Berthold Lubetkin is among the most important figures of the Modern Movement in Britain. Born in Georgia in 1901, he studied in Berlin and Paris, before moving to London in 1931. The following year he founded the famous Tecton practice with the Architectural Association graduates Anthony Chitty, Lindsay Drake, Michael Dugdale, Valentine Harding, Godfrey Samuel and Francis Skinner.

Lubetkin’s buildings are among the most iconic of the period, and include the penguin pool at London Zoo (designed in conjunction with the engineer Ove Arup) and Finsbury Health Centre.

The Priory Green Estate was designed by Lubetkin while he was working with Tecton in the late 1930s, but was not completed until 1949, by which time the firm had regrouped as Skinner, Bailey & Lubetkin. His intention was to create a manifesto for modern architecture.

The largest of the three estates designed by Lubetkin for Finsbury, Priory Green is laid out to match the original street pattern and has 12 blocks of apartments, plus a circular laundry and boiler house. The blocks were built with the same method as the Spa Green buildings, and include six eight storey blocks, arranged in two groups and four four storey blocks which run in parallel. The slightly austere finish of the estate was enlivened by a concrete relief by Kenneth Hughes and internal murals by Feliks Topolski.

Priory Green borrowed features from Lubetkin’s acclaimed Highpoint flats in Highgate, including lifts, central heating, balconies, daylight and ventilation from multiple directions, large entry spaces, and a roof terrace. Well designed fitted kitchens, including slide-away breakfast counters and ironing boards, electrical and gas appliances, and a central waste-disposal system in stainless steel, exceeded the amenities enjoyed by most of the population in the austere late 1940s.

Ove Arup’s innovative concrete box-frame or ‘egg-crate’ construction gave each flat clear views and interiors uncluttered by beams, columns or pipes, while his open terraces provided a communal area for drying clothes, social gathering and enjoying views.

Priory Green is one of the few Lubetkin buildings in London not to be listed, and one of the few social housing estates to receive extensive refurbishment in 2019. This act on behalf of the council was in part prompted by the disillusioned tenants, who issued a mock-obituary notice mourning ‘the sad death of a once-loved friend, their housing estate’.

An experimental series of murals by Polish artist and Royal Academician Feliks Topolski were somehow ‘lost’ during the estate’s darker years. The murals depicted the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the eighteenth century - including images of Pentonville resident Joseph Grimaldi - and what was then the present day.