Welwyn Garden City was founded in 1920, the second garden city after Letchworth based on the principles of Ebenezer Howard. Howard envisioned in the garden cities movement, a balance of city and country, allowing its citizens the advantages of both and disadvantages of neither. The town was to provide homes and work, as well as education and leisure. It is the first of these that we will explore, the varied housing of the garden city. Louis de Soissons was appointed the chief architect and planner of Welwyn. The style he used for the city was Neo-Georgian, the revival of Georgian architectural styles which became popular again in the 1920’s and still makes its influence felt today. The first houses were built to the west of De Soissons’ town centre. Along streets such as Parkway, Guessens Road and Handside Lane you can find the oldest houses in the town, designed in Neo-Georgian and Neo-Tudor styles by De Soissons and his assistants C.H. James and A.W. Kenyon. Just off Handside Lane we find Meadow Green, a close that was used as the site of the Daily Mail Village in 1922. A range of houses were built to show off the newest and most economical building styles, and included steel and concrete framed houses. No.19 was the concrete framed house, now converted into flats, designed by De Soissons with a flat roof in an Italian villa style. De Soissons designed a pair of houses in a similar style on High Oaks Road, around the same period. As well as James and Kenyon, De Soissons was assisted by others who would go on to make a name for themselves in later years, such as N.F. Cachemaille-Day, Felix Lander and Paul Mauger. Most of the housing stock in the interwar years was designed in the standard Neo-Georgian style laid down by De Soissons, but among the few to break with this stricture was one of Mauger’s designs. In the Pentley Park area of the town, there are three modernist influenced houses dating from the late 1930’s. Nos. 24 and 26 Pentley Park were both built in 1938, No.26 designed by Mauger and No.24 by emigre architect E.C. Kaufmann. Kaufmann moved to Britain from Germany in 1933 and worked on a variety of projects, along the way changing his surname to Kent. Both 24 & 26 are strongly influenced by the Central European international style modernism which was beginning to spread to Britain at the time. They are the only examples of the style from the interwar era in the town. Next door to these two is No.34 Coneydale designed by J.W.M. Dudding for Hugo Leakey. Dudding designed the house in a more modestly modernist influenced style than its neighbours, with a echoes of the surrounding Neo-Georgian softening the shock of the new. Mauger went into private practice after the Second World War and carried on designing buildings for the town. He designed a large number of houses in the north western section of Welwyn Garden City, although none with the hard modernist edges of Pentley Park. More representative of his post war output are the six houses he designed in Reddings (Nos.18-24) in 1955, which won him a Housing Design medal that year, conventionally styled brick houses with steeply pitched tiled roofs. Other post war designs are also represented on Reddings, as well as nearby streets Ashley Close, The Glade and Roundwood Drive. The Architects Co-Partnership designed three houses in the area, Nos. 4 & 5 The Glade and No.38 Reddings, between 1951 and 1955. All three houses show the influence of Scandinavian modernism, with their simple designs in brick and shallow pitched roofs, a style which strongly influenced post war British modernism until the coming of Brutalism a few years later,. Unfortunately, No. 4 The Glade which was designed by Leo De Syllas for his father has had an unsympathetic extension in the last few years. In the same area there are also houses designed by a number of architects like John Bickerdike, William Allen, Gordon Nettleton and Michael Meacher, all in the restrained modernist style of the ACP houses. Louis De Soissons influence was not just left to the interwar period. His post war firm of De Soissons Peacock Hodges Robertson & Fraser designed a large number of houses as part of the town's expansion in the 1960’s. No 82-102 Knightsfield are a group of houses, maisonettes and flats by the firm from 1956. The design of the dwellings follows on from De Soissons’ interwar work in the town, using the Neo-Georgian template to integrate the building into the town's fabric. The houses are built in yellow brick and feature concave metal window canopies. More contemporary were the houses designed by the firm a short distance away in Blythway (1964). A collection of houses, flats and bungalows in brick with shallow pitched or monopitch roofs. These, and others in Fern Grove and the Panshanger estate (both 1968), were designed after De Soissons death in 1962, possibly accounting for the change in styles. The Panshanger estate was large housing area developed by the town in the 1960’s and 70’s. As well as De Soissons firm, houses were designed and built by the Commission for New Towns, which had taken over from the WGC Development Corporation in 1966. The architect for this project was Oliver Carey, who had previously designed a number of buildings for Hertfordshire County Council. For the estate, Carey designed houses with asymmetrical pitched roofs featuring clerestory dormers, mainly in brick and with timber cladding. The De Soissons houses on the estate are more conventional with pitched roofs and tile hanging. Also on the estate are a group of houses by the Panway Self Build Group. As the name suggests, the 10 houses are self built, with timber framing and brick infill. The building of the houses took 18 months with the self builders agreeing to put in at least 16 hours of work a week to get the project finished. Although not as radical in design as the housing in some of the New Towns that followed, the houses of Welwyn Garden City are interesting for their ability to combine the conventional Neo-Georgian and Arts and Crafts influences with the more challenging modernist styles coming from Europe. The early exhibition houses used new techniques like steel framing, concrete and flat roofs, which would become de rigueur 40 years later. The town's development corporation also was a proving ground for architects like NF Cachemaille-Day and Felix Lander who would go onto to form a partnership with Herbert Welch and introduce the sun trap window and moderne style to London’s suburbs. Hopefully the new spate of 21st century garden cities will be as interesting architecturally in 50 years time as Welwyn Garden City.
See Also- Welch, Lander & Day Paul Mauger The Post War Houses of Hatfield
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AuthorExploring modernism in the garden cities and new towns of Hertfordshire. Archives
March 2020
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