If you hadn’t walked in from a stretch of bustling city life, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in an Alpine spa hotel. Water runs along a channel beside a lush bed of ferns in a sunny courtyard, before tinkling into a shallow pool beneath the dappled shade of mature ginkgo trees. On timber-lined walkways that wrap this tranquil space, some residents sit on benches outside their flats while others tend to herbs in the rooftop garden. The only signs of the rat race are the red double-decker buses, visible from the courtyard windows of this new almshouse in south London.
“People are so often pushed to the margins in later life,” says Martyn Craddock, chief executive of United St Saviour’s, the charity behind this handsome new block of social housing for over-65s. “We are here to provide an option for people who want to live independently in the centre of the city – and have fun in their later years.”
