When 84-year-old retired fire chief Frank Turner first laid eyes on the house offered to him at the Appleby Blue almshouse, a heartrending "Bloody hell!" escaped him. Relocating from his old Council flat on Cadbury Way Estate in Bermondsey, Turner hadn't set his hopes high—"As long as I get room to put my bookcases," he said, just moments before stepping through the door to a new chapter in his life. His disbelieving chuckle said it before him: "This is something special. It really is."

Rohan Lopez, a 63-year-old musician and artist, reminisces on his previous living situations—from a squatter’s association house to a retirement home—with a sense of nostalgia. Dealing with the lack of hot running water and the challenges of using an outside toilet, his previous living situations were marked by "stress, disappointment, and controversy". At the almshouse, he found a welcome sense of comfort. "The outside world is what it is," he notes, "but this is my sanctuary". For Lopez, the peaceful atmosphere around him offered a refreshing change from his past, creating a "chill, peaceful, quiet" retreat where he could truly relax and be himself.

Turner and Lopez are two of 63 residents welcomed by United St. Saviour’s Charity's (UStSC) new almshouse in Bermondsey, a district in the London Borough of Southwark, Inner London. In England, the almshouse—institutionally and architecturally—was originally established by the church in the medieval ages, providing charitable housing for the poor, elderly, or specific community members and eventually came under the management of local authorities or charitable trusts. Appleby Blue occupies a piece of land bequeathed to the charity, with the instruction that it be used to build almshouses for the poor of the parish, in perpetuity.

Acknowledging the lack of high-quality social housing for the elderly in inner-city London, UStSC recreated the almshouse typology to facilitate active engagement with the city's vibrant core for today's elderly population. Sitting directly on the public high street, with a bus stop at its entrance, the outward-looking residential design not only creates a dialogue between the residents and non-residents but also allows easy access to the city at large. Departing from the conventional model for low-cost residential accommodation for the elderly, typically marginalised from the life of the city and inward-looking, Appleby Blue is an active, open and shared residential building, now cited to be 'UK's best new building' following its RIBA Stirling Prize win, building on precisely these qualities.

Designed by Witherford Watson Mann architects (now two-time winners of the Stirling Prize), the almshouse represents a progressive evolution of the typology through a progression of shared spaces, extending from the busy public high street to a number of public-facing activities on the ground floor of the street-facing building and culminating at the private Garden Court. The double-height Garden Room forms the heart of the social spaces, which also includes the Appleby Blue community kitchen, a crafts room and a resident’s lounge and constitutes the street-facing end on the ground floor. A two-storey timber and glass façade extends beyond the building line to the street, seeking to invite the city's largely intergenerational public into its interiors, as residents cheerfully wave to those arriving and departing from the buses, fostering a sense of connection and community in the bustling urban landscape.

Typical designs for almshouses often form a three-sided quadrangle, with doors and windows opening onto a shared courtyard or communal area, fostering a sense of community while maintaining a sense of individual space and independence. At Appleby Blue, this traditional almshouse typology is reimagined through a U-shaped ground floor plan that accommodates a central Garden Court, with 57 housing units arranged around its perimeter, enveloped by a single-loaded corridor. This corridor, however, transcends its conventional role as an institutional passage, functioning more like an indoor public balcony.

On the first floor, the shared balcony extends to the building’s front, resembling an indoor street that gazes down onto the public high street. Overlooked by the kitchens of individual housing units, the glazed gallery comes alive as residents relax on the benches outside their units, fostering serendipitous encounters and ensuring a mutual "eyes on the street" dynamic between the indoor and outdoor streets. “The place is lovely…and very secure,” observe two residents sitting on the bench as they share their thoughts. “I love everything, everything, everything about it; it’s clean and it will be clean.”

The lushly planted Garden Court, designed by Grant Associates, serves as the central courtyard of the building around which the individual homes are arranged. Measuring 40m x 8m, it is conceived as an abstract woodland glade, featuring a linear water feature running between a grove of ginkgo trees and seasonal woodland plants. The combination of natural acoustics and the gentle sound of the water within the landscape creates a tranquil sanctuary, offering residents and visitors a peaceful retreat just steps away from local city transport.

The mid-rise housing development, ranging in height from two to five storeys, offers a mix of apartment sizes, including 55 sq.m. one-bedroom and 79 sq.m. two-bedroom units, as well as 11 wheelchair-accessible apartments and two studio units for research assistants. The rear wing of the almshouse recedes down to two storeys on the south, maximising sunlight in the courtyard.

The roof terrace on the second floor features a productive garden with raised beds for growing herbs and vegetables, designed to create outdoor spaces for communal dining. The raised beds accommodate residents' needs, ensuring accessibility for recreational gardening despite potential mobility challenges.

The RIBA Stirling Prize Jury echoed similar sentiments at the building's felicitations at the Prize ceremony in London. Ingrid Schroder, Director of The Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture, commended the project on behalf of the jury, stating, “Designing social housing for later life is too often reduced to a simple provision of service. Appleby Blue, however, is a provision of pure delight. Its architects have crafted high-quality spaces that are generous and thoughtful, blending function and community to create environments that truly care for their residents. This project is a clarion call for a new form of housing at a pivotal moment. Built against the backdrop of two crises, an acute housing shortage and a growing loneliness epidemic among older people.”

The promotional film created by Philipp Ebeling for United St. Saviour’s Charity conscientiously reveals the lives of residents at the Appleby Blue almshouse, highlighting how simple yet essential amenities—often taken for granted—contribute to a life of dignity and joy, free from isolation. A quick search and a basic consensus on what constitutes a 'happy home' will reveal that from an architectural perspective, it is thoughtful design elements such as natural light and ventilation, connection to nature, flexible spaces, comfortable human-scaled environments, the use of colour and materials, privacy, community interaction, acoustic comfort, cultural expression and sustainable materials. This seemingly extensive list serves as a fundamental guide at Appleby Blue, enabling its affordable social housing model to be elevated to honour it, instead, as a fundamental right.

Project Details

Name: Appleby Blue
Location: London, England
Typology: Housing
Client: United St Saviour’s Charity
Architect: Witherford Watson Mann
Area: 5,800 sq.m.
Year of Completion:2023