used by MAB to accommodate mentally handicapped children from Leavesden and Caterham Asylums temporarily until a School had been built for them at Darenth, Kent. In the meantime work began on building a permanent

A very rare opportunity to acquire a one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of the Isokon Building, widely recognised as one of the finest achievements of Modern Movement architecture. Designed by the eminent architect Wells Coates and completed in 1934, the Isokon has been given a Grade I listing by English Heritage, placing it among the most historically important buildings in Britain. It has an outstanding location on a quiet road in Belsize Park. This book tells the story of a remarkable Modernist building and its even more extraordinary cast of characters. Lounge - 4.12m x 3.29m (13'6" x 10'9" ) - Into bay and recess, natural wood flooring, double glazed bay window to front, period ceiling cornice, fitted log burner. Outside: To the front of the house there are shrubs and hedging, the driveway gives off road parking and leads to the double garage although currently half of the garage has been partitioned of to create a hobby room as shown in photo 13, the other half of the garage has been retained and has an electric door to front as well as a personal door to the rear garden. There are gates giving access to the rear garden. This is a splendid feature of the house and has a good sized lawned area. There is extensive paving adjacent to the property and behind the aforementioned gates. There are a great variety of shrubs, a pergola, some trees, and a summerhouse/shed. A gate at the bottom of the garden then accesses an area of additional garden. This tree line we are told also belongs to this house although the current fence line runs in front of it. Woodland walk shown in picture 12.You live in the building’s largest apartment on the top floor, which was once occupied by its founders. Can you give us a brief overview of the design and layout features of the apartment? restrict its use for infectious patients. A short article in The Times on 22nd December 1880 further inflamed public concern.

On the ground floor were located the staff offices, a community kitchen and a small restaurant. The kitchen was remodeled later by Marcel Breuer to become the Isobar, also on the ground floor was the laundry. These buildings advocated a modernist utopia, now a forgotten dream. Find sources: "Isokon Flats"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( September 2014) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Amidon LA 1996 An Illustrated History of the Royal Free Hospital. London, Special Trustees of the Royal Free Hospital.

To the front is a gravel driveway which leads to the side of the property and offers ample parking with an area of lawn to the front with established front boundary. This combination of radical architecture and politics, alongside adventurous cooking proved to be irresistible for many of Hampstead’s local artists. Regular exhibitions were held in the Isobar and the basement transformed itself into an informal north-London salon, regularly attended by Adrian Stokes, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo. WE ARE DELIGHTED TO OFFER AS A CHAIN FREE SALE, THIS SPACIOUS FAMILY HOME WITH LOVELY GARDEN AND ADJOINING WONDERFUL WOODLAND WALKS. Meanwhile in 1933 Robert Kuczynski, a rich and influential German-Jewish-communist exile, moved into a flat at 12 Lawn Road. Most of his family, who gradually joined him there, worked for Soviet intelligence. In 1936 Brigitte, a talented secret agent, moved into Lawn Road Flats after marrying a British communist, Anthony Lewis. In the same year her brother Jurgen arrived in London to reactivate the German communist party in Britain, living at 36 Upper Park Road. As a well-respected government statistician, he had many influential friends. Brigitte’s sister Ursula, codenamed Sonya, was sent to Switzerland by Soviet Intelligence to establish a small group of anti-Fascist activists prepared to work inside Germany. Brigitte briefed new recruits in the Lawn Road Flats’ restaurant, the Isobar, before they travelled to Switzerland. In 1942 Jurgen and Ursula recruited Klaus Fuchs, the spy who revealed British atomic bomb programme secrets. After the war they both returned to East Germany. The landmark building was renovated by Avanti Architects in 2003-2004. What were the main challenges – and resulting features – of the restoration?

Architecture critic JM Richards believes these stories are “closer to the machine housing than anything Le Corbusier never ever designed” This is an exceedingly rare opportunity to acquire one of the most important penthouses in London, positioned at the top of the Isokon, a building widely recognised as one of the finest achievements of Modern Movement architecture in the UK. Designed by the eminent architect Wells Coates and completed in 1934, the Isokon has been given a Grade I listing by English Heritage, placing it among the most historically important buildings in Britain. It has an outstanding location on a quiet road in Belsize Park. The flats were to be served from a kitchen on the ground floor since it was thought that the modern urban dweller should benefit from domestic services rather than focussing on such activities himself. The kitchen shut in 1936 but in its place the Isobar opened, a space designed by Marcel Breuer and F.R.S. Yorke, which attracted the emigré and home grown intelligentsia and bohemia of the time (including Walter and Ise Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Agatha Christie to name just a few) and helped the building to achieve a good part of its fame. Between the mid 1930s and mid 1940s seven Soviet spies lived in the Lawn Road Flats, (now known as Isokon), and many others lived nearby. Who were these spies and what brought them to the area? The interior has its flaws, with the penthouse kitchen being windowless and some of the beams and ducts running randomly across walls and ceilings. But the building envelope with its round corners, its geometry and smoothness of the rendered concrete is a successful and very powerful modern statement. The heavy massing of the building represents a departure from the aesthetics of Le Corbusier’s five points of architecture; the building is a grand gesture in its own right, its appearance created through the load bearing concrete and a deliberate intention to make the building look coherent.

consequently renamed the North-Western Hospital. It became the Lawn Road or North-Western branch of the RoyalBurke intersperses his painstakingly detailed research with fascinating glimpses of life at the time, drawing on stories and letters that bring his account into vivid relief."