Hatfield House was built in 1611 by Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury and First Minister to King James I. It is a splendid example of a Jacobean great house, and has been the stopping place of monarchs such as Mary I, Elizabeth I and Edward VI. In the shadow of this great house are a number of other great examples of domestic architecture, Hatfields post war houses. Hatfield already had one notable modernist houses before its expansion in “Torilla” by FRS Yorke, (now Grade II* listed after nearly being demolished in 1993), but its post war houses show an fascinating snapshot of British domestic architecture from 1946 to the start of the 1980’s.
Hatfield new town was created in 1946 as part of the post war New Towns Act designed to create a number of new urban centres for those affected by the Blitz. The masterplan for the town was overseen by the architect Lionel Brett (later Lord Esher), which expanded on the Hertfordshire town which had been the centre of the De Havilland aerospace industry from the early 1930’s. The plan allocated 2,340 acres for expansion, with a target population of 25,000. A new town centre was placed to the west of the old town, in a slightly later separate plan by Maxwell Fry. To the south of the new town centre, a large area was designated for new housing, which was filled over the next 20 years by a host of famous post war architects, with Brett & Boyd, Stillman & Eastwick-Field, Maxwell Fry & Jane Drew, Sir Basil Spence and Tayler & Green all designing housing in Hatfield New Town. Lionel Brett and his partner Kenneth Boyd designed the first section of housing in the Roe Green area, consisting mainly of terraced houses with some low rise flats. Other architects that designed housing in this area included William Crabtree and Richard Sheppard. Brett and Boyd also designed the first private house in the new town at 11 Cranborne Road (1954). In design terms their houses have an open plan ground floor with a kitchen/diner in one half and a living room in the other. The national shortage of bricks forced Brett and Boyd to use only the party walls as load bearing, with the front and back being merely lightweight insulated walls. Boyd also designed a number of long curving terraces along Bishops Rise and Hazel Grove (1957). Unfortunately for Brett and Boyd a number of housing problems damaged their reputation, not least when on the nights of 3rd and 4th November 1957, over 90 houses were damaged in high winds, including 28 who lost their roofs completely. Further to the southeast, the Oxlease estate begun in 1957 featured a range of housing by numerous famous post war architects. Sir Basil Spence designed houses in Woods Avenue and Briars Lane (1959) featuring tile hanging and ironwork balconies. Spence’s assistant Andrew Renton produced a number of detached houses in Larks Rise and Bishops Rise (1961), near Boyd’s terraces. The partnership of Stillman and Eastwick-Field produced a terrace of houses with split pitched roofs in Deerswood Avenue (1958). Maxwell Fry and wife Jane Drew designed a number of mono pitched terrace rows off Oxlease Drive (from 1957), similar to their work in Harlow, as well as White Lion House overlooking Fry’s town centre plan. The partnership of Tayler and Green, renowned for the social housing work in Norfolk, produced 234 houses and 96 apartments in between Northdown and Southdown Roads (1965), including eye catching studio flats on stilts. The new town also featured a few tower blocks, such as Goldings House, a 14 storey point block designed by Woodroffe Buchanan and Coulter, who also designed the surrounding streets of houses and maisonettes. However the most interesting post war housing in Hatfield is the Cockaigne development along The Ryde (1963) in the north of the town. Designed by the firm of Phippen, Randall and Parkes, these one storey houses were built as part of a cooperative housing scheme founded by Michael Baily, Shipping correspondent of The Times. The design of the houses took the form of courtyard houses with open plan interiors. They were fitted with sliding, folding wood doors inside allowing rooms to be created at will. The estate was Grade II listed in 1998. As the years went on the responsibility for Hatfields development was passed from the Hatfield Development Corporation to the the Commission for New Towns and then to Welwyn Hatfield Council. Later developments did not match the high water mark produced at The Ryde, but interesting housing was built at Crop Common by Lewis and George in the late 1970’s and Redhall Close by David Irving in the early 1980’s. The post war houses of Hatfield are not as spectacular as those found in Hampstead and Highgate or as forward looking as some of those in Milton Keynes, but do show an interesting variation and great examples of some of Britain's post war domestic architectural work. This is an amended version of an article published in The Modernist issue 11 "Domestic" July 2014.
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