Egypt Lane

In 1932 Berthold Lubetkin founded the famous Tecton practice with the Architectural Association graduates Anthony Chitty, Lindsay Drake, Michael Dugdale, Valentine Harding, Godfrey Samuel and Francis Skinner. Lubetkin and Tecton’s buildings are among the most iconic of the period, and include the penguin pool at London Zoo, Finsbury Health Centre and Highpoint in Highgate. The latter is described by the architectural historian Alan Powers as ‘perhaps the single most celebrated Modernist building of the 1930s in London.’

Valentine Harding designed Egypt End as his own home, much like Lubetkin with his home at Whipsnade Zoo. These early designs provided a test bed for some of the groups most pioneering ideas which went on to become central to the most progressive English architecture of the 1930s. Egypt End was one of the earliest uses of reinforced concrete in UK domestic architecture and achieves a wonderfully elegant finish across its sweeping whitewashed planes. The outer spiral staircase in steel became one of the leitmotifs of English modernist design. The original L-shaped plan has morphed over the years into a U but many of the original features and concepts underpinning this pioneering design remain.