The three apartment blocks in Langham House Close were designed in 1955 by James Stirling (1926-1992) and James Gowan (1923-) for the Manousso Group as a speculative development. They were built in 1957-58 on a site that was formerly the back garden of a Georgian manor house. The blocks were Grade II listed in 1998 and upgraded to Grade II* in 2006.

The main block (primarily built of load-bearing London stock brick and timber shuttered concrete) is three storeys in height with floor levels expressed externally by concrete bands. Each block has a largely glazed entrance hall with dogleg stairs. Apartments in the main block feature balconies drained by concrete gargoyles whose pattern derives from Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, and Maisons Jaoul. Stirling wrote widely on Le Corbusier in the years preceding his work at Langham House Close and was also known to be studying the work of Dutch architects such as Theo Van Doesburg at the time. It is also thought that the warehouse buildings of Stirling’s native Liverpool influenced the design of these apartment blocks. According to English Heritage, “this mix of vernacular and early modern movement influences with raw Corbusian concrete (far better finished here than in Le Corbusier’s work) heralded a new style of architecture in Britain, which with its acknowledgement of the massiveness of many buildings of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution was a truly British contribution to the international modernist canon of the late 1950s, and gave an appropriate aesthetic to the title ‘New Brutalism.’”

The architecture of the Langham House Close flats is as impressive inside as it is externally. The structural brick and concrete fireplaces are particularly noteworthy, but the attention to detail and quality of construction is to be admired throughout. “If we consider this building within the context of other post-war apartment complexes,” wrote Eva Branscome of the Twentieth Century Society in a recent article concerning the listing of the buildings, “we can find none at all that has dedicated such a thorough approach to the whole building both inside and out.” Branscome goes on to praise the “rigorous approach” of the design, describing it as “a truly exemplary ensemble” and “a benchmark against which other apartment blocks can be measured”. Catherine Croft, the director of the Twentieth Century Society, further added that “the flats themselves are striking with ingenious floor plans and geometric concrete fireplaces. They still look very modern and are exciting spaces to live in.”