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.
Lynch is an architect who likes to reflect on the meanings and human significance of his art. His largest commissions to date are office and apartment buildings in Victoria, close to the court, including a just finished block called n2, and his approach helps him bring unexpected richness to these types of development. The court is an occasion to create a “secular-sacred atmosphere of civic seriousness and compassion”.For the artist Brian Clarke, whose ceramics and stained glass are an integral part of the project, this is a chance to put into practice his belief that “architecture’s responsibility is to increase the value of human life”. Both Clarke and Lynch have been through what the former calls the “brutally grim” experiences of coroners’ courts, following the deaths of loved ones, and both are moved to do what they can to improve them.
As well as fulfilling the same duties as coroner’s courts all over the country, the one in Westminster has a particular responsibility to examine cases in London of national significance. The inquests into the Grenfell Tower disaster and the terrorist attacks on Westminster Bridge, both in 2017, were held here. The main functions of the extension are a jury room, which can also be used as a second courtroom, offices, and a waiting room for families. The existing building has been renovated and reformed. In the aftermath of Grenfell, a Garden of Remembrance was built quickly to Lynch’s designs, to provide a reflective space for those affected. A new Garden of Reflection, accessible through the waiting room, will open alongside the rest of the remade court. The first sessions will be held there in September.
Inside, the building is both solemn and intimate. The new court/jury room is almost churchy beneath its hemi-cylindrical vault, with coloured light from Clarke’s glass entering from the western side. The atmosphere is inward-looking and removed from the life of the street: the glass is opaque where it needs to be, to stop passers-by or photographers’ lenses intruding on the privacy of proceedings, becoming more transparent higher up, so as to give views of the sky.
At the same time, Lynch takes some cues from the more thoughtful elements of the older building, especially a central bay window with a built-in seat – “An act of empathy,” he says, “a place to sit and cry.” His work likewise offers what he calls “welcoming, body-scaled furniture” built into the fabric. There is plenty of timber, especially oak, which feels both civic and friendly. Even in the building’s most monumental moments the scale remains small.
Taken altogether, the complex crams in a lot. Spaces can be both off-centre and symmetrical, long or high, light or dark. If there is something Roman about the new stone block, the wandering plan of the composite old-new interior is more like an old English country house. The gardens are something else again, geometric affairs of circles and squares in light and dark masonry, with subtle variations in their roughness and smoothness, spectrally lit at night.
If the sarcophagus-like extension seems determined to impose some sort of will on the site, other elements are diffuse to the point of dissolution, only to be brought back to coherence through the consistent intent behind them, and through echoes and rhymes of shapes. The semi-circle motif pops up in various guises – as gable, old bay window, a niche in the Garden of Remembrance. The horizontal striations of the old building are continued, in less pronounced form, in the courses of the stonework on the new extension.
And then there are Clarke’s windows, donated by him to the building, that appear at significant moments around the complex. They represent spring flowers with deep primaries, with some offbeat green and pink, painted and then etched on to the glass with what he calls “urgency”. It’s a simple but effective idea, realised with virtuosity in the handling of depth and density of colour, meant to convey growth and renewal. The role of his work, he says, is “not to give people an artistic ecstasy, but to say ‘I am with you’, ‘I know what you’re going through’, to put an arm around people’s shoulders”.
Building and glass together might conceivably verge on the mawkish, if they weren’t delivered with both palpable wholehearted good intent and high levels of skill and subtlety. There might also be something overly self-important about the more sepulchral aspects of the architecture, except its oddness stops it being too pompous. Also, helpfully, the ensemble of old and new together encompasses a wide range of lightness and weight. Beatrix Potter meets ancient Rome is, it turns out, a rewarding combination.
