Metropolitan housing association has appointed Lyndon Goode Architects to convert a listed Victorian house in a Brixton Conservation Area into five new homes for social rent.

We are using Building Information Modelling (BIM) to configure four flats and one duplex apartment within the existing envelope, ensuring minimal interference to the fabric of the four-storey semi-detached building. As the only surviving original interior feature we are sensitively restoring the double-fronted house’s central staircase. We are also preserving and conserving the fully-stuccoed façade with its elaborate moulding, cast iron window guards and prostyle porch.

This project respects and unites the area’s two predominant building typologies – affordable and social housing developments and listed Victorian properties – to produce robust, low-maintenance and high-quality homes in a heritage building.

The property is part of a sweep of Victorian double-fronted villas running along Barrington Road, Coldharbour Lane, Loughborough Park and Moorland Road, together comprising the Loughborough Park Conservation Area. Originally a single-family house, in 1967 No. 7 Moorland Road was converted into two dwellings that are currently vacant and in a poor condition.

Developed in the 1860s, the road was marked “well to do” in Charles Booth’s 1889 Descriptive Maps of London Poverty, and No.7’s fully-stuccoed façade with its elaborate neoclassical moulding, cast iron window guards and prostyle porch reflects this.  Henry Currey is credited as the likely architect of the Loughborough Park area, while Edwin Heritage is believed to have been the builder. Much of the Conservation Area’s development is fairly well-preserved, in contrast to the west side of Moorland Road, which was entirely redeveloped by Lambeth in the 1960s and 70s.

The houses along Moorland Road survived the WWII Blitz only to become subject to a new threat in 1966, when the Greater London Council published plans for Ringway 1, an eight-lane motorway encircling the capital’s centre, whose construction would have flattened Brixton. The house at No. 7’s fate seemed sealed when Nos. 5-19 Moorland Road were brought into public ownership.

Local opposition halted motorway plans in 1976, after which Lambeth Council moved towards a policy of protecting its Victorian-built legacy, listing the Moorland Road buildings and designating the Loughborough Park Conservation Area. All that exists today indicating the intent to redevelop the area is Southwyck House, the vast 1981 brutalist ‘Barrier Block’, designed to protect homes behind it from the proposed motorway’s din.