Croydon gets it in the neck a fair bit. Soulless, drab, 'New York built in Poland', a concrete jungle. The Late Show in 1993 characterised it, in a rare moment of analysis from any media on the town, as an English Alphaville: comparing it to Godard's 1965 dystopian sci-fi masterpiece. And there are many elements of the town centre that deserve comparing to science fiction. There are 45 office blocks in the town centre, mostly built in the decade leading up to 1974. Most of these blocks stand on pilotis, Le Corbusier's word for concrete stilts, which allow people to walk beneath the buildings. In theory this makes them generous, makes them permeable. In reality, the vast tarmac car parks block access to them during the week when busy, and at the weekend when empty form a slightly uncanny zone around East Croydon, where you feel like your walking beneath the instep of giants. However, here I've chosen my ten favourite postwar Croydon buildings, those that most represent my home town. They also all reflect the space age in which they were built, and go some way to explaining my lifelong obsession with visions of the future from the past.
It's probably also briefly worth mentioning the less pleasant side of all this rebuilding: Croydon is a town all about money. These buildings were put up to capitalise on the 'Brown Ban' when Labour's deputy leader decreed that no high rise office space could be built in central London, and so Croydon, for a while, became a Docklands for the era of the trim phone and the Austin Maxi. But all of this Tory effort to make money out of every square footage of the town remains, currently in the ugly form of selling the library service off to construction firm John Laing, which sounds absurd and outrageous enough, without the fact that a couple of months in Laing have flogged off the libraries to a facilities management company in Wolverhampton.
All of this building is impressive, but don't for a moment imagine that Croydon's town fathers give a flying fuck about it. Which means that we have to. Let's not give in to their cynicism.
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1. Lunar and Apollo HouseLike most of the office blocks in Croydon, these adjacent towers were built on land purchased by a private developer from a private tenant – in this case reclusive multi-millionaire Harry Hyams, who bought the land from Croydon High School for Girls, who took the money and ran to the suburbs. The names Lunar and Apollo couldn't place it any more in time: they were completed in 1970, the most famous buildings designed by Denis Crump and Partners, a practice not all all renowned for their 1st Mortlake Sea Scouts Headquarters. Most days there are queues of people waiting to see immigration staff as they belong to the Home Office. | |
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2. Corinthian HouseHere's a lovely Richard Seifert building, from the team who gave us Alpha Tower and the NatWest Tower. Corinthian House is a bit tucked away, overlooking a rather scrubby roundabout on Lansdowne Road. Seifert often worked with Harry Hyams, but Croydon was an exception. Its glass faces are beveled a little like those on Millbank Tower, and the pilotis are classic Seifert, jazzily angled and covered in mosaic tiles, like those on Centre Point or Space House. The elongated entrance canopy (captured beautifully here by Ian Steel) is the cutest of all details on this little gem of a building.
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3. Leon HouseI have two favourites among these buildings: this one and the next. Leon House is an extraordinary staggered double tower, marooned in South Croydon away from the swagger of its contemporaries, cut off by the Croydon flyover. It's the most pure Le Corbusier-style block in the town, built in austere grey concrete with a kind of elegance that few of the other structures can match, and would look at home in most European cities or the US, the kind of place Nixon would order to burgle. It was finished in 1969, a year before the vastly inferior Lunar and Apollo Houses, and designed by the firm of Tribich, Liefer & Starkin. |
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4. The NLA TowerThe Noble Lowndes Tower, Threepenny Bit or fifty pence building is the most recognisable landmark in the town. Partly because it towers over busy East Croydon Station, and so commuters travelling between London, Gatwick and Brighton get an eyeful of its offset octagonal floors and white mini-mosaic tiling, calling cards of Richard Seifert at his best. It's built on a roundabout, like Centre Point, and has a ramp that disappears into an underground car park beneath. It was finished in 1970, but the roundabout almost didn't make it, as that was planned to go though East Bridge House, whose tenant couldn't be persuaded to leave until three years later. |
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5. Whitgift CentreCroydon's shopping centre, with its five tower blocks, was built on the site of a school, like Lunar and Apollo House. Built by shopping centre experts Ravenseft, its claim to fame was starring in the original title sequence to Terry and June. These incredible photos are from 1971 and were taken by Ian Steel. My mum used a wheelchair so we always used the circular ramps – or whirlarounds, as we called them. My first job was, I think, just to the left of the second photo, in Sherratt and Hughes bookshop, now Waterstones. |
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6. Nestlé House St George's House was the tower block famously built twice the height of Croydon's previous tallest building, Norfolk House, on the whim of Croydon's Borough Engineer, Allan Holt. It was soon occupied by Nestlé, who even branded the town at East Croydon, whose railway signs for years read 'home of Nestlé. St George's House was built at the end of a covered mall, St George's Walk, a place that lost out almost immediately when the Whitgift Centre was built, because of its unfortunate wind-tunnel design. The tower and mall were designed by Ronald Ward and Partners, most famous for their Thameside landmark, Millbank Tower. Nestlé have moved out, but their famous nest still towers over the town, cast in concrete 23 storeys up. |
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7. Suffolk HouseSuffolk House was one of the first postwar buildings completed in the redeveloped town centre of Croydon. The mustard-coloured panels on this modest 3-storey office building place it in time quite as distinctly as the steel-framed curtain wall design. Here was late-fiftes architecture at its most polite. A noughties plan to replace it with a 40-storey glass-clad skyscraper came to nothing. I've always rather liked little Suffolk House, a building type more familiar to other less aggressively developed towns. |
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8. Fairfield HallsThere's no mistaking the resemblance between Fairfield Halls and the Festival Hall (and acoustician Hope Bagenal worked on both), except perhaps that these days while the South Bank has been polished and pimped to within an inch of its life, the Croydon version is looks more like a bingo hall by the day. Still, I saw some of the best things there, and I'm sure it's still managing that balancing act and inspiring and entertaining kids and families with the odd gem hidden among the rubbish. |
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9. Tabener HouseThe council offices moved out of the Victorian Town Hall building next door to this gigantic tower block, Tabener House, in 1967. Allan Holt had a hand in the design, which was chiefly handled by architect H. Thornley. It's undoubtedly one of my least favourite towers in the town, but the christmas tree created initially by leaving a triangle of lights on at nigt, and more recently through blue lights bought to decorate the building, is kinda sweet. Also, there's a story about my dad, a council caretaker, stumbling into a christmas party in drag, having accidentally improvised a costume from one of the other guests's clothes, that makes me laugh every time I see the big old tower. |
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10. Amp House Here's one of my favourite buildings in the town, chiefly because of the amazing atomic-age relief above the entrance, and the concrete chevron panels surrounding it. Finished in 1968, the Amp House family group is the nearest the town centre comes to the kind of generous public art that new town dwellers are so familiar with. |
