Natural balance: Lynch Architects’ remodelled coroners court

Lynch Architects’ complex ensemble of a restored and remodelled coroner’s court, a new extension and two courtyard gardens is an exercise in working in the city at three scales simultaneously: the urban, in a place of portentous but uncoordinated government placemaking; the inhabitable monument; and the intimate, the delicate and the subtle. 

The old building at the core of the project is, as it always has been, an active coroner’s court for an extensive reach of central London, and it masks a mortuary built on the very large scale required for any major emergency.

A comically inept foundation stone from 1893 – one word continues off the edge of it onto the wall beyond – tells us that the building was designed by GRW Wheeler, architect and surveyor to the united vestries of St John the Evangelist and St Margaret – that is, the baroque St John, Smith Square, and the venerable parish church by Westminster Abbey. 

No one knows much about Wheeler for all the pomposity of his appointment, but here he successfully combined the elements that architects will have seen every week in The Builder and the Building News: cheerful red brick banded with stone, and the combination of early and late-17th-century details that was so popular at the time. It is a small but dignified building in Horseferry Road, a dog-legged route leading from Victoria Street to Lambeth Bridge that from the late 19th century was increasingly peppered with large state and commercial buildings.

Lynch Architects has treated this building with great respect. Its front door leads to a narrow corridor continuing straight ahead to the mortuary; to the left is a stair and above is the courtroom itself, a fine Victorian room now in perfect condition and complete with its fireplace and fittings. The rest of the existing building consisted of unremarkable offices, with at one point temporary accommodation on the top floor for families displaced while their homes in the borough were fumigated. 

The architect has opened up the western side of the ground floor with a little play of arched openings; beyond are two new spaces. The first is the court’s now open-plan office area, but the second is located on the ground floor of the new extension and provides a friendly and warm space for families and visitors who in the nature of things may be upset by the court’s proceedings. 

The external form of this extension is a monumental stone-faced north elevation with a barrel-vaulted roof, a bit like a very tall gravestone. This responds magnificently to two public buildings nearby: one is the 1935 Westminster Baptist church which also combines the Jacobean with the late Stuart but, interestingly, in a different way to the courthouse; the other is a red-brick Catholic church, gothic but about the same age. For many people who know the area well, this corner is also memorable for a rear view of Edwin Lutyens’ chequerboard-faced flats in Page Street and for the surviving ancient urinal, patronised by taxi drivers, which for a long time shared its gas lighting with the nearby lamp post.

The new lower visitor space is lined in timber and has a vaulted ceiling which runs counter to the one above outside. It also provides a first glimpse of the quite exceptional stained glass that is incorporated into the extension, all by Brian Clarke and of a quality that I have seen in no other recent building, mostly in blue and yellowy-gold. Clarke is an enthusiast for the arts and crafts era and his glass here is infused throughout with the jewel-like quality of the finest fin-de-siècle work. 

A subtle touch in this room is a short marble post between the entrance and the seating area: you can lean on it, but practice director Patrick Lynch adds that it provides an informal demarcation point between groups of people who might not want to stand close to one another, as well as – in its somewhat mysterious, totemic quality – an allusion to the fact that this is, after all, a building that deals with death and perhaps also with redemption.

Courtroom attendees rise through the old stairs and can reach both the old chamber and the upper floor of the extension. Lynch has designed a long, narrow space to divide the two. At either end of this is another blue and gold window; since a former window to the courtroom now faces this corridor, some of its colourful light permeates into it.

On the new side of the corridor there are openings into two rooms, an office and a larger jurors’ room that can be divided by folding doors and also double as a second courtroom. We are here below the barrel vault, which is split by a continuous longitudinal rooflight and lined, like the room below, with oak slats. But the lighting in here is extraordinary: Clarke’s windows, which occupy the wall to the coroner’s left, are a blaze of poppies against a blue background, with green, yellow and purple highlights. This is an astonishingly powerful and beautiful space which at once turns the project as a whole into something well beyond the ordinary.

A pair of gardens flanks the building. That on the east side was completed in 2018 (RIBA Journal March 2020) and consists of a paved court with small geometrical planters and a blank aedicule resembling an unopenable door – inspired, as Patrick Lynch told Michèle Woodger at the time, by the ‘impenetrable doorways of Michelangelo’s San Lorenzo Chapel in Florence’. 

The final phase of the project has included a second contemplative space in the form of a water garden on the western side, reached through the visitor waiting space, with three objects in or by it, all sharing the circular theme of the extension: a round basin in the centre of the black granite pool planted with a tree; a roll-top low stone parapet protecting visitors from stumbling into it; and at the far end an abstract limestone screen.

This is a building rich in allusion. Lynch himself makes the reference to Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum but is no doubt fed up with architect-visitors also making a comparison with van Heyningen & Haward’s 1983 rare books library at Newnham College, Cambridge, then considered outrageous but now seen as canonical. But the closest comparison is surely with Erik Gunnar Asplund’s Gothenburg law courts, not only because he turned an intimidating institution into a friendly space, but also because, in a similar way to here, his extension partly slides in, effortlessly, humanely, behind Nicodemus Tessin’s pompous baroque facade of 1672. I have a feeling that Lynch’s new-old building is one that will permeate the consciousness of both architects and visitors for a long time. 

Timothy Brittain Catlin is an architect and historian whose most recent book is on Victorian architect Edwin Rickards

In numbers 

Extension footprint 70.2 m2
Gross internal area 509.9 m2
Height of extension 9.5m