GRAPHĒ: From the Archive: Inside London’s Pioneering Prefab Housing Complex

At the turn of the millennium, the Murray Grove development attempted to rebrand modular construction, confronting Britain’s housing woes and heritage hang-ups.

As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s April 2001 issue.

In a London gripped by a feverish surge of lottery-funded, bread-and-circus building that has given the city everything from the ill-fated Millennium Dome to the Tate Modern, and against a background of an economic boom whose imminent end is now clearly being signaled by a deluge of ultra-high-rise skyscrapers, Murray Grove is so modest as to be almost invisible.

It’s a simple L-shaped block of flats, just five stories high, in a scuffed and worn-out neighborhood near London’s financial district. The flats are not large; the smallest are no more than a couple of rooms totaling less than 600 square feet. And yet Murray Grove, in the year since it was completed, continues to collect awards of every description. It has turned into an essential stop on the London architectural tourist trail. It is the subject of a raft of studies and evaluations to determine just why it has been such a success, and how its lessons can be applied to affordable new housing elsewhere. And, most importantly, it is a place in which people who can afford no more than the modest rent of $225 a week actually want to live. With its heavy concentration of twentysomethings, it would make a perfect set for a British version of Friends.

Under the direction of a 140-year-old housing charity, Murray Grove is a project that has attempted to tackle all the great sacred cows of English housing. And remarkably, it has somehow contrived to kill them off, one by one, with a deftness that borders on ruthlessness. England’s housing, it should be understood, is still at the stage that English food was at not so long ago, before the country discovered green vegetables and extra-virgin olive oil. For the most part, it is the architectural equivalent of Spam. It doesn’t have to be this way, and certainly Murray Grove offers richer flavors.

In the 1960s, many of the best and most idealistic of Britain’s architects devoted their careers to designing high-minded contemporary housing for the welfare state. Precisely because of their efforts, good design found itself fatally tainted with the stigma of welfare housing. Public housing was linked with modernism and so-called good design. So the private sector set out deliberately to make its housing look as un-architect-designed as possible. That meant fake Tudor, Kentucky Fried Georgian, and tacky layouts. Nobody, it seems, ever lost money underestimating the taste of the British public.

It’s a legacy that has persisted. To this day, there is a belief in Britain that when it comes to designing crowd-pleasing homes, high kitsch is a better bet than high tech.

There is an equally pervasive preconception that no self-respecting Englishman is going to opt for a flat when he can live in a house with a garden. Then there is the belief that the British want their homes built using so-called traditional building methods, preferably involving bricks laid by hand. The conviction that a prefab is not a proper home runs deep. In Britain the very word "prefab" is indelibly marked with the distant memory of wartime austerity, when returning servicemen were expected to start civilian life with their families in prefabricated houses erected on bomb sites. These homes, then, are about as welcome in the more prosperous Britain of today as wartime recipes using powdered milk.

Murray Grove has set out to demolish all of these myths. Architecturally it may not quite be Zaha Hadid, but it has clearly been designed by an architect with ability. James Pickard is a 38-year-old partner in the recently established firm of Cartwright Pickard. Interestingly, he had never designed a house of any kind before he entered the competition to build the Murray Grove Apartments. For 15 years, though, he had been convinced that Britain was not going about building houses the right way. "The northern Europeans make us look primitive," he says. Murray Grove is the result of his personal crusade to show that there is a better way of doing things.