Wolton, who died in 2021 aged 87, helped launch Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. Her dilapidated London home is almost all that remains of her fearless work
Wolton, who died in 2021 aged 87, helped launch Richard Rogers and Norman Foster before swapping architecture for landscaping. Her dilapidated London home is almost all that remains of her fearless, uncompromising workehind an old brick wall in Belsize Lane, in a posh part of north London, stands a single-storey house that you would hardly know was there. Only a glimpse of a pitched glass roof gives a sign of shelter.
Her life was helped and hindered by inherited wealth, which gave the means to design houses for herself, but relieved her of the need to persuade and collaborate with clients and co-workers. “If only Georgie had been obliged to earn a living,” – according to an old friend, the retired law lord Lennie Hoffmann – “and had to accept the ordinary run of compromises that dealings with clients usually made necessary, I think she would have been a famous architect.
This was the start of Team 4, which included Wolton, Su Rogers and the two men. Wolton lent the practice “two or three thousand pounds – quite a lot in those days”, recalls Su now, plus the benefit of her professional qualification, but left after a few months, without having designed any buildings. This decision, she later said, was “absolutely exonerated by the subsequent division of those two” – Norman and Richard – “you could see them pulling apart.
The design of Belsize Lane, although a new construction, was about getting you to look at other things than its architecture. It is a single-storey structure, its 3,000 sq ft of floor space composed into a plan of long rectangles that looks like a T merged with an F. These divide the site into three gardens, of whose different characters you are continuously aware while moving round the interior.
Cliff Road Studios, London NW1 – two adjoining blocks designed by Wolton, completed in 1968 and 1971.Georgie seemed to regard the existence of rain almost as an impertinence. Water entered readily through the optimistic roof and window details of the Belsize Lane house, while the otherwise elegant garden elevation at Cliff Road features some contorted arrangements of gutters and flashings.
Stephen Welch, a gardener who worked with her for 30 years, describes her planting as “naturalistic”, within a more straight-lined architectural structure. She would let plants, within reason, thrive and grow as they wanted. She preferred “small, delicate flowers” and nothing too big or hybridised. She liked the occasional use of strong colours, and movement and texture: “Like all good gardeners,” he says, “she was aware of the different senses.
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