, so the termination is distinctive. The planning is actually a stack of maisonettes, so communal circulation is reduced giving more generous provision within the dwellings.

This playful articulation met its apotheosis in Lambeth Towers (1967), opposite the Imperial War Museum. This group of three linked towers rise from a base formed (in the original brief ) by a doctor's group practice and a old person's luncheon club. Once again, the ingenious section of stacked maisonettes means the communal access is every third floor and every dwelling has dual aspect and a balcony.

George's last design for Lambeth was the Brixton Recreation Centre. This much loved facility in an area of London which still has high levels of deprivation, was untouched in the 1981 Brixton riots. Popular campaigning by the user group recently saw off a proposal to demolish it and sell off the site for housing. Close to Brixton tube station it offers the best sporting facilities in South London until you get to Crystal Palace.

With an interest in theatre he became a partner with Roderick Ham in Ham and Finch Architects where he specialised in theatre design and refurbishment. He was project Architect for Derby Playhouse and worked on the interior scheme for the Theatre Royal York, a Cultural Centre in Amman and a scheme for rehabilitating the Theatre Royal Lincoln. He assisted Rod Ham when he edited Theatre Planning published by the ABTT.

He then spent four years as Head of Architectural Design at Greenwich University (then Thames Polytechnic) after which he moved to Riverside Studios in London to set up a practice with Will Allsop and John Lyall developing, among other things, proposals for the remodelling of the studio theatre.

In partnership with Robert Giles he later formed Architects Workshop working on a number of London Docklands projects. From 1987 he worked as a consultant with Hampshire County Council advising on a number of school projects to deliver phased masterplans to reinvigorate existing schools. In later years he got great satisfaction from designing Weston Adventure Playground in Southampton. This was a charity lottery project executed with his life-partner, Kate Macintosh, and it won an RIBA award in 2005.

George's talents and interest were much wider than architecture. He played the piano, the fiddle and the guitar and he was no mean artist. He was intensely interested in theatre having worked on Derby Play House while with Roderick Ham and was a keen amateur dramatics performer with the Chesil Theatre in Winchester for whom he also designed sets. He was an expert conjurer and a great cook.

George is survived by his long term partner, Kate Macintosh and their son Sean, and by his ex-wife Brenda and their children, Alison, Emma and Sarah and sons Adam and Jonny.

Additional information provided by Kate Macintosh