Described as “a provision of pure delight”, Appleby Blue Almshouse, a social housing complex for older people has been named this year’s winner of the RIBA Stirling prize. With a vibe that has more in common with an Alpine spa hotel than the poky rooms and grim corridors usually associated with housing for elderly people, the building – by architects Witherford Watson Mann – reinvents the almshouse for the modern era as a place of care, shelter and social connection.
As a building type, the origins of almshouses extend back centuries, giving a semblance of dignity to the poor, the old, the sick and the marginalised. Sequestered from the outside world, with cellular dwellings arrayed around courtyards, they evoke a sense of pastoral benevolence.
For Witherford Watson Mann, the challenge was not only how to rethink the traditional almshouse form, but also how to look beyond the simple provision of housing, to conceive of it as the heart of a hosting network, a set of rooms to be shared with like-minded local organisations. The client, United St Saviour’s, a charity based in Southwark, London, is also a grant-making trust, supporting refugee groups and youth centres, as well as cultural organisations. The aim is that these will make use of the building’s communal spaces, so it feels like an integral part of local life, rather than some kind of secluded retirement enclave.
Set in Bermondsey, in south-east London, among Victorian terraces and postwar blocks, Appleby Blue is on a site previously occupied by a disused care home. Its intended clientele are those over 65 who meet the charity’s definition of being in financial need and who have lived in the local borough of Southwark for more than three years. The scheme’s 57 bright, spacious flats for single people and couples are arranged around a central courtyard filled with shimmering ginkgo trees and tinkling pools.
Appleby is a doughty, five storey block of mottled brown and blue brick with pale oak window frames expressively counterpointing the dark masonry. To the rear, deferring to the scale of the Victorian terraces, it steps down to a smaller, two storey volume topped with a roof garden populated with raised beds and sitting nooks. Dedicated to cultivating produce for use in the almshouse kitchen, it is maintained by a local gardening group, with residents also making horticultural contributions.
At the building’s heart overlooking the ginkgo tree courtyard, is the double height garden room, designed to host an array of activities. Beyond the daily routines of eating, drinking, gossiping and watching the world go by, these might include coffee mornings, film nights, dance classes, markets, music performances, plays and making workshops.
The human theatre of this “civic room” can be seen from the street through a timber and glass walkway that projects out along the main facade, like a huge shop window. “The idea was to build right in the heart of the community, in a busy place, with a very direct relationship to the high street, not to hide people away,” says project architect Stephen Witherford.
A key move was to get rid of claustrophobic and disorienting internal corridors. Instead, access to individual flats is through glazed galleries that wrap around the south side of the main block. Furnished with robust oak benches, quarry tiled floors and planting boxes, the galleries act as informal inside-outside spaces in which to sit contemplatively or natter with neighbours, while savouring views of the Victorian terrace gardens and the hills of suburban London beyond. In warmer weather, the galleries can be opened up through large sliding screens.
In its architecture and operation, Appleby Blue is a consciously extrovert presence and a retort to the prevalent notion that older people (especially poorer older people) should be shunted to the urban and sociocultural margins, with adverse consequences for their mental and physical health. By reimagining later living as a collective experience, it draws its residents together in a building that elevates the everyday.
On behalf of the Stirling prize jury, Ingrid Schroder, director of the Architectural Association School of Architecture, said: “Designing social housing for later life is too often reduced to a simple provision of service. Appleby Blue, however, is a provision of pure delight. Its architects have crafted high-quality spaces that are generous and thoughtful, blending function and community to create environments that truly care for their residents.”
For all its admirable intentions, Appleby Blue is still a drop in a vast ocean of need. But in suggesting different ways of doing things, it does constitute an exemplar that has the potential to be replicated. And though it’s not all “rainbows and unicorns”, as Witherford admits, the residents take evident pleasure in their surroundings and relish being part of the almshouse community.
Seeing off competition from larger, more “statement” projects – including the restoration of the Palace of Westminster’s Elizabeth Tower – this is Witherford Watson Mann’s second Stirling prize. In 2013 the practice won for its imaginative remodelling of the ruined Apsley Castle in Warwickshire for the Landmark Trust. Restoring a fire ravaged stately home and designing social housing for older people might seem worlds apart yet both are underscored by a thoughtful sensitivity to context and the impetus to transform and transcend.
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