The Unlikely Revolutionaries
Jack and Molly Pritchard were not the sort of people from whom a design revolution might have been expected. Jack was a Cambridge-educated marketing executive who had made his career in the plywood industry; Molly was a trained psychologist and educator of independent mind and considerable intelligence. Neither was an architect or a practising designer; neither had the theoretical credentials of the Bauhaus masters whose work they admired. What they had instead was something rarer and in some ways more valuable: the combination of genuine conviction, practical ability, and personal resources that made it possible to translate ideas into built reality.
Jack Pritchard had encountered the ideas of European modernism through his work with the Venesta Plywood Company, which brought him into contact with Continental design and manufacturing culture in the late 1920s and early 1930s. A visit to the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1931 — when the school was still functioning under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's direction — was a formative experience: Pritchard saw in the Bauhaus a comprehensive design philosophy that aligned with his own convictions about the relationship between good design and the quality of everyday life. He returned to London determined to apply what he had seen to the specifically English problem of housing design.
Molly Pritchard was a less frequently celebrated figure in the Isokon story but an equally important one. Her background in psychology gave her a perspective on the design of living spaces that complemented Jack's more technically oriented approach: she understood what people needed from their homes in terms of social interaction, psychological space, and the organisation of domestic life. Her influence on the conception of the Isokon's communal facilities — the shared spaces and services that were intended to liberate residents from private domestic drudgery — was significant, and her own occupation of a flat in the building gave her a direct experience of the principles she had helped to formulate.
Commissioning Wells Coates
The Pritchards' commission to Wells Coates to design the Lawn Road Flats was one of the most consequential acts of architectural patronage in twentieth-century Britain. Coates was, at the time, a relatively unknown designer — his background was in engineering, his architectural training was unconventional, and his built work was limited to a few small commercial projects. What he had, in addition to exceptional talent, was a comprehensive engagement with the ideas of Continental modernism and a conviction that these ideas could and should be applied to British housing design.
The relationship between the Pritchards and Coates was collaborative in the fullest sense: not the conventional architect-client relationship in which the client defines the programme and the architect fulfils it, but a genuine intellectual partnership in which the design evolved through sustained dialogue about what modern living should be and how it should be expressed in built form. The Pritchards were sufficiently knowledgeable and sufficiently committed to engage with the architectural questions at the most fundamental level, and Coates was sufficiently open to use the collaboration as an opportunity for developing ideas that went beyond his individual thinking.
The programme that emerged from this collaboration was radical by the standards of British housing: minimum individual spaces, maximum communal provision, service of the building by trained staff who would maintain the flats and provide catering, a design philosophy expressed throughout the building from the structure to the furniture. The Pritchards funded the building from their own resources, accepting financial risk that a commercial developer would have been unwilling to take, precisely because they understood that the project was as much an experiment as a commercial enterprise.
The Isokon Company
Alongside the building itself, Jack Pritchard established the Isokon Furniture Company to produce the modernist furniture that the building's design philosophy demanded. The company's ambition was to bring Marcel Breuer into a production relationship with British manufacturing capacity, using the industrial processes available in England to produce Bauhaus-influenced furniture at prices accessible to a broad market. The bent plywood furniture that Breuer designed for Isokon — most famously the long chair — embodied this ambition: sophisticated in design, economical in material, and manufacturable in the industrial quantities that would make good design genuinely democratic.
In practice, the commercial success of the Isokon Furniture Company was limited. The British market for modernist furniture was smaller than Pritchard had hoped; the manufacturing processes for bent plywood were more costly and technically demanding than anticipated; and the economic conditions of the late 1930s, as the threat of war grew, were not conducive to the establishment of a new design enterprise. The company produced furniture in relatively small numbers throughout the late 1930s and into the early 1940s before effectively suspending operations.
The Isokon furniture's subsequent history is a story of rediscovery and revaluation. Original pieces became museum collectibles, recognised as design classics of the interwar period. The designs were revived and reissued by various manufacturers from the 1960s onward, and the Isokon Plus company, established with Jack Pritchard's involvement in later decades, continues to produce furniture based on the original designs. The Breuer long chair and several other pieces remain in production today, sold as luxury design objects at prices that reflect their status as design icons rather than the democratic accessibility that Pritchard had originally envisaged.
The Wartime Years
The Isokon Building's most remarkable period as an intellectual community was, paradoxically, the wartime years when the Pritchards' original commercial ambitions had been largely frustrated. With Gropius and Breuer departed for America and the Isokon Furniture Company effectively on hold, the building filled with wartime Londoners of varied background and distinction, including Agatha Christie, various members of the intelligence community (some of whom had connections to the Soviet spy network that would later become notorious), and a continuing stream of refugee intellectuals for whom the Isokon's serviced accommodation was both practically and symbolically important.
Jack Pritchard himself served in various capacities during the war, his marketing and organisational skills put to work in the cause of the national effort. Molly continued to develop her work in progressive education, which had been a constant interest alongside her involvement with the Isokon project. The building provided a stable anchor for their lives during the upheavals of the war years, even as the social world it housed underwent considerable transformation.
Legacy and Recognition
Jack Pritchard lived into his nineties, long enough to see the Isokon Building's reputation transformed from a curiosity into a recognised landmark of twentieth-century architecture. He was involved in efforts to preserve and restore the building as its physical condition deteriorated in the post-war decades, and his testimony was invaluable to historians and architects working to understand what the building had originally been designed to achieve. His memoir and the accounts he gave to oral historians constitute one of the most important primary sources for understanding the design ambitions and social vision of the interwar modernist movement in Britain.
The recognition that came in his later years — the Grade I listing of the building, the establishment of the Isokon Gallery, the growing appreciation of the Isokon furniture designs — gave him genuine pleasure, not because he craved personal honour but because he understood these recognitions as confirmation that the ideas he had committed his own resources to realising had been right. The Isokon project had always been, for Jack and Molly Pritchard, an argument about how modern people should live — an argument expressed in built form, in designed objects, and in the community of remarkable people that the building had attracted. That the argument was still being taken seriously, still generating discussion and admiration, still shaping the way designers and architects thought about the relationship between design and daily life, was the best evidence that the argument had been worth making.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*