Berthold Lubetkin’s grade I-listed modernist masterpiece Finsbury Health Centre is set to undergo a £1.25m restoration led by Avanti Architects and supported by campaign group the Twentieth Century Society.

Designed by Lubetkin and the Tecton Group before the foundation of the National Health Service, the centre was the realisation of a radical humanitarian brief for a deprived central London community, delivered in a new building-type.

The C20 Society said the centre, completed in 1938, encapsulated all of modernism’s progressive ideals – social, technical, aesthetic – combined with a political and architectural conviction unequalled by any other work of its era. In the process the reinforced-concrete structure set a benchmark for the modernist design of many subsequent health centres and hospitals.

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