Westminster coroner’s court is a pretty, playful building from 1893 by the little-known architect GRW Wheeler, red brick with stone trimmings, pertly symmetrical, its style sort of Jacobean. “It’s a bit Beatrix Potter,” says the architect of its new extension, Patrick Lynch. The mood of the original building doesn’t say much about the sombre activities it was built to contain: the identification of bodies, the examination of deaths felt to be in need of explanation, the matter-of-fact delivery of conclusions on causes and circumstances. Its aim seems to be comfort, its message “never mind”.
Lynch’s stone-faced, timber-framed extension looks, at first sight, as different as can be. It presents, next to the old building’s busy-ness, a smooth, blank, round-ended elevation, which is the gable end of a barrel-vaulted oblong block. The shapes might make you think of tombstones and sarcophagi; the new building looks more ancient than the older one. It is, in a good way, odd: its gravity sets up a relationship with its neighbour that is not going to be entirely easy. The idea, though, is to be complementary rather than antagonistic, not to pick a fight between different eras of architecture, but to create an assembly of objects and spaces – old and new, internal and external, serious and sweet – that contribute as much as construction materials can to the dignity and comfort of the bereaved.
