Behind an old brick wall in Belsize Lane, in a posh part of north London, stands a single-storey house that you would hardly know was there. Only a glimpse of a pitched glass roof gives a sign of shelter. You certainly wouldn’t know that it is a unique piece of modern architecture, a rare work by the distinctive, remarkable and under-recognised Georgie Wolton, who died two years ago aged 87. Old friends describe her as someone who “just did what she believed”. She was both “impossible” (although she “didn’t mind you telling her that”) and “fearless”. So, you might say, is the house.
To say the house “stands” requires qualification. It’s in bad shape, thanks in part to what an architect friend of Wolton’s calls her “gung-ho attitude to making buildings”. It leaks, overheats in summer, gets too cold in winter. It might now be easier to build a new house than to repair it, while real estate values in those parts are such that many millions could be made by putting up a block of luxury flats on the site. Other works of hers have disappeared, including the glass-and-steel Fieldhouse in the Surrey Hills, that shines from the pages of old architecture magazines like a beacon of American-inspired modernity.
