The Salvation Army Men’s Social Services Centre completed in 1974, replaced a ‘Men’s Palace’ or itinerants’ hostel that had been demolished for an office development. A curved linear building in blue brindle brick, the building sits in a commanding position adjoining the seventeenth-century Keelman’s Hospital in City Road. Ryder first proposed two parallel blocks, but then he noted a proposed road improvement that introduced a curve and this prompted him to change the roadside block accordingly

The curved canopy somewhat resembles that at Lubetkin’s Highpoint II in Highgate, as does the rooftop penthouse with its arched paraboloid roof – here the superintendent’s flat. Ryder and Yates had formed their partnership in 1953 and these details were honed by the pair over many years, particularly as larger jobs came their way in the 1960s. Another regular feature of their work, seen at the Salvation Army, was the mounding of the surrounding landscape into what Yates termed ‘earth sculptures’.

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