The Spies Who Came into the Modernist Fold: The Covert Life in Hampstead's Lawn Road Flats

摘要

Outstretched, bright white with a pinkish hue, fearlessly modern and conspicuous, the Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, London, opened to great fanfare and publicity in the summer of 1934 (Figures 1, 2). Thanks to the impressive public relations efforts of both the building's owners, Jack and Molly Pritchard, and its architect, Wells Coates, photographic spreads of the thirty-unit, four-story reinforced concrete block appeared in nearly every British architecture journal, while newspapers from Bournemouth to Belfast trumpeted its opening. With the opening of the Lawn Road Flats, continental modernism made its mark in England on a grand scale, as did a "revolutionary way of living" in sync with the mobile age.