Gleadless Valley Estate, Sheffield: ‘Symbol of an emerging city’

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1950s, 1960s, Gleadless Valley

Lewis Womersley, having made his reputation in Northampton, was appointed City Architect for Sheffield City Council in February 1953. Many of you of will know his most celebrated project Park Hill but some say his: (1)

supreme, but often overlooked, achievement … is the Gleadless Valley Estate which combined urban housing types and the natural landscape so effectively that it still looks stunning, especially on a bright winter’s day.

Today, we’ll give that scheme its due.

An early, undated, view of the estate

The context, in this steel city, was firstly the appalling housing conditions created by the rapid urbanisation of the Industrial Revolution. Hitler was to add his own contribution: the Sheffield Blitz in December 1940 killed almost 700 and damaged some 82,000 homes, over half the city’s housing stock. As the city looked to rebuilding, its 1952 Development Plan estimated the need to replace 20,000 unfit homes and build a further 15,000 to cater for the natural increase of population.

An OpenStreetMap of the estate created by Gregory Deryckère

Adding to the difficulties of the task were Sheffield’s hilly terrain and restricted borders. An attempt to extend the city’s boundaries in 1953 was rejected; Sheffield had to rely on its own resources. It bought land either side of the Meers Brook – the Gleadless Valley – lying two to three miles south-east of the city centre: ‘a beauty spot considered too steep and north-facing for development in the 1930s but purchased in desperation in 1952-53’. (2)

Elsewhere in the city, the Council looked to high-rise. In 1949, a deputation from the Housing Committee had visited multi-storey schemes in Copenhagen and Stockholm and concluded that these offered both a necessary and attractive way of solving some of the city’s housing problems. By the mid-1950s, density zones of 70 persons per acres had been agreed for greenfield sites, 100-120 for inner-city slum clearance areas and 200 for ‘one great project’ in the city centre. The latter would become Park Hill (and, less grandly, the Hyde Park flats). The Gleadless Valley would be, in its own way, another great project. (4)

The Gleadless Valley offered a rare opportunity for innovative and exciting design and layout but it required a strong council and enterprising Architect’s Department to harness it.  The leadership of the Council came principally in the form of two strong Housing Committee chairs, Councillors Albert Smith and Harold Lambert, who were prepared and able to give Womersley his head.

Lewis Womersley, pictured at Park Hill

Womersley himself – variously described as ‘domineering’ and ‘a no-nonsense Yorkshireman’ – added his own impetus and style. But, despite that powerful persona, Womersley’s key contribution – in an echo of the pluralism of the London County Council Architect’s Department of the day – was to give his team freedom and latitude to develop their own ideas and designs. By 1963 (just before Womersley’s departure for private practice), Sheffield’s Architect’s Department comprised a staff of over 200, of whom 80 were architectural. (5)

Firstly, Gleadless was part of a grand design encompassing the entire city: ‘Sheffield’s situation at the centre of a landscape of hills and slopes was to be visually integrated, united, through public housing’. Harold Lambert believed that: (6)

The careful exploitation of this topography – the building up of hill-top architectural compositions – is gradually producing something of the fascination of the Italian hill towns. It is stimulating; it is exciting!

Callow Mount, photographed in 1984 © Tower Block, the University of Edinburgh

Morland, Leighton and Raeburn, in the Herdings, photographed in 1987 © Tower Block, the University of Edinburgh

Tower blocks were placed at high points in the city to act as landmarks – in Netherthorpe east of the city centre, Burngreave to the north, and Norfolk Park to the south-east. Additionally, two complexes of point blocks were built in prominent points at either end of the Gleadless Valley scheme: six towers at Callow Mount (one of fifteen storeys and five of thirteen) at the top and three thirteen-storey blocks one mile to the south in the Herdings district. Here, as elsewhere, Womersley applied his favourite maxim from the eighteenth-century landscape architect, Capability Brown, to ‘flood the valleys, plant the tops’.

The re-clad towers of Callow Mount with cluster blocks in the foreground

When it came to the valley – ‘a piece of impeccable English pastoral landscape, everybody’s favourite summer-evening stroll out of south Sheffield’ – finesse was applied. The Council first carried out an aerial survey and slope analysis; gradients averaged one in eight, it was said. The planners concluded that the topography divided ‘the development naturally into three neighbourhoods’ – Hemsworth, Herdings and Rollestone – with each, reflecting the community thinking of the day, planned to have its own schools and shopping centre. (7)

Sloped terraces in Hemsworth with the Oaks Water Tower to the rear

Thenceforth:

The natural characteristics of each area have formed the basis for house design and layout. Much research work was carried out in designing house types suitable for the steep slopes, sometimes leading to unconventional solutions.

Here the genius of Womersley’s approach came into its own. Teams of architects were established with specific briefs – some for two-storey homes, some for maisonettes, some for housing for elderly and so on – but the overall vision was to create a truly mixed development with forms appropriate to the landscape in the various areas of the estate. (8)

The estate as a whole, built between 1955 and 1966, would comprise 4451 homes (2387 houses, 1115 flats and 949 maisonettes), housing a population of around 17,200. Of 450 acres in total, housing occupied 267 acres (including ten acres set aside for private housing), and schools, shops and community facilities took up 22 acres. Some 161 acres of the estate were preserved as parkland and woods. Whilst the housing itself reached the prescribed density of some 70 persons per acre, the plentiful open space reduced the overall density to 39 per acre. But, beyond the numbers, its exceptional quality lies in both its vistas and its detail.

Spotswood Mount: patio housing and the Holy Cross Church

The vistas – better seen in person – can speak for themselves. Here, we’ll take a closer look at the detail. To begin with some of the most remarkable and innovative designs, there are the patio houses, seen dramatically on Spotswood Mount below Holy Cross Church (itself a striking design by Braddock & Martin-Smith completed in 1965). These three-bed, two-storey homes are carefully stacked up the steep hill leading to the church, their first-floor living rooms giving sweeping views across the valley.

An ‘Upside-Down’ house on Grindlow Drive, front and rear

The ‘Upside-Down’ houses dotted around the estate were also designed to both exploit and fit their hilly siting and, as the name implies, are constructed with entrances and living rooms on the upper floor and bedrooms on the lower. Again, they provide stunning views.

Sloped terraced housing, Ironside Drive

Sloped terraces of more conventional two-storey homes were another means of coping with the terrain. Three-storey cluster blocks of flats, adapted to the contours, were yet another adaptation. Less attractive – not least through the greying pebbledash that encases them – are the six-storey blocks along Blackstock and Ironside Roads. The (economising) innovation here was the bridged entrance at second-floor level which avoided the need for lifts.

Maisonette blocks on Ironstone Road

In the words of an admiring Lionel Esher, architect, planner and RIBA president in the mid-sixties: (9)

the architects used every kind of ingenious hill-climbing or adjustable dwelling capable of being entered at any level, with results that are both entertaining and economical.

Higher density housing on flatter land was provided in the four-storey maisonette blocks (concentrated particularly along the Gleadless Road in Rollestone) and three-story blocks of flats elsewhere. And then there are the two-storey houses familiar across the country – the key was always variety and ‘fit’.

Three-storey flats off Blackstock Road

It was, in all, a stupendous achievement and the estate became a Sheffield showpiece, celebrated in the City Council’s report Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield, published (in English, French and Russian) in 1962 and, ten years later, still shown to official visitors as ‘a symbol of an emerging city’. More importantly, it was popular with tenants who thought they were ‘privileged’ to live there and believed it ‘the finest estate in the city’. Beyond the decent homes and facilities, residents praised ‘the attractive surroundings, greenery and open views’. (9)

Esher, writing in 1981, thought it ‘one of the prettiest suburbs in England and undoubtedly a powerful agent in the embourgeoisement of the Yorkshire working man – whatever one may think of that’. It seems astonishing therefore that some, however unfairly, were describing Gleadless as a ‘sink estate’ not too long after.

Terraced housing on Gleadless Road

Symbolically, the estate’s later fall was marked by the decision in 2013 of Sainsbury’s, following Tesco, to ban home deliveries to the area. More objectively, recent data place areas of the Gleadless Valley among the five percent most deprived in the country. High rates of crime and antisocial behaviour were also reported.

Whatever the figures and the always complex, more mixed reality on the ground, views of the estate – though sometimes from those who knew it least – were damning: (10)

The perception of the estate in local and national media is as one of the worst places to live … In the Sheffield urban folklore, Gleadless Valley is synonymous with deprivation, anti-social behaviour and crime.

What had happened?

Well, for one, there was mass unemployment. For Sheffield as a whole, the unemployment rate in the 1960s stood at 2 percent; by 1984, it had reached 16 percent. Between 1979 and 1983, Sheffield lost an average of 1000 jobs a month; 21,000 jobs were lost in the steel industry alone.  Working communities – in every sense – stopped working.

The current headline rate of joblessness in the city is, of course, much lower but such data take little account of the numbers working in low-paid and precarious employment. The testimony of one Gleadless Valley resident captured the shift: (11)

There aren’t many jobs round here, so no-one has got much money. That’s just the way it is. My dad used to work in a steel mill and when I was at school my work experience was done in a steel mill. If the jobs were there … I would have gone into the same work as my dad. That’s what people always did but those jobs have gone now.

Instead, Jack Clithero was working eleven hours a week at £8.50 an hour in ‘the chippy round the corner’.

Flats on Ironside Road

For those in work and receiving benefits and those who were unemployed, the impact of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government’s welfare reforms from 2010 was also devastating. Cuts to Housing Benefit, disability benefits, the impact of the Bedroom Tax and so on were estimated to have reduced the average annual income of working-age adults in Gleadless Valley by £570 – equating, beyond their personal impact, to an £8.8 million hit to the local economy. (12)

There have been other social changes. The growth of smaller households means that the estate, designed for an average approaching four persons per home, is – at 55 percent of its maximum occupancy level – significantly under-occupied. As a result of Right to Buy, just 50 percent of homes are now social rented, 38 percent owner-occupied and 12 percent privately rented. (13)

Maisonette blocks on Spotswood Drive

If all this takes us some way from the architecture and design of the estate, that’s no accident. Of course, there has been some obsolescence. The six-storey maisonette blocks haven’t stood up particularly well. Ground floor garaging in some of the larger maisonette blocks – designed in the car-friendly, affluent sixties – is underutilised and may be adapted.

The now ‘Twin Towers’ of Herdings glimpsed from Ironside Road

The tower blocks were renovated between 1998 and 2011. Their colourful new cladding (thankfully found fire-resistant) makes a visual impact that perhaps even Harold Lambert wouldn’t have anticipated. One tower – Raeburn Place in the Herdings – was demolished in 1996, not through any structural failing but because it was found to have been built on a fault. Flats in Handbank House on Callow Mount are now reserved for elderly people.

In general, the estate escaped large-scale regeneration in its earlier iterations but in 2017 it was allocated £515,000 from the Government’s Estate Regeneration Programme. Resident consultations have followed and various ideas floated. There is a case for new and more diverse housing in Gleadless Valley, for the remodelling of some existing housing and for better use of some of its open space. Residents were clear, however, that they didn’t want the estate sold off to a private developer and it’s a sign of Sheffield’s continuing municipal ambition that it will take the lead role in the thirty-year programme to follow.

Gleadless Valley is not a failed estate, merely an estate that has grown older in a changing world. As Owen Hatherley has argued, ‘even the tweediest anti-Modernist would have to apply industrial strength blinkers to see this place as harsh or inhuman’.  He describes it as an example of the English picturesque – ‘the aesthetic at its most stunning’.

A Times article in 1969 was similarly extravagant in its praise: (15)

Gleadless Valley has the fragmented quality of a village. Here the footpaths wander through rough grass, sidle past back doors, lead under the main road and suddenly emerge in the shopping centre … It is a casual, slightly shaggy environment on which the planners have used the lightest of touches … Gleadless Valley is touched with the English genius for country things: it is a place for children, for family life …

Some of those judgements would later be contested but the estate remains a powerful fulfilment of the political and architectural ideals which inspired it. It remains, quite simply, in its layout and design, one of the outstanding council housing schemes of the last century.

Can this century rediscover some of that ambition and vision?

Sources

(1) Ruth Harman, John Minnis, Roger H. Harper, Sheffield, (Yale University Press, 2004)

(2) Elain Harwood, Space, Hope, and Brutalism: English Architecture, 1945-1975 (Yale University Press, 2014)

(3) Another, more extensive, visit to continental Europe followed in 1954. The ensuing report, ‘Multi-Storey Housing in Some European Countries: Report of the City of Sheffield Housing Deputation’, approved by the Housing Committee in March 1955, concluded that members were ‘satisfied that housing development in the form of well-designed multi-storey flats can provide living standards which are in every way adequate as an alternative to two-storey housing’.

(4) Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave: the Rebuilding of England 1940-1980 (Allen Lane, 1981)

(5) The characterisations of Womersley’s personality come from Stefan Muthesius and Miles Glendinning, Towers of the Welfare State: An Architectural History of British Multi-Storey Housing 1945-1970  (Scottish Centre of Conservation Studies, 2017) and Esher respectively.  Details of the Architect’s Department are drawn from FE Pearce Edwards, JL Womersley and W George Davies, ‘The Work of the Sheffield City Architect’s Department’, Official Architecture and Planning, Vol 26, No. 7 (July 1963)

(6) The preceding quotation comes from Muthesius and Glendinning, Towers of the Welfare State. The words of Harold Lambert come from his foreword to Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield, published by the Housing Development Committee of the Corporation of Sheffield in April 1962.

(7) The Corporation of Sheffield, Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield. The quotation which follows is drawn from the same source.

(8) For a map and typology of the estate’s varied housing, see Urbed, Gleadless Valley Masterplan Public Consultation Boards, pp1-7

(9) The first quote, from the Morning Telegraph, 21 June 1972, and the following are drawn from Barry Goodchild, ‘Local Authority Flats: A Study in Area Management and Design’, The Town Planning Review, vol 58, no 3, July 1987

(10) See Manor, Arbourthorne and Gleadless Housing Market Profile (ND but the data is drawn from the early 2010s). The quotation comes from Reform, Gleadless Valley (ND), uploaded by Sid Fletcher of TowerBlockMetal who has also written fully and informatively on the estate.

(11) Jack Clithero, ‘I thought I’d follow my dad into the steel mill but those days are gone: My Wigan Pier Story’, Daily Mirror, 26 February 2018

(12) Christina Beatty and Steve Fothergill, The Impact of Welfare Reform on Communities and Households in Sheffield (Sheffield Hallam University Centre for Regional Economic and Social, November 2014)

(13) See Urbed, Gleadless Valley Masterplan Public Consultation Boards, pp1-7

(14) Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Britain (Verso, 2010)

(15) Gordon Aspland, ‘Achievements in Bulk Housing’, The Times, 10 November 1969

The Campsbourne Cottage Estate, Hornsey: ‘a colony of self-contained workmen’s dwellings unsurpassed in the country’

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Hornsey, Pre-1914

I’m delighted to feature another guest post today, this by Ray Rogers. Ray is a conservation and historic buildings specialist with a long-standing interest in housing policy and design going back to his early experience of designing council housing in a London borough architects’ department. He is currently writing a series of conservation area appraisals and management plans.

The Campsbourne Cottage Estate in Hornsey, north London, is an early example of council housing built following powers granted to municipal authorities by the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1890. The first part of the Campsbourne estate pre-dates the London County Council’s better-known cottage estates such as Totterdown Fields in Tooting and Tower Gardens in Tottenham.

Nightingale Lane

The design and detailing of the houses and the quality of materials and workmanship give the estate its distinctive character. Apart from some bomb damage sustained in World War Two and some recent alterations to individual houses, the estate remains substantially unchanged in appearance and is exceptionally well preserved. However, it is the story behind the creation of the Campsbourne estate that illustrates the pioneering nature of such developments in responding to the housing issues of their time.

Early housing legislation such as the Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act of 1875 gave local authorities powers to clear entire areas of ‘insanitary’ buildings but few municipalities (with the exception of major cities such as Glasgow, Liverpool and the London County Council) fulfilled the requirement to replace housing lost through slum clearance, and those that did so mainly relied on philanthropic bodies such as the Peabody Trust to undertake rebuilding.

Most new housing was provided by private speculative builders and in Hornsey as elsewhere these houses were aimed at the emerging lower middle classes. It was the skilled working class that was most directly affected by cyclical slumps in speculative building and the rising cost of housing, and advocates of housing for working people made the case that: (1)

working men of all grades and occupations have been unable to get a decent cottage to live in and have had to choose between occupying part of expensive and overcrowded houses, quite unsuitable for more than one family, or occupying a dilapidated and insanitary dwelling … commonly described as slums.

From the last decade of the 19^th century a new type of municipal housing emerged, not just replacing ‘unhealthy’ housing lost through slum clearance but providing a net addition to the housing stock. This was given statutory basis by Part III of the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890. The new Urban District Councils, created under the Local Government Act of 1894, were well placed to take advantage of these new powers and Hornsey U.D.C. lost little time in implementing the opportunities offered by the 1890 Act, following its adoption by the authority in 1896.

Northview Road corner with Nightingale Lane

Hornsey is now part of the London borough of Haringey but until the late 19^th century it was a historic settlement straddling both sides of Hornsey High Street. Development of the surrounding open fields proceeded rapidly following the opening of Hornsey station in the late 1860s. Twenty-four acres of land north of the High Street were acquired in 1866 by the British Land Company which laid out an estate of speculative terraced houses that followed the grid iron street pattern and narrow fronted houses typical of ‘by-law’ housing.

Further development was delayed until after 1896 when the Priory estate was sold, of which four and a half acres of land to the west of Nightingale Lane, on the southern boundary of Alexandra Palace, was acquired by Hornsey U.D.C. in 1897. By 1899 the council had built 108 cottages in Nightingale Lane and in Northview and Southview Roads. Another six acres were bought in 1902 and a second scheme of another 140 cottages was started in 1904. (2)

Hornsey is an exceptionally healthy and well-managed urban district in the northern suburbs of London, contrasting very favourably with other urban districts further eastwards. Realising that ‘prevention is better than cure’ the Council and its officers have endeavoured to prevent the growth of new slum areas by themselves establishing a good supply of model cottages for workmen rather than have their district unduly disfigured and deteriorated by the objectionable and overcrowded products of the jerry-builder.

An early photograph of Nightingale Lane

Both schemes (and a third scheme in Highgate) were overseen by Edwin J Lovegrove, the Borough Engineer and Surveyor, who had designed an earlier cottage development for Richmond Town Council, the ‘Richmond Municipal Cottages’, regarded as one of the first successful cottage developments and described in detail by William Thompson in his Housing Handbook of 1903. Thompson also describes the Hornsey cottages development, then known as the Nightingale Lane scheme, with special attention given to the costs and financing of the project, resulting in a self-financing development with rents considerably lower than those in the private rental market and with no impact on the local rates. On reviewing the Campsbourne schemes in 1905 James Cornes wrote: (3)

No wonder that, with so much knowledge of this subject, he (Lovegrove) has been able … to rear a colony of self-contained workmen’s dwellings unsurpassed in the country. This for London is a revolution in cottage building, and clearly indicates the thought, care, and real ability that the Surveyor must of necessity have put into this work. The Housing Committee and Corporation must be congratulated upon the excellent results of this undertaking, and for the splendid example they have been able to set to other municipalities.

On the east side of Nightingale Lane, the Campsbourne School, opened in 1897, was contemporary with the cottage estate. Designed by Thomas Chatfield Clarke, architect to Hornsey School Board, the school buildings are a good example of a late Queen Anne style Board school.

Northview Road

The first Campsbourne scheme had two classes of houses, Class A having a sitting-room, living room, scullery and three bedrooms and Class B having similar accommodation but smaller and with two bedrooms. The sitting room was in fact the ‘front parlour’ and the living room was the kitchen with scullery attached.

The second scheme was more ambitious in the range and size of cottages provided. There were four classes of dwelling: Class A had a sitting room, living room, scullery and four bedrooms; Class B the same but with three bedrooms and Class C had two bedrooms. Class D contained a living room, small scullery, bathroom and two bedrooms. The innovation in this scheme was the use of Cornes and Haighton’s combined range, copper and bath in each cottage. The bath could be covered when not in use. The Class A cottage provided for the larger family, as described with typical Edwardian moral condescension by James Cornes in 1905: (3)

… attention should be given to the highest rented cottage in the scheme, providing as it does four bedrooms and a larger sitting room and living room, let to the working man with a wage earning family, thus keeping in a comfortable home grown-up sons and daughters who, too frequently, are turned out into the world and, as a result, contract early and undesirable marriages which might have been avoided had the home surroundings been of a different character.

Second scheme – Class A cottage

The completed cottage estate consisted of four streets of two storey houses arranged in short terraces of six to eight houses each. The houses are built in red brick with shallow brick arches over window and door openings. Each of the end of terrace houses are stepped forward slightly and have large projecting gables with barge boards, with two smaller gables within the terrace. The houses have flat street fronts and there are no bays or other projections apart from some porches on the second phase of building.

Northview Road

The plain uniformity of the terraces is lightened by the use of simple repetitive detailing in the brickwork. All of the houses have a scalloped brick relief panel set beneath each window cill and a course of dog tooth brickwork set between two projecting brick courses runs along the full length of each terrace.

Southview Road

The houses in Nightingale Lane, Northview Road and Southview Road formed the first phase of development. On these houses the dog-tooth band course runs across each elevation at first floor window cill level. On Nightingale Lane and Northview Road the large chimney stacks also have a dogtooth detail. Northview Road, together with the Nightingale Lane frontage, is the best-preserved of the two streets as Southview Road was affected by bomb damage in World War Two.

Beechwood Road

Hawthorn Road and Beechwood Road comprised the second phase of the development and show some changes in form and materials, although still based on terraces each of six or eight houses. The main difference is the use of yellow London stock brick for alternate terraces on both sides of the road, giving the street frontage a more varied and picturesque appearance than in the first phase. The dogtooth band course is retained on the red brick terraces but it runs in a continuous band midway between ground and first floor instead of at window cill level.

Hawthorn Road

On some of the yellow brick terraces the dogtooth detail was replaced with a continuous projecting band of dentilled brickwork in red brick and a similar detail can be seen on some terraces in the LCC’s Tower Gardens estate. The window arches and scalloped relief panel are also all in red brick. Five of the later terraces have paired porches either side of the projecting party wall with a lean-to slate roof and small paned windows.

Hawthorn Road

Hawthorn Road

By 1914 the rest of the land south of Alexandra Palace and to the west of Nightingale Lane had been developed by private builders, completing Northview, Southview, Hawthorn and Beechwood Roads with speculative terraced housing, some using the eclectic pattern book of local architect John Farrer and others in the form of ‘Tyneside’ flats, in which the street frontage has two front doors, one leading to a ground floor flat and the second leading directly to a staircase to a first floor flat.

1914 Ordnance Survey map showing the extent of the cottage estate with Alexandra Park to the north

Building in Hornsey stopped in 1914 and after the war councillors could not agree on the need for further council housing in the borough, with many feeling that adequate provision had been made pre-war. The council resisted complying with the Housing and Town Planning Act (the Addison Act) of July 1919, which charged local authorities with building more working-class homes with controlled rents, even though poor housing and insanitary conditions, particularly in the Campsbourne area, had been brought to the attention of its Public Health Committee. An editorial in the Hornsey journal of 7^th February 1919 said: (4)

Inasmuch as Hornsey is not altogether what is superficially described as a “working-class” area, it will be seen that the Town Council have not lagged in the provision of workmen’s dwellings. The first of the four schemes was completed in 1898 and the last in 1912. We have reason to believe that the dwellings are almost exclusively occupied by men who actually earn their living in the borough – the local police, the postmen, municipal employees, and others.

The Council can say with the strictest veracity that they have provided for a considerable number of families, but that no further accommodation is needed is not so incontrovertible. Is there no overcrowding in Hornsey? Is there no “unsuitable accommodation”? Are the artisan and the labouring the only classes for whom cheap provision should be made?

Beechwood Road

Towards the end of 1919 the council eventually gave in to pressure and instructed Edwin Lovegrove to draw up plans for 79 houses to be built on land that had been requisitioned during the war for allotments. However, the housing scheme was never progressed, being dropped on grounds of cost, and the land was bought by the council in 1923 as part of the newly laid out Priory park. This marks the end of a chapter in the pioneering of council house building in Hornsey.

Hawthorn Road

The Campsbourne Cottage estate makes no pretensions to great architecture or town planning, being barely touched by the influence of the early Garden City movement, but nevertheless it remains a significant milestone in the provision of affordable housing for working class families and when compared to the housing typical of the time this was no mean achievement. (3)

… Within a few miles of the heart of London he (E J Lovegrove) has succeeded in building a self-contained cottage with a forecourt, garden at the rear and four rooms including a bath and every other modern convenience, to let at 6s. 6d. per week inclusive rental.

The houses are still much valued today. The estate was designated as a conservation area in 1994. A conservation area appraisal and management plan has recently been prepared and it is hoped this will assist the planning authority in controlling some of the piecemeal changes being wrought by ‘home improvements’ that are beginning to detract from the unified appearance of the estate.

Notes

If you’re interested in learning more of Hornsey’s local history, do visit the website of the Hornsey Historical Society.

Sources

(1) William Thompson, quoted in The Lowestoft Journal, 25 February 1899

(2) William Thompson, The Housing Handbook (1903)

(3) James Cornes, Modern Housing in Town and Country (1905)

(4) Janet Owen, Hornsey’s Post-War Housing Problem, Hornsey Historical Society