Not long before his death Childe sent ‘affectionate letters’ to all his friends, including Agatha Christie.1 The Mallowans stayed on as tenants at the Lawn Road Flats until June 1948 and remained close to Childe. As the director of the Institute of Archaeology, Childe was Max Mallowan’s immediate boss and he helped Max secure the chair of Western Asiatic Archaeology. Mallowan undoubtedly liked Childe and in his autobiography made a number of favourable references to him; Agatha Christie, however, doesn’t mention him at all.2
Max Mallowan had returned to England from Cairo in May 1945. As the war drew to its close Agatha Christie became ‘completely unnerved’ by the thought that her husband might have changed in his absence, or find her different, and in some panic she had rushed off to her daughter, Rosalind, in Wales for the weekend. On the Sunday evening she travelled back to London on ‘one of those trains’, she recalled in her autobiography, ‘one had so often to endure in wartime, freezing cold, and of course when one got to Paddington there was no means of getting anywhere’.3 She managed to board ‘some complicated train’ which despatched her at ‘a station in Hampstead not too far away from the Lawn Road Flats’, and from there she ‘walked home’ carrying her suitcase and some kippers wrapped in a brown paper parcel:
I got in, weary and cold, and started by turning on the gas, throwing off my coat and putting my suitcase down. I put the kippers in the frying pan. Then I heard the most peculiar clinking noise outside, and wondered what it could be. I went out on the balcony and I looked down the stairs. Up them came a figure burdened with everything imaginable – rather like the caricatures of Old Bill4 in the first war – clanking things hung all over him. Perhaps the White Knight might have been a good description of him. It seemed impossible that anyone could be hung over with so much. But there was no doubt who it was – it was my husband! Two minutes later I knew that all my fears that things might be different, that he would have changed, were baseless. This was Max! He might have left yesterday. He was back again. We were back again. A terrible smell of frying kippers came to our noses and we rushed into the flat.
‘What on earth are you eating?’ asked Max.
‘Kippers,’ I said. ‘You had better have one.’ Then we looked at each other. ‘Max!’ I said. ‘You are two stone heavier.’
‘Just about. And you haven’t lost any weight yourself,’ he added.
‘It’s because of all the potatoes,’ I said. ‘When you haven’t meat and things like that, you eat too many potatoes and too much bread.’
So there we were. Four stone between us more than when we left. It seemed all wrong. It ought to have been the other way round.
‘Living in the Fezzan desert ought to be very slimming,’ I said. Max said that deserts were not at all slimming, because one had nothing else to do but sit and eat oily meats, and drink beer.
What a wonderful evening it was! We ate burnt kippers, and were happy.5
Max went back to the Air Ministry for a final six months, and the Admiralty derequisitioned their home ‘Greenway’ on Christmas Day.6 ‘There could not,’ she recalled, ‘have been a worse day for having to take over an abandoned house.’7 They decided to remain at Lawn Road Flats and pay for the construction of a door linking Flats 16 and 17 to double their living space. In August they were still waiting for workmen to install their inter-connecting door, and decided to go to ‘Greenway’ until the two flats were ready. Rather like the painting of Lawn Road Flats in chocolate brown, however, the Mallowans’ door became a contentious issue. On 14 August Pritchard wrote to Agatha Christie at ‘Greenway’ apologising for the delay:
Dear Mrs. Mallowan,
I am afraid your pessimistic view about proceedings in your Flat was correct.
The workmen are still there and it won’t be possible for us to have it re-decorated by Monday next – even should V.J. Day not be celebrated this week.
I am sorry that the Flat won’t be perfectly ready, but it definitely will be habitable when Professor Mallowan comes back.
As you suggested, we will decorate the Flat whenever you leave London for another week.
I hope you are having a good time.8
For the remainder of the year the Mallowans appear to have divided their time between Lawn Road Flats and ‘Greenway’. On 15 October 1945 Pritchard wrote to Agatha Christie at ‘Greenway’ informing her of a telegram the manageress of the Flats had intercepted before it was posted through the letterbox of Flat 16. The telegram, he wrote, appears to have been steamed open more than once and has been wrongly addressed. He saw nothing wrong with reading the telegram himself:
Dear Mrs. Mallowan,
Emily happened to see the telegraph boy when he was just on the point of putting this telegram through the slot of your door. The envelope was open and seems to have gone through several kitchens before reaching its destination! I was rather interested to know whether it was the telegram which you were expecting last week so I read it and found, as you will see, that it is quite correctly addressed on the inside – whoever handled it at the Hampstead Post Office, however, has put the wrong address on the envelope. This seems to have been the reason for the delay and I think a good reason for complaining to the Hampstead Post Office.
Yours sincerely,
P.S. I hope that you will think this good detective work on my part!!9
At the end of the year, a fortnight before the derequisitioning of ‘Greenway’, Agatha Christie sent Jack Pritchard a cheque for £16 2s 3d from ‘Greenway’ asking him to send their mail from 18 and 25 December to her daughter’s address in Wales where they would be spending Christmas, and after that to 48 Swan Court as they were travelling abroad. She would be back in Lawn Road Flats at the end of January on a longer tenancy, and would be furnishing their apartments with their own furniture:
Dear Mrs. Mallowan,
Thank you for your note received this morning, and for your cheque; receipt for which is enclosed. It will be nice to have you back at the end of this month, and we can of course make arrangements about taking our furniture out of your flat. We shall also be very pleased to make an arrangement with you for a longer tenancy.
I paid £1 2s. 7d for laundry received on December 4th and December 18th and I don’t think I have made a mistake in charging it to you. If I have, would you kindly let me know?
Thank you for reminding me about the key. I will see that it is made before you come home.10
The Mallowans moved out of Lawn Road Flats on 1 June 1948. The previous October Agatha Christie informed Jack Pritchard she had found a bigger apartment and intended to leave the Flats. In the meantime, they were going abroad in January, and because it was unlikely that their new flat would be ready for them by the time they returned at the end of April, she would remain a Lawn Road Flats’ tenant until June. If he agreed, she would sub-let the flat to friends – a Dr and Mrs Smith, Custodians of the British Museum – while they were away. She also ‘agreed to pay for restoring the wall between Nos. 16 and 17 to its original state, and also for the redecoration of the two flats made necessary by this work.’11
With the departure of the Mallowans the wartime ethos of the Flats came to an end. Television, as opposed to radio broadcasting, began to dominate the post-war world and many of the residents, past and present, enjoyed a new-found celebrity. Philip Harben, who since 1942 had been compering a BBC wireless cooking programme, achieved nationwide fame between 1946 and 1951 presenting a BBC TV programme called Cookery. This was followed by Cookery Lesson with co-presenter Marguerite Patten and What’s Cooking from 1956. In 1947 along with Raymond Postgate he briefly revived the Half Hundred Club (closed since 1940, the Isobar had remained open during the war) to help ‘meet the challenge of shortages’.12 In a letter to Philip Harben, Raymond Postgate set out the new terms of membership taking into account post-war limitations on both food and wine: ‘The revived club should have a similar object to the old, but modified to the extent that while previously the challenge was to produce fine meals within a low price range, it is now to produce them within the limits of certain shortages.… Because of the wine situation, the price would need to be varied to the extent say that £1 became the maximum per head.… Each member to put down £2 and always to be one dinner in credit. Any profits to be drunk at once. Food may be provided at home, at any restaurant, at the Isobar or in Mr. Harben’s chain of maisons tolerees.’13
Harben was then credited with ‘the first TV ‘moment’ when on live television he cracked an egg that was so bad he had to abandon the recipe while he and the studio crew broke into helpless laughter’. Harben had a brief career as a film star, appearing as himself in the 1953 movie Meet Mr Lucifer and in the 1955 Norman Wisdom film Man of the Moment. His celebrity status was further enhanced in Separate Tables: Table Number Seven, a play by Terence Rattigan, where two of the characters leave the table announcing they are off to watch ‘dear Philip Harben’.
*
Philip Harben was not the only celebrity to emerge from the Flats; Gordon Childe, too, enjoyed his moment of fame. His appearances on ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’ were, no doubt, ‘a good means of bringing archaeology to the public’ and he ‘was delighted to be recognized in the street as a participant’.14 William Brown was also building a successful TV career appearing on In The News throughout the 1950s with A. J. P. Taylor, Robert Boothby MP and the journalist and politician Michael Foot. Graham Hutton, an economist, was in the chair and John Irwin the producer. ‘Boothby,’ according to Taylor, ‘was a left-wing Tory whose ideas, as learnt from Keynes, often carried him away from Toryism altogether. He would begin with an aggressively Tory statement and gradually retreat from it. Then Michael would say, ‘He’s coming round again. He agrees with us,’ and Bob would chime in, ‘That’s right.’15 The programme ran each Friday evening and ‘achieved viewing figures as good as those of a variety show’.16
In The News undoubtedly brought its panel ‘fame though of a limited kind.’ There were only a few hundred thousand television sets throughout the country. ‘Few middle-class people had them and certainly no intellectuals. Most of the viewers came from the more prosperous, skilled working class – taxi drivers, artisans, waiters and such like. A landlord in the Midlands complained that his pub was empty on a Friday night because the miners had all gone home to watch In The News.’17 ‘In this way,’ A. J. P. Taylor continued in his autobiography, ‘we acquired perhaps undeserved reputations as demagogues or People’s Artists.’ Taylor was hailed as the ‘Plain Man’s Historian’, a description he ‘did not disdain’.18
In 1951 Walter and Ise Gropius returned to the Flats to visit the Festival of Britain on the London South Bank. Gropius had lost none of his poise. In an interview with the Observer newspaper he compared the human mind with an umbrella – ‘it functions best when open’ – and praised the ‘feeling of lightness and gaiety’ that the festival had created. ‘He was especially enthusiastic about the interior of the Festival Hall,’ although about the outside he was more guarded. He did speak appreciatively of ‘the wavy roof-line of the Thames-side restaurant’ mimicking the ‘rippling waters below’.19
The 1950s brought with them a new sort of tenant for Lawn Road Flats and a new source of irritation – wireless sets played at ‘full strength’. In 1952 Percy Dickins of the New Musical Express began compiling a hit parade introducing record charts to a new generation of listeners (previously, a song’s popularity was measured by the sales of sheet music). In November 1953 Frankie Laine’s ‘Answer Me’ was number one despite the BBC banning the ‘religious’ version of this song – it had begun with the words ‘Answer me, Lord above, Just what sin have I been guilty of?’ – after receiving a number of complaints; Nat King Cole’s more acceptable version ‘Answer me, Oh my Love’ became a hit sensation the following year. Before the BBC’s ban, however, younger listeners reached for the volume knob. On Friday 23 November 1953, William Brown wrote to Lena Neumann, secretary of the Lawn Road Flats, complaining about the noise:
Dear Miss Neumann,
As you know, I am not given to grumbling and complaining, but we seem to have some new tenants in the flats whose wireless is really driving me to distraction. I do not know where they are but they seem to be somewhere below me and they keep their wireless on at what seems to be full strength.
I am under the unhappy necessity of having to earn my living and, as you know, I do it by writing. I cannot write with this appalling racket going on for most of the day.
My secretary, Miss Cormack, who comes to me to receive dictation from me, is similarly bothered by the racket of this particular wireless. If you can tell me who the tenants are, I will interview them myself but something must be done if we are to live in any sort of civilised fashion at all.20
He was not alone; the writer Charles Fenn wrote to William Brown four days later to tell him that his days, too, were being made ‘intolerable by the radio beneath you’. He had also complained but to no avail. ‘I’ve complained in vain to the occupant. I wrote to Fleetwood Pritchard but my letter has been ignored. What are we to do?’21 Brown acted swiftly. That same day he wrote again to Lena Neumann enclosing Charles Fenn’s letter and informing her that he, and Charles Fenn, had found a solution to their common problem:
Dear Miss Neumann,
I find that the annoying radio comes from Miss Jean Pritchard’s flat.22
I got the enclosed this morning from Mr. Fenn and he and I went and had a word with Jean Pritchard which I hope will produce the desired effect.23
*
Charles Fenn was a retired American intelligence agent and the last of the Lawn Road Flats’ gifted spies. In March 1945 in a café on Chin-Pi Street in Kunming, China, he had recruited one of the twentieth century’s most famous revolutionaries, the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, into a US intelligence network controlled by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. During the Second World War, Fenn had been assigned to the Morale Operations branch of the OSS, and had worked on subverting the Japanese enemy through propaganda methods. Assigned to China-Burma-India (CBI), he found himself responding to four main theatres of war where competing nations pushed their own agendas and interpretations of the CBI conflict: the ‘French and British striving to keep their Asian colonies; Americans opposing the Chinese Communists; and Chinese nationalists fighting the growing Communist insurrection more fiercely than the Japanese invaders’; and the Vietnamese, under Ho, ‘struggling for political freedom from the French’.24
The recruitment of Ho was undoubtedly a major achievement, and contributed to the successful American war effort in China-Burma-India. Fenn was awarded the US Soldier’s Bronze Star Medal for Valor, and a citation from General William Donovan, the head of OSS, for his wartime service with OSS.25 Fenn supplied Ho with radio equipment, a radio operator, arms and medical supplies in exchange for an agreement to fight their common enemy, Japan. In an interview given to Parade magazine in 1973 he told his interviewer, Lloyd Shearer, that he remembered ‘asking Ho if his Viet-minh group was Communist’, and was told by Ho that ‘the French called all Vietnamese who wanted their independence, Communists. I told him something about our work,’ Fenn continued, ‘and asked if he would be interested in providing us with intelligence on Japanese movements. He said yes but that he had neither radios nor men who knew how to operate such sophisticated equipment. I told him that it could all be arranged and asked what he wanted in return. He said arms and medicines. We agreed to meet again.’ In 1973, at the height of the Vietnam War, Fenn remained convinced that had President Truman and his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, ‘been more knowledgeable and farsighted, had they been more tolerant and open-minded with their one-time intelligence agent, Ho Chi Minh, and his nationalist-Communist background … then the US might never have gotten so long and expensively bogged down in the tragic Vietnamese-quagmire’.26
In 1948 Fenn returned to London, where he had been born in 1907, and moved into Lawn Road Flats. While there he wrote plays for London’s Little Theatre and several books on China including a biography of Ho Chi Minh and an account of his experiences with the OSS in CBI. He also worked for the BBC and helped produce the Emmy award-winning television documentary Uncle Ho and Uncle Sam. He ‘later retired to Ireland where he lived in Schull, County Cork, managing a colourful bed and breakfast, the Standing Stone. For Fenn, it was a green and peaceful spot, far removed, both figuratively and geographically, from the war-torn Far East the author once knew’.27
*
The ‘nominated year of 1950’ had ‘passed without any public enquiry as to the obsolescence of the living places’ known as the Lawn Road Flats. The Isokon building, like Charles Fenn among the Irish fishermen of Schull, County Cork, had settled down ‘with decent dignity among the accepted inhabitants of Hampstead’s lower slopes’.28 To celebrate the occasion Jack Pritchard held a twenty-first birthday party at the Flats inviting residents past and present. Philip Harben prepared the food; Raymond Postgate selected the wine. Photographs taken at the party show a middle-aged Wells Coates and Jack Pritchard as well as a portly and obviously contented Philip Harben, a haunted Gordon Childe was also present. The RSVP from the industrial consultant Frederick Fyleman’s secretary’s secretary, is a priceless gem:
Sir and Madam,
Mr. Frederick Fyleman, the eminent Insultant, is extremely busy and has asked me to reply to your kind invitation for 14th July which he accepts, he says, with mingled feelings.
He is somewhat surprised, however, that no mention has been made of free transport but takes it that his fee will cover this little matter. Rather to my surprise he prefers not to mention any stated sum as he is not as a rule backward in coming forward, so to speak, and says he prefers to leave it to your discretion.
I have not made a copy of this letter so perhaps you will refrain from showing Mr. Fyleman this letter as it might do harm but not much, as all he pays me is 25/- a week including home comforts so what can the louse expect for that?
On behalf of Mr. Fyleman, written by his secretary’s secretary,
Connie Winterbottom (Frosty)29
In many respects the Lawn Road Flats twenty-first birthday party was the ‘last hurrah’ for Jack Pritchard at the Flats, as they were sold in 1968 to the New Statesman and, given the Flat’s past history, the intervening thirteen years were uneventful. The New Statesman paid £67,500 for a 90 per cent interest in the freehold of the Flats and the Isobar, which included the club’s furniture and kitchen equipment, forming a subsidiary investment company, Lawn Road Flats Ltd, to manage the property. The minority owner was the building company Bovis – one of the directors of the New Statesman, Neville Vincent, was also a Bovis director. The new company was formed on 31 December 1968 and a final glass of sherry was provided for tenants in the Pritchards’ flat on 23 December where they were introduced to the new chairman of the company, Jeremy Potter. The sale was reported in a number of papers, including the Hampstead and Highgate Express, which mocked the ‘New Statesman, protector of the pragmatic Left,’ for ‘unexpectedly entering “the lush and profitable pastures of the property market”’.
‘There’s nothing very startling about it,’ Jack Morgan, secretary of the New Statesman and now secretary of the subsidiary company set up to run the flats, told a reporter from the Express, ‘It’s what you might call a run of the mill investment. We have others. We have simply decided to put some of our reserves into property.’30
The take-over, despite going ahead smoothly gave rise to ‘a few murmurs from some tenants that their rents might go up’. The New Statesman, however, ‘conscious that Hampstead provides probably the highest concentration of its readers in the country’ (‘I hope there are a good number among our tenants,’ said Mr Morgan), proved itself to be ‘an admirable landlord’ and ‘sensibly allayed any fears by sending out a letter saying that ‘everything will continue as before’.31 It was also agreed that Jack and Molly Pritchard would continue as tenants of Flat 32 for a period of up to five years paying the same fixed rent of £92.7.10 plus rates. Eight months later, however, the ‘wonderful manageress’ of the Flats, Renée Little, resigned her post and the management of the Flats and Isobar passed to George Knight & Partners, Estate Agents, on 1 August 1969. Both George Knight and his partner Kenneth Walker became members of the Isobar Club. Coincidental with this new arrangement, tenants were asked to make their own contracts direct with the Electricity Board.32 The personal touch that the Flats had always provided ended abruptly with the departure of Renée Little, and the day to day running of the Flats was switched to the Estate Agents’ office in Heath Street. Gone were the days when a tenant who had mislaid their key could be let in by the manageress. On 28 July Jack Pritchard received a standard letter sent to all tenants announcing the managerial take-over by George Knight and Partners:
… there may well be a number of unforeseen minor difficulties during the first weeks and we trust that you will bear with us until we have settled in. We have already met a number of residents socially at the Isobar and those of you whom we do not know we hope to meet during the first weeks of August.
In future, all matters concerning the Management of the flats will be dealt with from our office which is open from 9.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. Monday to Friday and from 9.30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday. Mr. Paul Eastwood will be responsible for attending to the day to day administration and from Monday to Friday will visit the flats each morning to attend to any problems which may have arisen.
…
Genuine emergencies such as fire or water penetration should be notified out of office hours to
|
|
George Knight |
Telephone 267–1371 |
|
or |
Paul Eastwood |
Telephone 435–8315 |
|
or |
Kenneth Walker |
Telephone 722–5360 |
We would mention that we do not regard loss of keys as an emergency. A list of locksmiths on 24 hour call is kept by the Police.33
And that was that. Very soon afterwards the Isobar was sadly closed down and converted into flats. The club ‘had never been a profit making venture but with its disappearance the sense of community which had been such an important part of life in the Lawn Road Flats also vanished’.34 In January 1972 estate agents George Knight and Partners negotiated on behalf of the New Statesman the sale of the Flats to Labour-controlled Camden Borough Council ‘for what some might consider to be the bargain price of £157,500’, ‘considerably below the £200,000 figure’ which it was thought that the Lawn Road Flats ‘would fetch’.35 ‘After being the property of a left-wing political magazine for almost three years,’ reported the Hampstead & Highgate Express on 4 February, ‘they now belong to a left-wing council which, for the first time, will be able to offer its tenants furnished flats to live in’.36 The sale was discussed at a noisy meeting of the Camden Borough Council on 10 February 1972 where it was agreed to go ahead with the purchase. The following points were made:
I cannot guarantee the accuracy of this report as proceedings were made virtually inaudible by continuous barracking from a member of the public who claimed to have been dispossessed by a Compulsory Purchase Order.37
It was a contentious sale. Private Eye accused the New Statesman of profiteering prompting the then board of the New Statesman to issue an injunction against Private Eye preventing them from repeating such allegations. Some of the Isokon furniture pieces that had adorned Lawn Road Flats and the Isobar, the work of Marcel Bureau, were donated to the Bethnal Green Museum while the Victoria and Albert Museum expressed an interest in obtaining the furniture in the Pritchards’ flat – ‘a historically important ensemble’.38
In 1973 Jack Pritchard moved to the house designed for him by his daughter Jennifer and her husband Colin Jones at 8 Angel Lane, Blythburgh, Suffolk. The following year the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, the forerunner of English Heritage, designated Lawn Road Flats a Grade II building, defining it as a ‘particularly important building of more than special interest’.39 On 18 January 1975 Pritchard wrote to the town clerk and chief executive at The Town Hall, Euston Road, a Mr Wilson, complaining that he had not been consulted on the refurbishment of Lawn Road Flats then underway. ‘There seems to be some misunderstanding,’ he wrote, ‘which I very much hope will be cleared up quickly. I believe that the aims for “Listed” buildings is to have them maintained, as nearly as possible, in their original condition. The Isokon Lawn Road Flats is a “Listed” building. Re-painting has begun, and although I have repeatedly offered to give what guidance I can regarding maintenance in the widest sense of the word, we have never been consulted on any point although we are probably the only people still living that were closely concerned with its construction. So far the painting that has just started is not complete and consists of a hard white filler coat – certainly not the original colour. I ask that the final coat should not be put on until its colour has been agreed. The doors of course were never in the blue that they are at present. (They were painted by the previous owner, namely the New Statesman.)’40
Pritchard did not get his way. The following week he sent two rather angry letters to a Mr H.A. Hunt at the Housing Department upbraiding him for not adhering ‘to the spirit of the Listed Buildings policy’41 and for his downright pig-headedness: ‘Anyway, I am told that you said that the original colour was pink – that is hardly true. It was off white, not unlike the attached.’42By 3 March Pritchard was exasperated: ‘to describe the original colour as “pink” without any qualification was by no means correct.… Naturally I am glad the building now looks clean, but sad that simply because you did not consult in sufficient time, as I had so often suggested, we could now have had the building looking much as it was in 1934. I can’t help wondering why you refuse to consult even your own Architect Department?’43
Blythburgh and the setting up of the Theta Club, a sailing club for children on the Norfolk Broads, now became the main preoccupation of both Jack and Molly Pritchard. The sailing club, ‘following the rules of education they had learned from Bertrand Russell, arranged for the children to take the club over and operate it for themselves’.44
The Pritchards’ marriage lasting ‘more than 60 unconventional years’ had given rise to ‘much socialising and fairly Bohemian entertaining’.45 Blythburgh, ‘an exquisite small house’ became an entrepot of interesting people, a place where one might meet ‘artists, silversmiths, economists, sculptors, journalists, singers, brewers, dons, authors, a penniless refugee from southern Asia or the sister-in-law of an archbishop. Only two things were certain: good wine and good talk.’46 The journalist, Fiona MacCarthy, wrote in the Guardian newspaper that ‘Jack believed in the impulse principle of friendship. Three and a half minutes after he first met me, in a modern furniture store in Bromley, he had asked me to Suffolk for the weekend. I was not the only one. On an average Saturday Jack would welcome warmly 20 or 30 people, mixing ages and sexes with a wonderful abandon, piling his guests all in together in the sauna. One evening I found myself lying alongside a stranger who turned out to be the naked Chairman of the Pru.’47
Molly’s death in October 1985 was a blow to Jack from which he never really recovered; he died seven years’ later. Jack had confided in Fiona MacCarthy that he ‘disliked the thought of funerals’ and ‘that when he died his friends must assemble for a gigantic party, mirror image of the uninhibited assembly that had marked the death of Gropius’.48 In her obituary for the Guardian published on 30 April 1992, three days after Jack’s death, Fiona MacCarthy rounded off her article with the touching statement: ‘What a party it will be.’49
On 5 May a letter from Charles Fenn appeared in the Guardian that caught the Jack Pritchard and Lawn Road Flats’ experience perfectly, and deserves quoting in full:
Fiona MacCarthy’s obituary of Jack Pritchard (April 30) admirably reflects Jack’s own effervescence, but perhaps I may add a personal note. The 12 years I lived in the Lawn Road Flats (1948–1960) were amongst the happiest of my life, largely because of the numinous haven offered. In 1935 Jack Pritchard, having found almost the last remaining acre of unspoiled wilderness in Belsize Park, inspirationally commissioned Wells Coates to design a block of flats. This building (Coates’s first, he later admitted to his client) turned its back on the street and its face to the wilderness, so that the windows looked out upon what seemed open countryside.
As in a well-constructed yacht, the flats offered multum in parvo, and at what seemed a very low rent. Breakfast, if required, was served to each flat. Cleaners (discreet friends to us all) serviced the flats daily: shoes were cleaned each morning by the porter, the attached club served meals and drinks at absurdly low prices. Close by were a tube station, a railway station, a bus depot, Hampstead Heath, and excellent second-hand bookshops and junk-shops.50
What more could Fenn have desired? In the 1980s the building fell into disrepair, and as a Grade 1 listed building it was placed on the English Heritage ‘at-risk’ list.51 In May 2001 Notting Hill Housing Group was chosen to purchase and restore the building and to make the flats available as affordable ‘key worker’ accommodation. The architect Wells Coates and his patrons Jack and Molly Pritchard would have warmly approved.