Behind an old brick wall in Belsize Lane, in a posh part of north London, stands a single-storey house that you would hardly know was there. Only a glimpse of a pitched glass roof gives a sign of shelter. You certainly wouldn’t know that it is a unique piece of modern architecture, a rare work by the distinctive, remarkable and under-recognised Georgie Wolton, who died two years ago aged 87. Old friends describe her as someone who “just did what she believed”. She was both “impossible” (although she “didn’t mind you telling her that”) and “fearless”. So, you might say, is the house.
To say the house “stands” requires qualification. It’s in bad shape, thanks in part to what an architect friend of Wolton’s calls her “gung-ho attitude to making buildings”. It leaks, overheats in summer, gets too cold in winter. It might now be easier to build a new house than to repair it, while real estate values in those parts are such that many millions could be made by putting up a block of luxury flats on the site. Other works of hers have disappeared, including the glass-and-steel Fieldhouse in the Surrey Hills, that shines from the pages of old architecture magazines like a beacon of American-inspired modernity.
Until recently it seemed possible that, apart from a reasonably durable twin block of studios and flats in north London, all material trace of her architectural career could disappear. This hazard, though, may not have concerned her too much – she did not strive, as most architects do, for either visibility or eternity. She eventually gave up designing buildings altogether for the more elusive and transient – and, for her, more enjoyable – art of landscape architecture.
Wolton, born Georgina Cheesman, gets a place in architectural history partly by virtue of the fact that she helped to set up Team 4, the practice that launched the careers of Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, and supported its early days financially, but written and recorded material on her life and work is sparse. There are some articles, a long interview in the archive of the Architectural Association (AA), recorded in 2015, a dissertation for the University of Edinburgh by an architecture student, Ellen Clayton. She didn’t, say her family and friends, seek publicity. “I don’t think she considered herself an important architect,” says Su Rogers, first wife of Richard, who knew her for 60 years.
Her life was helped and hindered by inherited wealth, which gave the means to design houses for herself, but relieved her of the need to persuade and collaborate with clients and co-workers. “If only Georgie had been obliged to earn a living,” – according to an old friend, the retired law lord Lennie Hoffmann – “and had to accept the ordinary run of compromises that dealings with clients usually made necessary, I think she would have been a famous architect. But that was not what she wanted and if ever there was a person determined that her life should be precisely, exactly what she wanted, it was our Georgie.”
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Wolton grew up in Surrey, the daughter of a successful insurance broker and landowner and a nurse, roaming a 1,000-acre farm on horseback. “We lived on horses,” as she put it. She went to Epsom School of Art, where she met the young Richard Rogers, and they started a relationship that lasted several years. She was “a great intellectual influence,” he later wrote. She was attracted not only to him but his mother, Dada, and father, Nino, refugees from Mussolini’s Italy. “I adored them and they adored me,” she said. “I learned so much from them – they were my spiritual parents.” She liked her own less-cultured father considerably less, and he disliked Rogers. “Every time Richard gets a wonderful new prize,” she told her AA interviewers, “I think, ‘Haha, you’re turning in your grave’.”
Wolton became interested in architecture, and encouraged her younger sister, Wendy, to take it up, before deciding to study the subject herself. “I thought, ‘I’m going to be better than her,’” she says on the AA recording. “I’m going to become an architect, too, and I did.” Wolton went to study at the AA, as Rogers did, where she flourished in a creative and free-thinking environment. She also found time to make drawings for Rogers, whose draughtsmanship was never his strong point. “Her help with my drawings,” he later wrote, “was probably the only thing that stopped me from being thrown out of the AA (and was not the last time she would rescue my career).”
They remained friendly – years later she would design a garden on the roof of his house in Chelsea, and another in a Thames-side complex in west London that included the offices of his practice and the River Cafe, the famous Italian restaurant that his second wife, Ruth, co-founded. Long before that, in 1962, she responded to a letter from him asking for help in setting up a new practice with Norman Foster, whom Rogers had met when they were both on scholarships at Yale. They needed, among other things, some money. She was also a fully qualified architect, which they at that time were not.
This was the start of Team 4, which included Wolton, Su Rogers and the two men. Wolton lent the practice “two or three thousand pounds – quite a lot in those days”, recalls Su now, plus the benefit of her professional qualification, but left after a few months, without having designed any buildings. This decision, she later said, was “absolutely exonerated by the subsequent division of those two” – Norman and Richard – “you could see them pulling apart. I always believed you should discuss things a lot but they weren’t really interested in that. I said, ‘Fuck this, I shall be squashed between these two’.” Her sister, Wendy, who married Foster in 1964, took her place in the practice.
Photograph: Courtesy of David Wolton
From then on, she designed buildings only for herself and by herself: “If you work in an office,” she said, “your life is not your own.” She added a glassy kitchen extension to a house in Camden Square, London, where she lived with her husband, David, a hop merchant and publisher, and their daughter, Suke. She designed Cliff Road Studios, a short distance away, two adjoining blocks of homes and workplaces financed by David, completed in 1968 and 1971, whose buyers included the artist Naum Gabo and the actor Keith Michell. The Fieldhouse was built in 1969, a weekend retreat on land given her by her mother. In 1976, the house in Belsize Lane was finished, which was to be her main home for the rest of her life. She converted a barn in Gloucestershire into a weekend home around 1980, and another, smaller one in the mid-90s.
Georgie Wolton was a student at the Architectural Association in the 1950s, a time and place of competitive creative ferment. It produced some of the most influential designers of the following decades, ranging from Richard Rogers to the great polychromatic postmodernist John Outram. This generation was influenced by the modernist architecture of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius but also reacted strongly against it, each in their own way.
Neave Brown
Brown is best known for the housing projects he designed for the London Borough of Camden, in particular the sweeping crescent of his Alexandra Road Estate, completed in 1978. His relatively low-rise projects aimed to bring back the intimacy and sense of community of traditional streets, while still building at a large scale and in the modernist materials of concrete and glass. He came dramatically back in fashion just before his death in 2018, as a younger generation of architects drew inspiration from his ambition to bring beauty and dignity to ordinary homes.
Eldred Evans
Evans burst on to the architectural scene at the age of 23 when, still a student, she won a competition to design a civic centre (eventually unbuilt) in Lincoln. Her best-known work, designed with her partner David Shalev, was Tate St Ives, a fusion of classical and modern motifs completed in 1993. Her own favourite work was her library for Jesus College Cambridge, which in parts is almost Tudor, completed in 1996.
Quinlan Terry
No one moved further from modernism than Terry, who with projects such as the development of Richmond Riverside and various country houses practised a literal version of traditional architecture that would be enthusiastically endorsed by the current king. “I don’t know what went wrong there,” said Wolton of Terry in 2015.
These works follow a trajectory towards invisibility. The Fieldhouse is a bold statement by a young architect, with a frame of 14 tons of Corten (that is to say, rust-coloured) steel holding up all-glass walls, a rugged version of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois. The Cliff Road Studios are white-walled and rectangular, classical modernist you might say, but fitting into the lines of a Victorian street. The Belsize Lane house, with a basic construction of brick walls and timber joists, is concealed behind old brick walls around the boundary of the site, and over time was submerged beneath plants. Her role with the barn conversions was to bring out the beauties of the old buildings rather than impose her own.
The design of Belsize Lane, although a new construction, was about getting you to look at other things than its architecture. It is a single-storey structure, its 3,000 sq ft of floor space composed into a plan of long rectangles that looks like a T merged with an F. These divide the site into three gardens, of whose different characters you are continuously aware while moving round the interior. Daylight can enter from multiple directions, changing through the day, making the house into a three-dimensional sundial. “You don’t have to look at your watch,” Wolton said, “you know exactly what time of day it is.”
You enter the site through an inconspicuous opening in the perimeter and pass along a covered path on the edge of a cloister-like courtyard. The front door is straight ahead, beyond that a broad tapering top-lit gallery, designed for the display of beautifully woven kilims, mostly Anatolian, from the 19th, 18th and possibly 17th centuries, which Wolton had by then started to collect in large numbers. The gallery leads to the bedrooms; living and dining areas and kitchen require a left turn. Beyond them is a studio, built in a later extension, and a part-sunken toplit room intended both for a ping-pong table and the display of further kilims, although concerns about the effects of ultra-violet light later caused them to be removed. The drops in level of these two rooms, together with a spiral stair up on to the flat roof, add a touch of vertical drama to what is otherwise a horizontal building.
The house, then, is a machine for appreciating nature and the rugs. It looks in, where the Fieldhouse looked out, a haven on which the city beyond barely intrudes. It has some eccentricities: one of its bathrooms is preposterously tiny, the garage too narrow for almost any known car, the kitchen also on the small side, while other spaces and door openings are unexpectedly ample. Suke tells me that, as a teenager, she enjoyed the fact that she lived in an exceptional house – “all my friends had to come and see it” – but she also has her criticisms. It was designed, she says, “for carpets, not people”. It was not really, she says, a family house. Her father wasn’t given a workshop for designing and making furniture, which he started doing around this time.
David Wolton is himself more forgiving on this score, but it’s generally true that Georgie’s version of modernist architecture was not of the most functional, efficient kind. The kitchen in the Camden Square house connected with the garden by way of a spiral staircase, which made the carrying of trays and crockery almost impossible. The spacious, light-filled interiors of Cliff Road are desirable – a one-bed duplex apartment is now on sale with the estate agents Modern House for £945,000, compared with an original price, David says, of £8,250. But they are also quirky. There’s a terrifying absence of outer handrails on the stairs that rise to sleeping mezzanines from the living areas, and if you want to go directly from the ground floor units to the communal garden you have to go through Hobbit-height glass doors.
Georgie seemed to regard the existence of rain almost as an impertinence. Water entered readily through the optimistic roof and window details of the Belsize Lane house, while the otherwise elegant garden elevation at Cliff Road features some contorted arrangements of gutters and flashings. David recalls that she had a fear of being sued for defects – she regarded it as an emotional affront, among other things – which is one of the reasons why she didn’t like designing buildings for others.
Gardens, though, didn’t present such risks, and eventually that trajectory towards invisibility led to the disappearance of buildings from her work. Adrian Gale, a longstanding architect friend, believes that the Belsize Lane house was always designed as “a background for the three courtyards”; she also allowed greenery to engulf it to a greater degree than she originally envisaged. She loved plants, in the end, more than bricks and steel, so it made sense that they should come to command her attention.
With gardens, she was willing to work for other people: private clients such as Lennie and Gillian Hoffmann and institutions such as Dartington College in Devon, Keble College, Oxford, and the University of East Anglia, in the last two of which she created landscapes around buildings by her friend Rick Mather. Not, though, that this work made her much more collaborative. She would be infuriated when Richard Rogers put sculptures in the River Cafe garden. If she had wanted art there, she said, she would have put art there herself. “She tested us,” say the Hoffmanns, “by giving us a couple of illustrated lectures on the history of landscape gardening. There was little suggestion that we had any useful ideas.”
Stephen Welch, a gardener who worked with her for 30 years, describes her planting as “naturalistic”, within a more straight-lined architectural structure. She would let plants, within reason, thrive and grow as they wanted. She preferred “small, delicate flowers” and nothing too big or hybridised. She liked the occasional use of strong colours, and movement and texture: “Like all good gardeners,” he says, “she was aware of the different senses.” At her Gloucestershire barn she explored meadow planting, what might now be called rewilding – “ahead of her time”, he says. There is, perhaps, greater freedom in her garden designs than in her buildings.
Everyone who talks about Georgie Wolton describes her as someone determined to do things her way. She had decided but not necessarily consistent views – “black was black one week, white the next”, says Gale. It took about 10 years of working together, says Welch, before she would take his advice on board. She was a perfectionist, serving meticulous dinner parties from small kitchens of her own careful design, thorough in planning and preparing gardens for planting.
“I don’t think anyone really knew Georgie,” says Gale, but it’s clear that she commanded loyalty among her friends. They describe her as good company and generous; not minding, for example, that it took many years for the Team 4 loan to be repaid, and lending her house for the birthday parties of friends’ children. Although she and David divorced in the early 90s, they remained on friendly terms. But a reclusive side to her personality came to the fore in her later life, when she lived alone in the Belsize Lane house, with its flourishing bay trees and dampish walls, seeing only a few of those closest to her.
The future of that house now looks hopeful. Historic England is considering whether to recommend it for listing, and it has been bought by Charlie Green, a property developer whose creations include the acclaimed all-timber Black & White Building. The house, he says, embodies his beliefs in the beneficial powers of good design, and he plans to renovate it as his family home. “London is a tough city,” he says, and the seclusion of the house “allows you to step away from it.”
Its continued life has to be a good thing – even if, as Suke says, her mother was not “precious about her past work”. Georgie Wolton may have removed herself from the main streams of 20th-century architecture, but everything she did, buildings and gardens, were in some way special. This singular house is the most complete expression there is of an equally singular woman.
