Named winner of the RIBA Stirling Prize 2023, the winning project revives medieval tradition of treating older people with the dignity they deserve.

The Almshouse Association was delighted to see the The John Morden Centre, specially built as a social hub where residents of Morden College Almshouses can interact and live full social lives, named the winner of the RIBA Stirling Prize. We were equally delighted to see the news picked up in a number of news outlets and publications including The Financial Times, The Guardian, BBC news and radio, The Big Issue and many architectural magazines. (see below for links)

Featured below also is one of the articles in full, as published by Building Design and written by Ben Flatman:

Mé’s winning project revives medieval tradition of treating older people with the dignity they deserve

By Ben Flatman 20 October 2023

This Stirling Prize winner places a much-needed focus on how we house and support people later in their lives

John Morden Centre_215_Jim Stephenson_ORIGINAL_3
Source: Jim Stephenson
The John Morden Centre by MĂŠ Architects

Alex Ely references George Bernard Shaw as part-inspiration for the design of Mae’s Stirling-winning John Morden Centre in Blackheath: “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” It is an implied criticism of not only how we approach ageing as a culture, but of how we accommodate our elderly population.

The John Morden Centre seeks to address this failing head-on, by creating a social hub where older people can interact and live full social lives. But it is an exception.

The sorry truth is that most recent British architecture in this sector has too often been an afterthought. Housing for the elderly is sometimes found in repurposed Victorian villas, or buildings that look depressingly like storage facilities. Rarely is it in places that look like they were designed with the necessary care and consideration for the particular needs of older people.

Mae’s building shows us that it does not need to be like this, and that the spaces we create for this demographic can be inspiring and soulful. It is also an important reminder that – if we look back a little farther – this country has a rich history of creating often very special places that offer security, support and a sense of community for this demographic.

The John Morden Centre sits within the grounds of Morden College, a charitable foundation established in 1695. The handsome main building is sometimes attributed to Wren, but was implemented by the master mason, Edward Strong.

The architecture of Mae’s building imbues the new social and gathering spaces with many of the same values that inspired the design of the original buildings. They share a sense that life is to be treasured in all its stages, and that it can and should always be lived to its full extent.

Morden College can trace its origins to the medieval alms-houses, which were Christian charitable foundations, specifically established to provide support and relief to the elderly and poor. They first appeared in England as early as the 10th century.

Residents were usually required to pray for the souls of the founders who had built and endowed the almshouses. Through their promotion of a shared, communal life, combined with what was often beautiful vernacular architecture, they fostered a powerful sense of place and togetherness.

The idea of the alms house – essentially supported communal living for the elderly – may be a thousand years old, but it remains a powerful model for how to enable older people to live with dignity, self-respect, and varying degrees of independence.

We know that loneliness and a sense of isolation can be key contributors to poor mental and physical health in later life. The John Morden Centre builds on the strengths of the alms house model, with an added focus on social interaction and engagement.

John Morden Centre site plan 2
Source: MÊ Architects

Its spine-like enclosed “colonnade” twists through the length of the building, linking a cafĂ© with a variety of flexible spaces that include a theatre. The colonnade references the original Morden College’s collonaded internal courtyard. Mae’s building also explicitly references the cloisters and courtyards of those even earlier medieval antecedents.

This project comes at a crucial time, when an ageing population requires us to think ever more carefully about the implications of later life. Mae’s own recent Daventry House project, which forms part of the Church Street masterplan in Marylebone, and provides 59 supported living flats for older people, demonstrates how the practice is leading efforts in the UK to reimagine this time-tested model for a wide range of contexts.

It is wonderful to see architecture for older members of society that seeks to give its inhabitants a sense of joy. As Morden College’s CEO, David Rutherford-Jones, observes: “It will enable them to feel good about themselves and about life
 residents walking into John Morden Centre find themselves in a place that recognises their importance.” article ends

Direct links to articles published on this story

Sir John Morden and the Foundation of Morden College

Sir John Morden, 1st Baronet (13 August 1623 – 6 September 1708) was a successful English merchant and philanthropist who also served briefly as an MP.

In 1695, after serving two years as Treasurer of Bromley College, a home for clergy widows, he resigned to establish, with his wife Susan – at a cost of £10,000 – his own almshouse for ‘poor Merchants
and such as have lost their Estates by accidents, dangers and perils of the seas or by any other accidents ways or means in their honest endeavours to get their living by means of Merchandizing’. Morden College was built (to a design sometimes attributed to Sir Christopher Wren, but largely carried out by Edward Strong, his master mason) on the north-east corner of the Wricklemarsh estate and was intended to house 40 single or widowed men. College trustees were drawn from the Turkey Company and since 1884 from the Aldermen of the City of London. The building was visited and written about by John Evelyn and Daniel Defoe. Evelyn’s Diary for 9 June 1695 records: “Went afterwords to see Sir Jo: Mordens Charity or Hospital on Black-heath now building for the Reliefe of Merchands that have failed, a very worthy Charitye, nobel building.”[1]

Defoe wrote about the college in his Tour Through Great Britain, published in 1724:”It was built by Sir John Morden, a Turkey merchant of London, but who liv’d in a great house at the going off from the heath, a little south of the Hospital, on the road to Eltham. His first design, as I had it from his own mouth the year before he began to build, was to make apartments for forty decay’d merchants, to whom he resolved to allow £40 per annum each, with coals, a gown (and servants to look after their apartments) and many other conveniences so as to make their lives as comfortable as possible, and that, as they had liv’d like Gentlemen, they might dye so.”

Sir John Morden died in 1708, aged 86, and was buried in Morden College chapel crypt. Created c. 1717–1725, statues of Sir John and his wife, Lady Susan Morden, adorn the western front of the college.  The college has since expanded several times and continues its charitable work.

Apart from the college, Sir John’s name lives on in the name of pubs on Brand Street (Greenwich) and Campshill Road (Lewisham), and local street names in the Royal Borough of Greenwich.

posted 23 October 2023