Victor House

Southwark, London

For nearly six centuries, the kitchen of the great hall of the Bishop of Winchester’s London residence stood at the corner of Clink Street and Stoney Street until 1814, when a great fire which swept along Clink Street caused it to be demolished and replaced with a flour mill. More than a century later, fire struck again in the form of a Second World War incendiary bomb, and the site lay empty for nearly 60 years. It has now been developed in the form of Victor House, an eight storey apartment building with a ground floor restaurant, carefully designed to preserve intact the archaeological remains of the ancient monument beneath it. The design seeks to restore the historic character of the streets as narrow, cart-width canyons by jettying out over the footway where possible whilst still allowing a penetration of daylight and sunshine. The form is sculpted by light angles and composed of robust geometric forms to complement the engineering vocabulary of the adjacent Victorian railway and wharf architecture – two 4-storey brick cubes, one sat on the ground in Clink Street, the other poised above an overhanging steel jetty in Stoney Street, are hinged at the corner by a tall glass silo. A second squatter glass vat is halved to effect the transition of the building line of Clink Street and signal the entrance to the apartments. Client: Stoney Street Developments