Lynch Architects have completed the renovation and extension of Westminster Coroner’s Court, a Grade II listed late-Victorian building Horseferry Road, London – a stone’s throw from Parliament and Westminster Abbey. The extension is unashamedly present, not trying to mimic or silently subsume into the existing architecture, and though the flat end of the barrel-vaulted block is stark, it does not dominate or fight against the historic red-brick neighbour. Despite obvious differences between the old and new components, there is a calming conversation and ease of relationship between the two.



This careful consideration to volume and weight continues throughout. This is a building that must work at different registers, needing to announce its civicness to the street, but for bereaved families and friends of the deceased attending inquests – which include high profile cases such as the Grenfell Tower disaster as well as less publicised events – offering a sense of assuredness, safety, sanctity, and calm at a more intimate scale.

This is carried through the project with various strategies which at their best incorporate not only architectural but also artistic and landscaping elements. The scheme deploys a sombre and calming material palette throughout, there is intelligent use of natural light and an allowance of shadows, and series of windows by Brian Clarke, a leading contemporary artist who works with stained glass, spills moments of diffracted colour into spaces within.


In many ways, Westminster Coroner’s Court was a perfect commission for Lynch Architects, a firm that have recently completed two somewhat larger schemes a short distance away in the rapidly growing area around Victoria Station. n2 & Nova Place, a complex of three buildings sits behind and framing the Victoria Palace theatre, subtle kinks in the plan of higher stories and a shifting mathematical rhythm playing out across the façades of the different blocks adds a sense of the poetic to large masses. Down the road, the Zig Zag Building is a large mixed-use project taking up a long section of Victoria Street’s real estate, but where some developers may place a single block taking up the entire length, Lynch’s stuttering façade and further rhythmic play with vertical fins, allow for the scale of the building to appear less through shifting light, shade, and geometry.

Buildings of this scale, even with strong detailing and considered poetry, work at a different urban and psychological scale to the Coroner’s Court. Zig Zag and Nova Place speak to the somewhat chaotic urban patchwork of the area, with good consideration to street-level touches but for the most part existing high above the passerby. The Coroner’s Court had to have a different relationship, speaking more to the human condition in scale, form, and feeling. It does this externally, with the new extension a clear statement in the street but not in any overpowering way, and moreso it does this internally, with sequences of carefully detailed spaces at an intimate and comforting scale.



The barrel vaulted extension carries a tomblike presence, but not in a daunting way. It references the Santa Maria dei Miracoli, one of the great Venetian churches that gently emerges from the sinuous passages and canals that lead to its tight Cannaregio square. The Coroner’s Court, however, is secular, and has not only stripped back Santa Maria’s Christian symbolism but also its rich ornamentation, here now offering itself up as a symbolic volume.

The interior is similarly stripped back, but with enough texture in the wooden floor, battened surfaces, and stone blocks to offer a warmth where such withdrawn spaces may act otherwise. This allows the moments of Clarke’s windows to sing even more, working twice: as flat panes of glass with clarity of image and colour, and then splayed across the architecture, where the colour and form of the artworks conflate with material.



Clarke had a major retrospective last year at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery, a short walk from Westminster Coroner’s Court. There, the artist presented a series of freestanding panels, wall-mounted glass in frames, and hanging systems, many containing his recurring motifs of flowers and collage. The works stood powerfully in the white-walled space, but his work sings most richly when tightly involved with architecture, not just presented within it. Lynch Architects are not the first architects he has worked with. With a career spanning five decades, Clarke has already designed glass works for projects by I.M. Pei, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid and more. His work can be seen in all kinds of building, from Saudi skyscrapers to a Holocaust Memorial Synagogue.

It is in projects like that last one, in Darmstadt, Germany that Clarke’s glass works best, where the interplay of light and form can carry reflective depth, and so it is at the Coroner’s Court that his windows offer moments of abstraction which might help those attending the building with their situation.

Outside, Lynch Architects have found space for a small garden, offering external respite for air and reflection. As with other elements of the design detail, it draws references from the bays, niches, and cornicing of the historic building it abuts. A salvaged limestone fountain adds a gentle noise and touch of history to the new sandstone paving and precast concrete forms, all softened with planting designed by Richard Nye. The void of an empty recessed arch watches over, its absence poetically present.