“Nothing is too good for ordinary people!”: A visit to Berthold Lubetkin’s Health Centre in Finsbury
Daryl Mersom traces the distinct influence of the Georgian-Russian modernist architect in London
“The curving façade and outstretched arms were intended to introduce a smile into what in fact is a machine.”
The Finsbury Health Centre, EC1, opened in 1938. The Conway Library. The Courtauld Institute of Art, CC-BY-NC.
Though I pass Berthold Lubetkin’s former home in Clifton, Bristol, each morning, his blue plaque on a boxy little white house took me a while to notice, distracted as I often am by estate agent windows, the rag-and-bone man’s trailer, and of course, Brunel’s suspension bridge. Lubetkin, an admirer of Brunel, made it from his birthplace Tbilisi to Bristol in an indirect manner, stopping for some time in Europe, and then working as an architect in London. The gorgeous public architecture he built in the capital will be the focus of this piece of writing.
The backdrop to it, though, will be an atmosphere of longing. Before the pandemic I was writing a book about Soviet architecture and how it seems caught up in this mood. I am interested in architectural examples of longing for a future that never arrived, and for a past that has perhaps been misremembered. I found plenty of sites of longing in the former Soviet Union, places where architects and urban planners had worked towards a future they genuinely believed would be better. Fascinated by the subject matter as I was, I allowed it to influence my own life. When the pandemic made it impossible to continue my research abroad, something of this mood seeped in to my daily experience. I read Nabokov on the Russian word toska, a feeling which cannot be rendered in English but roughly translates as longing, and began to collect as much travel writing from the former Soviet Union as I could. I also began to undertake site visits to Lubetkin’s various buildings in London. The penguin pool at London Zoo and the Highpoint residential complex are famous examples. I began with the Finsbury Health Centre though, a site built according to his belief that “nothing is too good for ordinary people”.
Above and below: Drawings for the Finsbury Health Centre by Lubetkin and Tecton, featuring a welcoming open-plan layout and a design to let in as much natural light as possible, 1938. Riba Architecture, (DR50/1(1)) and (DR50/1(7)), Inclusion here under CDPA 1988, sections 29 and 30.
I visited the Finsbury Health Centre on a grey and wet day. The tiling was dirty and worn. The gardens out front unkempt. There were weeds. The underside of the ledge overhanging the windows was peeling. The green painted railing - a green reminiscent of many Soviet interiors - which guides the visitor up a mellow slope to the front door, was rusting away. The NHS posters and leaflets were out of date, poorly designed, and depressing. Imagine what a properly funded health service could do with a building like this. The design by Lubetkin could pop and dazzle in a 2021 England that gave proper funding to the NHS.
At the front the bricks of glass lead up to a roof which is closer to a swimming pool in design than a health centre. I was immediately transported to the land of Soviet sanatoriums - Georgia. Yet rather than looking out at verdant wine making territory, we see London’s Vineyard Walk. A wet little street with few plants. I wonder if Lubetkin noticed this road and thought of home. There is a metal ladder-type staircase on the roof which would look at home leading up to a diving board in a 1960s outdoor swimming pool. The open rooftop balcony completes the look, all windows and light and designed so that patients could take the air. In inner city London it is questionable whether this did more harm than good. The utopian idea behind it can be traced back to the sanatoriums in Georgia’s Tskaltubo (below).
Sanatorium of the Ministry of Defense of the Soviet Union, Tskaltubo, Georgia. Photo by Vsevolod Tarasyevich, 1957. Wikimedia Commons/CC-BY-SA-4.0
Today the reflective windows on the two wings are grey and bleak, but in good weather I imagine they look quite nice. They preserve some of the patients’ modesty, I think, as does the glass brick front, which is translucent. The shape of the front, if we ignore the basement dug out beneath, reminds me of Soviet government buildings. I think part of this is because the design lends itself to standardisation, like so many buildings across the former USSR. I picture a health centre like this in every town and city, if the NHS receives better funding.
The original murals inside the Health Centre (below) are optimistic. “Live out of doors as much as you can”; “Fresh air night and day”; “Chest diseases are preventable and curable”. All this on a wall which leads the patient to the solarium (for children with rickets), a big ask under the grey skies of inner-city London. Fresh air in the city would today be impossible. In 2015 over 9000 people died prematurely because of poor air quality. Whether it was advisable in 1940s London for patients to take the air is likewise questionable.
Mural by Gordon Cullen, at the Finsbury Health Centre. The Conway Library. The Courtauld Institute of Art, CC-BY-NC.
Highpoint I, 1935, the first in a set of two Lubetkin housing blocks in Highgate, London, structurally designed by Ove Arup.
Outside, a lady who lives opposite the Health Centre feeds the pigeons. They congregate in front of her home. It seems strange that this row of houses butts up against the Health Centre. I think of Lubetkin’s Highpoint I (above) and the space afforded to its residents. It is set back off from the road and has a spacious driveway. Large trees block the view. The back garden is gated and hidden away. In contrast, the city invades the Health Centre. The back of it meets a park where bodies were once burned. Paths on either side give the patients little privacy - and so the windows are all covered. The balcony itself has only the protection of a wall with planters set in to it.
Poster featuring the Finsbury Health Centre, 1943 by Abram Games. Imperial War Museum (Art.IWM PST 2911). Inclusion here under CDPA 1988, sections 29 and 30.
The site offers us a look back at a road not taken, a Britain that might have been. Nowhere is this made clearer than on a certain Second World War poster. The poster’s slogan “Your Britain fight for it now” contains a pun which suggests to the reader that, as well as having ownership over Britain, it’s your Britain, you are in fact the material of Britain. This appeal to the essence of Britishness makes sense in a poster which depicts a village green, a country pub, and a small church with St George’s Cross on top. Yet the 1943 poster which depicts the Finsbury Health Centre seems to me far from this conception of Britishness.
Behind the centre are the slums (the poster was suppressed by Churchill for being too close to the bone); an emaciated boy with rickets walks over debris; the word disease is scrawled in white graffiti; and there is bent wire and a shattered tree trunk, reminiscent of the front line. In complete contrast the foreground depicts the shiny white Health Centre. Rather confusingly the building is pictured on a red brick wall, a material which to my mind is typically British. An appeal to British values which depicted the red brick housing of the North might have conjured up more sentimentality. For the young men about to go fight at the front this poster instructed them. You must go to war to defend Britain, not a simple version of it, but a version of it knotted up with Soviet architecture and the ideals Lubetkin brought over. This will be a new sort of Britain, more equal, in which patients will feel the full benefit of rest in the sun and air. Five years later in 1948 the NHS was founded.
The Finsbury Health Centre today. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Flickr user sludgegulper, CC-BY-SA-2.0.
About the author
Daryl Mersom is working on a book about architecture and longing in the former Soviet Union. His work has appeared in the BBC, Guardian, Calvert Journal, and recently, in Vol. 13 of Benji Knewman.