The building bears the unmistakable signature of Peter Barber, one of the country’s most distinctive residential architects, who has just been named the winner of the prestigious Soane Medal 2022. Its soaring brick arches, terraces and quirky vaulted rooflines can now be be found transforming the unprepossessing byways and remnants of derelict sites across London. While many modern residences have converged towards anonymous identikit apartment slabs, with single-sided apartments set into long, double-sided corridors, Barber’s projects draw on the rich variety of traditional dwellings from the pre-modern era, breathing new life into centuries-old ways of life that have endured in test of time. Bathrooms that jut out like privies in medieval castles… Edgewood Mews. Photo: Peter Barber Architects He has revitalized the back-to-back, mixed it with the Tyneside flat (pairs of single-storey flats stacked on a two-storey terrace) and joined it with the courtyard house and the Scottish flat, to create a varied vocabulary that is as familiar as it is striking. his. Set in narrow lanes, alleyways and welcoming courtyards, his works have a timeless air, based on the fundamentals that have made good places for as long as streets have been built – earning him an OBE last year. “It’s an approach that really appeals to people,” says Alex Kuropatwa, client of the Finchley project. “Peter is making the kind of public housing where people really want to live.” Edgewood Mews, this large walled site at the edge of the North Circular Road, is Barber’s most ambitious project. It is designed on a piece of land, a remnant of a road widening plan that never happened. In its program to sell small sites to small developers, Transport for London imagined it could fit around 50 homes here, probably in a trio of blocks of flats. Approached by Kuropatwa (for whom he designed a tiered apartment-style mansion in 2020), Barber took one look at the site and saw, instead, the ideal shape for a new street. His dense, Dickensian vision would create a crescent-shaped crescent, lined on both sides with terraces, small courtyard houses and stacked maisonettes, arranged on a gentle slope – creating more than 100 homes in the process, half designated as affordable in series. with TfL’s requirements. “First, it’s about the road,” says Barber, riding his bike down the lane, which could almost stand as the backdrop for a modern-day Hovis ad. “We always try to create the kind of solid, pleasant places that could encourage people to meet and get to know each other. Each has its own front doors and the terraces and patios are laid out to face the street and create a social environment.” Architecture cannot create a community, but if people are more visible to each other, Barber reasoned, they are more likely to meet and develop friendships. “There is no shortage of housing” … Barber at Sir John Soane’s Museum. Photo: Matt Tidby/Sir John Soane’s Museum When you stand on the cobbled road, which rises in a gentle embankment to accommodate a sunken car park below, you have no idea that the roaring six-lane North Circular is just steps away. The south side of the mews presents a monumental five-storey buttress to the main street, creating a buffer against traffic noise, forming a car-free oasis where neighbors can chat and children can play. Appearing from a moving vehicle, it’s a bold piece of highway architecture, the repeating double-height arches forming a dynamic rhythm as you slide, with bathrooms jutting out above the pavement like a medieval castle (only without the hole in the floor). On the other hand, the scale is completely different, designed with a cottage feel, set back from the road, where Barber hopes residents’ planting will soon swallow up the brickwork (and hide the clumsy row of street-mounted meters – against the architects’ plans). Hovis and warmth… the back of Edgewood Mews. Photo: Peter Barber Architects “You would never believe you live right next to a highway,” says Ihiri Haswani, who moved here with her three children four months ago. “The secluded world they’ve created means I can let the kids play in the street without worrying about cars. Only a few people have moved in so far, but it already feels like a neighborhood.” Barber was educated at the University of Sheffield, followed by the Polytechnic of Central London, now at the University of Westminster, where he teaches. The architect began his career working for Richard Rogers, something unlikely. “At the time, I liked the idea of light, frame buildings that barely touched the ground,” he recalls. But that soon changed. He found himself designing a house in Saudi Arabia that was the opposite of Rogers’ approach. “It was a world of heavy, huge walls, enclosing courtyards,” he says. “Since then, architecture has been a fixed and permanent thing.” His studio is as unconventional as his trajectory. Housed in a Victorian storefront in King’s Cross, its creaking floors are connected by narrow winding staircases, its street-facing window overflowing with architectural models – a confection for building lovers. Belying productive output, the office ranges in size from just six to nine people. “I never want to be bigger than the number of people who fit on the lunch table,” he says. A drum kit, electric piano and guitar fuel regular studio parties that spill out onto the street. Barber plans to use the platform of his lecture on the medal, which will be given on November 8 at the Sir John Soane Museum in London, to send a political message. “We could end the housing crisis overnight if we wanted to,” he says. “We should introduce private sector rent controls, stop the sale of council homes with the right to buy and build 150,000 council homes a year funded by direct taxation.” House style… Barber’s mansion in Peckham, London. Photo: Morley von Sternberg When I interviewed Barber in 2018, on the eve of an exhibition at London’s Design Museum, he came up with a conceptual plan for a city of a hundred miles. It was a provocative idea for a “dense, intense” strip of land around the suburban edge of London that could hold a million homes. How does he feel about it now? “I’ve completely changed my view,” he says, looking out over Edgewood Mews from one of the balconies. “There is no shortage of housing. There are over 400,000 empty homes in the UK and around 200,000 homeless people. The vast majority of empty homes are in parts of the country left desolate by economic decline – the Midlands, the North and coastal cities. Therefore, the solution to the housing crisis is not to build more houses. It’s about revitalizing the economy in these places, starting a massive upgrade campaign and bringing people back.” He called his latest speculative vision “8,000 Mile Island.” He envisions a “marine industrial revolution”, in the form of a ribbon of tidal barriers, offshore wind farms, giant floating tidal turbines and deep-sea fish and seaweed farms, tracing the coastline from the Orkney Islands to the Isle of Wight and back. Such a project, Barber argues, would bring renewed prosperity to our declining, desolate coastal towns and cities while offering food and energy self-sufficiency and an end to the housing crisis. Impressive arches … personalized front door space in another Barber project. Photo: Peter Barber Architects His plan would use the infrastructure already in place in the UK’s declining oil and shipbuilding industries in Hull, Inverness and Clyde and create thousands of new jobs in places such as Blackpool, Margate, St Leonards, Southend- on-Sea and Newhaven. . “Think of the housing industry that was reallocated away from the Southeast and tasked with rescuing and rehabilitating hundreds of thousands of empty homes,” he says. “Whole streets and neighborhoods are currently abandoned, decaying, buzzing with new life, activity and prosperity from the incoming workforce.” Barber speaks with the passion and conviction of a radical campaigner, the kind that makes you believe that an alternative, optimistic, fairer vision of Britain is eminently possible. His ambitious ideas would require a fundamental governmental shift, far beyond the capabilities of any architect. So might a political career beckon? “I don’t think I could last a minute in politics,” he laughs. “I just pretty much speak my mind.”
