The Colony Takes Shape
The Isokon building on Lawn Road, completed in 1934 to the designs of the modernist architect Wells Coates, was intended as an experiment in progressive urban living: a block of minimum-standard flats designed for the professional single person who wanted to live well without the expense and complexity of traditional domestic arrangements. Its founders, Jack and Molly Pritchard, conceived it as more than a residential building — as a community of like-minded, forward-thinking people who would form a network of intellectual and social exchange, a demonstration in bricks and concrete of the proposition that modern design and progressive social ideas could transform the conditions of everyday life.
What they got, in the extraordinary years between 1934 and the early 1950s, was something wilder and more significant than their original vision. The building attracted, partly by accident and partly by the deliberate networking of the Pritchards and their friends, an extraordinary assembly of modernist artists, architects, designers, writers, political radicals, and intelligence operatives whose interconnections and interactions made the Isokon building one of the most culturally and politically significant addresses in mid-twentieth-century Britain.
The list of notable residents and frequent visitors reads like a catalogue of inter-war European modernism: Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, the Bauhaus masters who fled Hitler's Germany and found temporary refuge in Lawn Road before their departure for America; László Moholy-Nagy, the Bauhaus polymath who taught, designed, and agitated for a new visual culture; Naum Gabo, the Russian Constructivist sculptor who had his studio nearby; Agatha Christie, who found in the building's flat, functional aesthetic exactly the anonymous modernity that suited a woman who valued her privacy; and various figures from the worlds of left-wing politics and Soviet intelligence whose connections to the building would become clear only decades later.
Architecture as Social Programme
Wells Coates's design for the Isokon building was a radical departure from the conventions of English domestic architecture. Where English housing of the 1930s, even at its most modern, tended to maintain the conventions of the individual house — private garden, separate entrance, rooms arranged for family life — Coates designed a building that challenged these conventions at every point. The flats were small, the corridors were communal, the kitchens were minimal, the building as a whole was conceived as a collective rather than as an assemblage of private units.
This social programme was supported by the building's physical design: the horizontal emphasis of its balconies and windows, the stark white render of its exterior (now restored after decades of accumulated grime), the clean lines of its interiors, all expressed a commitment to what the modernists called the Zeitgeist — the spirit of the age, which they identified with rational simplicity, functional efficiency, and freedom from historical ornament. The Isokon building was, in this sense, a manifesto in concrete form, an argument about how modern people should live.
The argument was not without its complications. The minimum flats that seemed adequate for the progressive single professionals the Pritchards envisaged as their residents proved less adequate for families and for the elderly. The communal facilities — the Isobar in the building's ground floor, the laundry, the shared services — worked well when the building was fully occupied and its residents were engaged with the social experiment, less well during periods of wartime disruption and post-war uncertainty. The maintenance of the building's distinctive appearance proved challenging as the decades passed and the social values that had generated it became less culturally central.
The Refugee Community
The arrival of the Bauhaus refugees in 1933-34 transformed the character of the Isokon community. Gropius and Breuer brought with them not merely their extraordinary individual talents but the social and intellectual world of Weimar Germany — a world of intense artistic experimentation, political commitment, and human warmth that had been abruptly destroyed by Hitler's seizure of power. Their presence in the building attracted other refugees from Central European modernism, creating a community-within-a-community that was simultaneously at home and in exile, simultaneously part of the British modernist scene and fundamentally shaped by experiences that few of its British neighbours could share.
The conversations that took place in the Isobar and in the flats themselves during the mid-1930s were among the most intellectually charged in London's cultural history. Gropius and Breuer were rethinking the relationship between design and production, between the individual work of art and the industrial manufacture of everyday objects, in ways that would eventually transform the built environment of the post-war world. Moholy-Nagy was developing his ideas about vision and light, about the photograph and the film as tools for a new kind of seeing, in ways that would eventually influence every medium of visual communication. Gabo was exploring the relationship between mathematical form and sculptural space, between material and void, in ways that connected directly to the parallel experiments of Moore and Hepworth on Parkhill Road.
The British and Central European modernisms that met in and around the Isokon building were not always comfortable with each other. The German tradition of systematic, theoretically grounded design education was in tension with the more intuitive, craft-based English approach. The political commitments of the Central European refugees — many of them were Marxists or fellow-travellers, most of them were passionately anti-fascist — were not always shared by their British neighbours, whose politics tended to be more eclectic and less systematic. But the encounter was generative precisely because of these tensions.
Intelligence and Ideology
The intelligence dimension of the Isokon story emerged gradually in the decades after the war, as the files of the intelligence services were partially declassified and as survivors of the wartime intelligence world began to tell their stories. Several residents and frequent visitors of the building had connections to Soviet intelligence — connections that ranged from ideological fellow-travelling to active espionage. The building's population of anti-fascist refugees, many of whom had connections to Communist or socialist movements in their countries of origin, made it an attractive environment for Soviet intelligence recruitment.
The most significant of these connections were those involving Arnold Deutsch, the Soviet intelligence officer who ran the Cambridge Five spy network, and his contacts in the Isokon milieu. The building's international, politically engaged, ideologically eclectic population was precisely the kind of environment in which the casual introduction of a new acquaintance — who might or might not be a Soviet talent-spotter — would attract no particular attention. The social opacity of the building's community, its reputation for cosmopolitan progressivism, provided cover for activities that would have been immediately visible in more conventional social settings.
The discovery of these connections, which began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, added a new dimension to the Isokon story without displacing its cultural significance. The building's importance as a centre of modernist design, as a refuge for intellectual exiles, as an experiment in progressive urban living, is not diminished by the discovery that some of its residents were engaged in the Cold War's intelligence dimension. These were people of their time, shaped by the political urgencies of the 1930s and 1940s, and their intelligence activities were part of the same political landscape that produced the art and architecture for which the building is primarily remembered.
Legacy and Restoration
The Isokon building fell into disrepair during the second half of the twentieth century, its white render darkened and damaged, its social experiment long concluded, its status as a significant modernist landmark unrecognised by the planning system that should have protected it. The campaign for its restoration, which gathered momentum in the 1990s and eventually succeeded in 2004, when the building was restored to something close to its original appearance, was a campaign for the recognition of a significant piece of British cultural history.
The restored building, now listed at Grade I and housing an exhibition about its history in the former Isobar, is one of the most significant modernist buildings in London — a tangible connection to the extraordinary decade when Belsize Park was, briefly, the centre of a world-historical experiment in the relationship between art, design, politics, and everyday life. The Penguin Pool at London Zoo, Gropius's house in Lincoln Massachusetts, the IIT campus in Chicago — these are the monuments of the Isokon world, scattered across the world in the cities where its principals eventually settled. The building on Lawn Road is the point of origin, the place where the experiment began.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*