67 Southwark Street, Southwark

2024 RIBA London Award

67 Southwark Street, Southwark
Allies and Morrison for Tailored Living Solutions Limited
Contract value: Confidential
GIA: 1881.5m²

The slim residential tower on Southwark Street stands as a testament to its architects’ flair for innovative design and meticulous urban integration. The project seamlessly blends into its surroundings, offering nine, triple-aspect apartments with panoramic views of London. It relates to and resolves a complex corner site, and its plot ratio – with the floor area 16 times that of the site – is remarkable and rarely seen in the capital. The building’s form, a nod to that of the traditional Italian campanile (bell tower), harmonises with the neighbourhood while standing out as a striking landmark south of the River Thames.

The previous structure on the site, Isis House, was a dark, low-ceilinged office building set above and apart from the street. The tall, slender tower that has replaced it stands on a sharp street corner. The architects were the driving force behind this project. Negotiating a campanile form in Bermondsey was no mean feat, but they were trusted partners, having already delivered substantial new buildings in the vicinity over several years.

The building forms one side of a triangular plot that is clearly legible as you approach it, and even more so from the top-floor belvedere, which is an impressive architectural feature. Surprisingly, the tower is built ‘brick on brick’ and not prefabricated – it uses Roman bricks in banded colour inspired by the religious buildings of Orvieto and Siena, Italy. This polychromatic approach of horizontal bands lends it a distinctive texture and warmth of character.

The massing is in three parts. The first is the tallest – a reference to the narrow towers of a city like Tokyo, where land prices are very high. It is only four metres wide, aligned to Southwark Street, and completes the space formed by the Bankside 2 and Bankside 3 buildings to the north. Its repetitive order of bay windows, placed in the distinctive alternating pattern of Roman brickwork, is grounded by the café and capped by the open belvedere at the top. The second part of the massing is three floors lower, follows the line of Lavington Street and is made of less elaborate brickwork. Its more informal appearance is reminiscent of New York fire escapes. The third mass is a small metal pavilion at the narrowest eastern end of the site, which has a more domestic scale. This forms the entrance to the base of the tower and the café. The café adds life to the wide pavement of Southwark Street, complementing the restaurant and studios by the same architects a little further down the road.

This is a significant building – a view shared by the local planning authority.

See the rest of the RIBA London winners here. And all the RIBA Regional Awards here.

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RIBA Regional Awards 2024 sponsored by EH Smith and Autodesk