Chinese Barbecue Beneath Lambeth Towers

I met Ruth through Twitter, back when it was good. Remember those days? I miss that community of like-minded architecture geeks. Ruth and I catch up sporadically—usually over lunch or dinner. She’d been trying to persuade me for years to eat at the restaurant underneath Lambeth Towers. I resisted, until a couple of months ago when I finally gave in. I bought lunch; she reviewed it…

Being an architectural historian can be frustrating work. You’re forever poring over images of buildings you can’t experience, enthralled to a scheme which you inevitably find out has been demolished, badly converted or sold off. Luckily, some opportunities to get beyond the image arise when these buildings become more open to the public though — which is the case for Lambeth Towers, not far from Waterloo station in London, a building I’ve coveted getting into for years.

Completed in 1971, the building — consisting of three interlocking 11-storey towers and a smaller 4-storey block — sits rather incongruously amid the Georgian streetscape that faces the Imperial War Museum. When describing it to non-architects, I usually say it looks like a load of dishwashers piled up — which does something of a disservice to the fact that I adore this building, not least as it evokes Kisho Kurokawa’s Metabolist Nakagin Capsule Tower which was constructed in Tokyo around the same time. The creation of such a distinctive form is often attributed to a sort of Fountainhead-esque megalomania, though in this case the architect George Finch was anything but. What’s particularly joyous about the scheme is how it has been carefully detailed to make the individual homes more evident within the overall massing, using panels of insulated timber amidst the concrete structural grid — hence the ‘dishwashers’ — to give it a more readily appreciable human scale, in accordance with Finch’s socialist principles.

The planning drawings by Finch and his team — which included Robin Redsull, Joyce Lowman and Donald Gale — have a habit of being amongst the most seductive you’ll come across in the archive, conjuring up a joyful environment for everyday life to take place. Unlike the pristine marketing imagery which plagues site hoardings across the country, Finch incorporated all kinds of idiosyncrasies to his drawings, from the pipe smoking man enjoying a ‘lovely view’ whilst his hosts bustle about behind him setting up a dinner party, to the mother who abandons the ironing midway through to join her child at the open balcony door to admire the skyline beyond. It makes you want to pull up a chair and join them.

As part of the original design, the scheme integrated community services for the local area, and housed a medical practice connected to the nearby St. Thomas’ Hospital, with consulting rooms, a small surgery, students’ common rooms, and nursing staff accommodation, along with a registrar’s office. The medical practice spaces have since been converted into a maths school (during which, to my horror, they painted over the exposed concrete frame) though a pharmacy remains on site. In some ways, the original aims for integrating social provisions have been retained — not least in the reuse of the Old Person’s Luncheon Club which was once at the base of the tower, and has subsequently hosted a range of restaurants, including Turkish and Thai cuisines. The latest of the incarnations is Mr Charcoal — or Charcoal Fresh (Seven Flavours), if the Google translation of 碳鲜生 (柒味) is to be trusted.

Finch’s drawings of the Luncheon Club won me over for a space bustling with stout octogenarian bodies, smartly turned out in hats and headscarves for an afternoon sharing tea with friends over strains of music drifting over them from the piano. The bulbous room squeezes out from the base of the tower, in contrast to the reinforced concrete grid above, offering panoramic views to the park opposite.

Admittedly, Mr Charcoal has changed the decor somewhat. The full-height fish tank doesn’t fit in with Finch’s original designs, the previously open communal space has been subdivided into booths, and the wafts of piano music have been replaced by wafts of smoke, efficiently extracted from the tabletop barbecues by a system of pipework that brings to mind Harry Tuttle’s plumbing scene in Brazil. Sadly this also impacts the curvilinear split roof, which is now squatted with multiple extract units. But the overall bones of the design are still there, allowing me to cosplay being a retiree in the 1970s.

The restaurant specialises in the cuisine of North East China, offering up hefty portions of delights such as sea urchin fried rice, and marinated beef skewers. We passed on the vast array of offal available, to instead be schooled in how to barbecue a selection of meats, prawns, and mushrooms by the kind but increasingly less patient waiting staff. Thankfully, it’s still a very social experience, with the team and fellow diners chatting about the best ways to cook each item, and offering up delicious spice blends to dunk them into, whilst systematically splattering each other with the sizzling fats of whatever’s being turned on the grill. I’d recommend that you wear something stain resistant with an elasticated waist, living up to your old people’s luncheon dreams.

Dr Ruth Lang is an architect, researcher, writer, and senior lecturer at the London School of Architecture.

Mr Charcoal Restaurant 82 Kennington Road, London SE11 6NL mrcharcoaluk.co.uk