Bedford Passage


A contemporary housing scheme with 
a Grade II listed workhouse

Marrying the old and the new

What are the challenges of developing a central London site that includes a Georgian workhouse that might have inspired a classic novel? This was the scenario facing Llewelyn Davies in London’s Fitzrovia. Zahra Lodhi, Associate and Design Team Leader on the Retained Buildings aspect of the Bedford Passage scheme, explains:

Our site between Cleveland and Charlotte Streets was owned by the University College London Hospitals Charity (UCLHC) whose original idea was to clear the existing buildings for new housing. By 2015, however, when Llewelyn Davies got involved, the brief had changed radically.

The Dickens connection

The site incorporates a building constructed in the 1770s to house the parish’s sick and poor. From 1836, as the Strand Union Workhouse, it accommodated up to 500 men and women in notoriously harsh conditions. Its historical interest as one of the oldest London’s workhouses is obvious, but it also has links with one of Britain’s most popular novelists.

Charles Dickens lived at 22 Cleveland Street from 1815 to 1816, and from 1828 to 1831. The workhouse may well have been in his thoughts when he came to write Oliver Twist in the 1830s.

Used as an infirmary by Middlesex Hospital until 2005, the building was empty and neglected. The proposal to demolish, however, met opposition from local organisations, heritage groups, and the Dickens Fellowship amongst others. Their campaign resulted in the main workhouse building becoming Grade II listed in 2011.

The Llewelyn Davies solution

Bedford Passage now represents a mixed-use and heritage refurbishment project. Our winning proposal delivers 13 market residential apartments and two town houses in the Retained Buildings alongside a New Build Development providing Affordable and Market Residential apartments, plus Office and Healthcare space.

The scheme sits within the Charlotte Street Conservation Area and the New Build takes great care to respect the scale, roof forms, and overall building height etc of the area. Similar considerations informed our decision to retain the unlisted houses constructed in the 1800s to the north and south of the workhouse. These complement the main building and modern replacements (as proposed in some schemes) would have sat uncomfortably with the existing streetscape.

Unearthing the past

Construction work started with the Retained Buildings but the New Build Development had to pause for archaeological investigations.

The area behind the workhouse had been a burial ground until 1853. Once the later additions to the building were demolished, archaeologists from the Museum of London dug trial pits which, as expected, uncovered human burials.

The likely number on the entire site proved impossible to estimate but, in the worst-case scenario (for us and the Client), could have amounted to tens of thousands. Fortunately, the number turned out to be nearer 3,000 although excavating, analysing, reassembling, and reinterring the human remains, all at the Client’s expense, still took around two years.

The exterior works

The listed workhouse building was constructed in classic yellow stock brick over four stories.

The works included cleaning and making good of the brickwork, repairing as much as possible, and replacing only where necessary. We were able to reuse some bricks from the site, otherwise sourcing exact colour matches from brickwork specialists.

The building, wrapped in scaffolding to keep it dry, was largely repointed (carefully matching the lime in the mortar) and the brickwork was then recleaned. When finished it looked almost too new, but everything is already starting to blend in.

Much of the original brickwork was shot and had caused internal movement and cracking. That called for remedial work including the installation of helibars. We also had to dig down several metres to underpin the whole building. Quite a scary process.

In addition, we refurbished and rebuilt the original wall to the front of the building for which we were able to draw on existing photographic records.

Whilst empty, the building had been invaded by greenery and the roof had crumbled allowing water ingress. Without our intervention, it would eventually have fallen apart. Now it should be good for another few centuries.

The new apartments

The workhouse interior retained virtually no original features. In its time as an infirmary, it had been partitioned into offices and it was no longer possible to appreciate the historical space.

Just one stairwell remained of the workhouse’s original two (one for men, one for women) with a nicely detailed, if later, timber handrail. It was not ideally located for a main staircase, but we were not permitted to move it, so we made it work.

To respect the history of the building, we avoided anything super-modern or pastiche, designing apartments that are contemporary but with a touch of heritage whilst meeting modern living standards. The use of bulkheads and uplighting enhances the interiors and the choice of materials, finishes, and sanitary-ware reflects the light and airy feel.

Achieving the required energy efficiency standards in an historic building is always a challenge. We couldn’t replace what would have been the original single-glazed sash windows, so had to fit secondary glazing. We also applied an insulating lime render and wood fibre insulation board to the internal face of the exterior walls, allowing the brickwork to breathe and reducing condensation and damp (whilst losing around 150mm from the interior spaces!).

For heating and cooling, we wanted to take the building into the future and have therefore installed an MVHR heat and recovery system, with a fan coil unit that also provides cooling, as well as extraction and supply.

A job well done

The workhouse refurbishment is now complete, but it’s been a long haul. We started on the project with drawings and sketches in 2015 and construction work began in 2019. We then experienced the pandemic and two years of archaeology. The time, however, seems to have gone remarkably quickly. Most importantly, the team has achieved exactly what we set out to accomplish.

Any further questions?

If you have any further questions about this article, please contact us via london@ldavies.com or 0207 907 7900