Blending History, Modernity and Creativity on Greville Road

Sheet music strewn across the floor. Buckets placed beneath leaks. A false ceiling that half-covered the high windows, and a ladder leading up through a trapdoor. That was the sight awaiting Candida and Sloan Hickman when they visited the studio at 26a Greville Road for the first time. ‘Poignant, romantic and full of potential!’ is how they describe it now.

The studio had once been used by the sculptor Sir William Goscombe John. Born in Cardiff in 1860, as a young man he studied at the Royal Academy, travelled in Europe and Africa, and worked in Rodin’s Paris studio. Then, in 1891, John married the Swiss-born Marthe Weiss, returning to London the following year and establishing a home in Kilburn.

By the early 1900s, John was celebrated for statutes of eminent figures and began to receive public commissions. Today, he is remembered for his moving memorials after the Boer War and the sinking of the Titanic, as well as to the victims of the First World War. And he worked during a fascinating period in art history, when sculpture left behind the strict classical style of the Victorian Era and became more naturalistic.

It was John who likely turned Nos.24-26 Greville Road into a family home with a double studio space attached. He lived at the address until his death in 1951, becoming ‘Kilburn’s most famous resident’, according to the art historian Dr Roger Bowdler.

This creative heritage continued into the second half of the twentieth century, when 26 Greville Road became home to sculptor Willi Soukop. Born in Vienna in 1907, Soukop fled to Britain in 1934, where a community of artists were seeking refuge from Nazi persecution at Dartington Hall in Devon. This was also where he met his wife, the French dancer Simone Michelle, later a member of the Modernist ballet company of Kurt Jooss.

In 1945, Soukop moved to London. Over the following decades, he was commissioned for numerous public works of sculpture, as well as becoming a respected teacher. He was still living at No.26 when Candida and Sloan moved in, and always hard at work in his studio, with a beret on his head and a handwarmer to keep off the cold.

Around the same time, Candida had also enrolled for a foundation course at Chelsea School of Art. Visiting one evening, Soukop encouraged the young artist, saying, ‘you must work, work, work!’ Another evening, the couple returned home to find an array of sculptures laid out in the yard, en route to an exhibition.

Over time, the false ceiling was removed, the roof repaired and the beautiful skylights were triple glazed. The new interiors were the work of the respected architect and academic Jonathan Woolf. Called ‘one of the most significant architects of his generation’, Woolf was celebrated for his open and calm contemporary buildings.

At Greville Road, he turned the studio into a creative living space by creating an open-plan lower level with separate seating areas, and a mezzanine floor with a kitchen, a dining room and bedrooms. As the couple recalls: ‘no other architect used Frank Lloyd Wright’s room proportions to achieve the natural, unnoticed balance of height and area as he did.’

One of the most important features of the design was the moveable screens, which made the space more flexible and allowed for privacy. These screens were inspired by the traditional mashrabiya found across the Middle East and created by Nabil Ghali, who has pioneered the use of traditional and vernacular building methods in modern Egypt.

The couple have a deep love of Islamic art and architecture. They spent five days in Cairo meeting with Ghali in his office, as well as wandering the narrow streets of the city to find examples of masharabiya that they liked. Describing the beautiful screens that now separate the internal spaces, Candida recalls: ‘They have never failed to bring joy.’