Highpoint

Sited at one of London's highest points, Highpoint I was the first of the two Modernist blocks here to be built, both designed by Lubetkin and Tecton. It was completed in 1935 for entrepreneur Sigmund Gestetner, originally designed as social housing for the staff of the family's office equipment business. Regarded as one of the best examples of early International style architecture in London, the 7-storey block of 64 flats was innovative in its day. In 1936, at Lubetkin's suggestion, Gestetner purchased the adjacent site of a C19th or possibly C18th house called The Cedars, and Highpoint II was built here in 1938, a more luxurious block with a penthouse where Lubetkin lived. The private landscaped gardens to the rear of Highpoint I and II were designed by Clarence Elliott in consultation with Lubetkin. The site was mature in the 1930s and the design worked around the existing trees such as the cedars in front of Highpoint II. The site slopes downhill from the two buildings bisected by a central axial path between the blocks; however, the whole area is held communally. The gardens to the rear of Highpoint I comprise two rectangular terraces, the upper laid out with grass and the lower with tennis courts, each with screening shrubs and trees. The gardens behind Highpoint II include an additional plot to the south-west, the site of a squash court, and a swimming pool with a single storey pool-house at one end and a circular children's paddling pool at the other, designed by Lubetkin. The gardens between pool and house are given a more 'private' treatment, contrasting with those behind Highpoint I, with serpentine paths and varied 'naturalistic' planting. The gardens have been described as belonging to 'the tradition of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton which manipulated nature as a green informal foil to large formal houses, usually white, in a vision of benign, confident coexistence'.