HOUSING AT ST MARK'S ROAD, NORTH KENSINGTON, LONDON

This scheme appears to consist of twelve large houses. Each house is in fact two narrow houses over a flat. The houses have access to the garden at the rear and the flat is restricted to the street side of the building. At the corner between the two terraces is a small block of flats with a major bay window. The plans of the houses are angled to the street to allow the comer to be turned and privacy between dwellings to be maintained. This results is a maximum contrasting scale as between the double fronted street facades and the individual stepped form of the rear elevations.

The project was for social housing such as might be undertaken by the local authority but, in this case, was delegated to a charitable trust, The Kensington Housing Trust. The financial standards were therefore the same as those for public housing.

The appearance of the scheme is derived on the one hand from the rather curious spiky Victorian terraces that surround the site, and on the other from a desire to include historical and more recent references in the same composition. The intention might be summed up by a description used of the Queen Anne style "eclecticism with an artistic eye'9.

Streets and houses are seen in perspective, and the scheme emphasises those elements that protrude from the main facade and form the typical rhythms and modelling that make up a London domestic street.