35. Brutalist Bloomsbury

Mention the architecture of Bloombsury and the mind turns almost inevitably to its fabled Georgian and Victorian squares, latterly home to luminaries such as Virgina Woolf, EM Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Lyton Strachey and Lady Otteline Morrell. Yet as the character of the area changed from residential to academic, not only do these houses now play host to academic departments, but they are joined by an assortment of extraordinary modern buildings, including significant examples of post-war British Modernism and Brutalism. On this walking tour we discovered a much lambasted building by the prolific but under-rated Richard Seifert, a pair of late and controversial works by Sir Denys Lasdun, Patrick Hodgkinson’s acclaimed mega-structure the Brunswick Centre, and host of lesser known gems including an elegant 1960s theatre, a dynamic and remarkably preserved hotel in the international style and an uncompromising concrete chemistry laboratory.

We discovered how the University of London commissioned the LCC’s chief architect Leslie Martin to replan all of the Bloomsbury precinct in the Modernist style, but the plans were only partially completed due to pressure from conservation groups. Only a few buildings were actually completed. Sir Denys Lasdun’s controversial works the Institute of Education and SOAS. The IoE creates an 800ft monumental wall of cast in situ concrete along Bedford Way, with sentry like service towers. The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in contrast is constructed of pre-cast concrete infilled with with a cladding of prefabricated bronze-anodized aluminium panels and window sections. Lasdun repeated some of the language used at the ‘teaching wall’ at University of East Anglia, but without the spacious Green setting of a campus university, his pair of brutalist seem as though they aim to intimidate their polite Georigan neighbours.