Peabody has a fine tradition of providing social housing for Londoners and appointing the best architects to help them do so. Under the leadership of Dickon Robinson in the nineties and noughties, they upgraded and added to their ageing stock with excellent new developments (earning them an RIBA Client of the Year Award) but none so exquisitely done as Niall McLaughlin’s work in east London.
This is a brilliant piece of urban design. The dignified new building, with its refined proportions and details, replaces a well detailed and proportioned Peabody mansion block taken out in World War II by a V2 bomb, along with another block whose footprint now provides a garden at the heart of the newly completed courtyard still graced by the remaining three Edwardian blocks.