Welwyn Garden City is 100 years old on April 29th 2020, when the Welwyn Garden City Ltd company was formed. Like its neighbour, Letchworth Garden City, Welwyn GC was the brainchild of Ebenezer Howard, who 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. Land had been identified in 1919, and work began the following year with the first house occupied by Christmas 1920. 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. Although modernist architecture and design was making its presence felt on the Continent and in the United States in the 1920s, examples in Britain were extremely rare. Subsequently the town's design reflects both the consertaive style of the era and its architects. However, there are a number of modernist influenced buildings around the town. The most prominent is the former Shredded Wheat Factory, looming over the Great Northern railway tracks that bisect the town. Designed by De Soissons in 1925, the buildings starkly functional designs echoes the types of buildings that would emerge in Britain in the next decade, as the influence of Gropius, Behrens and Le Corbusier filtered through. The factory was added to between 1925 and 1960 as production increased. However Nabisco moved to Wiltshire in 2008 leaving the factory empty. The site was bought by Tesco to turn into housing, and after a protracted planning process, the non listed parts of the building were demolished. The remaining factory buildings are due to be turned into an arts and entertainment centre in the near future. Indeed, Broadwater Road, off which the Shredded Wheat Factory sits, was once home to a number of modernist and art deco influenced industrial buildings. Nowadays of course, only a few remain. The most interesting one left is the Roche Products Factory (1940), designed by Swiss architect Otto Salvisberg in the international modernist style. The company's site grew in the post war period with a series of monolithic industrial buildings designed by James Cubitt & Partners (1961-69), all of which have now been demolished for housing. The only remains of the Roche site are the 1940 Grade II listed building and the 1977 James Cubitt designed offices opposite. Later industrial buildings include the Smith Kline & French HQ (1964) designed by Arup Associates, a six storey brutalist block on stilts, with a brick podium below. This block towered over the other low rise buildings of the garden city until it was pulled down in 2003. One surviving post war building is the Rank Xerox Research Centre (1988) by Nicholas Grimshaw. Designed in his usual Hi-Tech style, with exposed service pipes, the building is now a business centre with an unfortunate cladding on the frontage. Away from industry, there are a few modernist style houses from both the interwar and postwar periods. 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 Paul Mauger and No.24 by emigre architect E.C. Kaufmann. 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 echoes of the surrounding Neo-Georgian softening the shock of the new. This compromise between flat roofed modernism and genteel neo-georgianism was continued in the post war period. The best examples can be seen in the north of the town, with designs by Paul Mauger, the Architects Co-Partnership, John Bickerdike, William Allen, Gordon Nettleton and Michael Meacher. Around the town are a few more examples of the post war modernist style, most prominent being the Campus West complex incorporating the library, a cinema, offices and other leisure facilities. It was designed by Sheppard Robson and Partners, and completed in 1973. After being held up by planning challenges for a number of years. In the suburbs of the town are a few examples of the modernist church design that became fashionable after the Vatican II conference, such as Christ the King, Haldens (1964) by Riley and Glanfield and Holy Family Church (1967) by De Soissons, Peacock, Hodges and Robertson. The other notable set of modernist influenced buildings in the town are the post war schools of Herts County Council. Hundreds of schools were built across the county in the immediate postwar period to cope with a population boom from displaced Londoners. The county's newly formed architects department decided to use a prefabricated building system to produce schools quickly and efficiently. Examples in Welwyn Garden City include Swallow Dell Primary (1952), Harwood Hill (1959) and Templewood Primary (1950). Templewood, designed by A.W. Cleeve Barr and featuring murals by Pat Trew, became one of Herts flagship buildings, admired by Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, who reportedly said “c’est jolie” of it. Despite its overwhelming Neo Georgian character, there is a long and varied history of modernism in Welwyn Garden City. From international style modernism and functionalism in the interwar period, through to the festival, brutalist, neo-vernacular and high tech style of the post war years, the changing face of modernism in Britain can be glimpsed between the brick and pitched roofs of Louis De Soissons designs. You can also read our previous blogs on Welwyn Garden City;
The Other Golden Mile: The Factories of Welwyn Garden City The Houses of Welwyn Garden City Learning to Build: Herts County Council Schools
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27/10/2021 09:26:51 pm
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