Houses for artists

So we finally set out for west London and a short tour of the buildings of Charles Voysey. Voysey is most famous of course for his long, low houses in the country built for the newly wealthy Victorian and Edwardian bourgpoise. Houses such as Broadleys on Lake Windermere and The Homestead in Frinton-On-Sea, which I've written about before.

The personal style of Voysey's houses - white rough render, slate roofs and green painted woodwork - became ubiquitous and defined to an extent the popular ideal of housing in the early decades of the twentieth century. The buildings we were off to see though are unusual in Voysey's oeuvre. Only one - 14 South Parade in Bedford Park - is a conventional house and even then it is small, urban and compositionally at odds with most of his buildings. The other two - a factory for Sandersons and a purpose-built artists studio - also represented unusual commissions for an architect who became somewhat unfairly typecast.

We started in Baron's Court, emerging out through its magnificent district line station finished in irridescent green glazed tiles. The stunning quality of this building with its exquisite little pedimented ticket booths stands as a rebuke to contemporary public realm infrastructure. The latter still managed to make its presence felt though through the introduction of a credit card reader parked unceremoniously in the window.

Once out we nipped around the corner to see these rather lovely Edwardian artist's houses with their vast north facing studio windows. Despite some extravagant art nouveau touches, they are in bad shape and clearly a little unloved. Not surprising really because they face directly onto the six-lane Talgarth Road choc-full of traffic crawling into London from the west. The built-in benches in the porchways where models would once wait for the besmocked painters of genteel nudes now look particularly uninviting. To be fair it was snowing on the day we visited but the belching fumes of the traffic didn't help.



This mannerist number caught our eye too with a chimney seemingly growing out of an elaborate scrolled gable end as if one had been violently compacted into the other. Having attempted the odd elaborate gable in my time, the structural stability of this one worried me the longer I looked at it.

Just around the corner and on the other side of the railway tracks is Voysey's little  St. Dunstan Road studo. The back of it can be seen from the local park where the vast north facing windows are clearly articulated, as is the sharp programmatic dividing line between studio and residence. The latter is tiny, squeezed into the front few metres of the building, the austerity of which must have appealed to Voysey's infamously puritan nature; barely room to tap out your clay pipe.....

The studio is oddly wedged into its corner site forming a diagonal at 45 degrees to the neighbouring houses on either side. The relationship between the two is gently mediated though by a subtly curving and beautifully detailed low wall with Voysey's delicate ironwork fencing following it around. It also only just about fits into its site, leaving what must be some strange wedges of space around the edge...clearly the artist was no gardener. 

It is now in the hands of a Hungarian Church group who have constructed some peculiarly garish timber gateways at either end of the front facade. My lack of enthusiasm for these DIY additions brought amused accusations of ideological inconsistency from my companions.

Voysey - like Edwin Lutyens - was often accused of having a rather childish sense of humour when it came to architecture and the timber brackets holding up the front porch are typical of one of his jokes. The profile is presumably that of his client, a trick he repeated with slightly absurd regularity.

After this we set off to Chiswick and the second bit of Voysey on our itinary, the ex-Sanderson wallpaper factory where we were joined by our Acton native guide Sam McElhinney. En-route we passed through two Charles Holden designed underground stations, Acton Town and Chiswick Park, the former mainly because we got lost.



Both of these had an admirable toughness to them, Acton Town being almost brutalist in its straightforward use of materials. It also contained vast amounts of space, all elaborately orchestrated for armies of suburban commuters. None were in evidence on the freezing saturday morning we passed through though, leaving us plenty of room to admire the quarry tile clad walls and austere decoration.

Voysey built relatively little except for houses so the Sanderson factory is a very different kind of beast than his usual fare. Nevertheless it has his refined sense of proportion and delicacy of line. Its white glazed brick walls end in chimney-like finials linked by an elegantly loping parapet line which gives the building the quality of a giant version of his furniture pieces.

The leaded light windows have been replaced and the high level bridge connecting it to the existing Sanderson factory has gone (if it was ever built), but Voysey's design is very fine indeed, an object lesson in how to make an urbane and dignified factory on a tight urban site. It's solid rather than stolid and shows that Voysey could handle both urban situations and vertical compositions.

At this point there was a departure for food, beer and warmth, followed by a quick scoot around a randomly located timber works. I always enjoy these, especially because the buildings tend to be made by the products on sale making for delightfully ad-hoc timber-fests. This one came by way of appointment to the Queen who obviously gets her decking here, some of which had been used to make an elaborate flight of external steps.

And then on we traipsed on towards Bedford Park, that genteel artists colony largely designed by Norman Shaw in the 1870's. Shaw developed a number of house types which were bastardised in various ways to create diversity from street to street by Jonathan Carr, Bedford Park's opportunist developer. This mucking around with an already ecelctic mix of architectural provenance, leads to all manor of strangeness and some fairly nutty compositions all round.

Fruitiest of all is probably Shaw's own Tabbards Inn, a huge pub and theatre beside Chiswick Park station. It has a hundred and two things going on, many of them very nice although not possibly together. I'm not one to judge on excess or questionable taste, but Shaw's work lacks the geometry of Lutyens or the complete conviction of Voysey. Instead it offers a heady melange of mannerisms, overscaled oriel windows, riotous gables, chimneys ago-go and every conceivable material. Nairn described him as a bit heartless, which seems harsh. The addition of a 1960's covered entry stair seems almost of a piece with what else of going on and that in itself is an achievement of sorts.

The weather was unrelentingly grim by this point and Bedford Park is rich and interesting enough to warrant another visit and another blog post so I will concentrate here on Voysey's single, remarkable contribution. This sits on South Parade overlooking a large green space and the district line trains that hurtle past. It is yet another artists studio, expressed this time as an elegantly slim little tower with a pyramidal roof. The projecting eaves are supported by the daintiest steel brackets possible which break delightfully to let the chimney pass through.

Voysey himself added an extension at the side which slightly reduces the building's compositional purity. As remarked by Nairn in his London architecture guide, south parade is Voysey's most art nouveu and urban design, a world away in many senses from his ground hugging houses in more suburban and rural locations. Instead, it sits perky and upright, very dainty and, yes, vaguely reminiscent of Vienna or Paris.

At the back a north light wraps over to follow the pitch of the roof, again breaking through the eaves line and showing Voysey's careful attention to functional matters.

Voyey's reputation today is an odd one. On the one hand, he is celebrated as a kind of proto-modernist, a precursor to the more progressive and puritanical white-walled international style to come. On the other he influenced countless suburban houses, pantiled and rough rendered pseudo-cottages the country over. Although he had no time for modernism, his work can still partly be seen in its light, especially a building like South Parade. The care and attention to detail of the most humdrum domestic elements links him in some way to the modernist experiments in living, the interest in ergonomics and both household efficiency and comfort. He was in some ways, a strict functionalist. albeit a romantic one.

Like Lutyens, he attempted to combine the ramshackle vernacular house with more sophisticated aspects of geometry and composition. With Voysey, these formal concerns are incredibly subtle and never dominate the gentleness of the whole.  His houses manage instead to be highly refined and carefully composed and seemingly loose and casual at the same time. This is an almost impossible trick to pull off in architecture and maybe Voysey's brilliance was to hit on a certain formula that allowed him to do it time and again. The slightly austere but comforting avuncularity of the materials allowed him to play very precise games with proportion, scale and texture whilst rarely straying from middlebrow acceptability.

Only once or twice, as at Broadleys and Bedford Park, did he do anything that could be seen as radical but in housing that might also be a blessing. Instead, he developed an entire idiom of housing, an image of home that is still incredibly popular today.

At this point my hands were so cold I dropped my iphone on the pavement with a resounding splat resulting in some smashed glass and an expensive bill. So, we headed for Turnham Green station and (various) homes, artistic or otherwise.

Models on film

In advance of going to see this film about architectural models as film sets, here's a nicely wonky and thoroughly unconvincing bit of architectural set design, courtesy of Alfred Hitchock. 

Wait for the title credits to end and gasp as the camera pans over a majestic mountain range before zooming towards a remote train station in the snow. The bit with the car is particularly charming given that it serves very little purpose other than to draw attention to the fact that the east European village in which the film begins is actually a small model built in the Gainsborough studios in Shoreditch. 

The death and life of the English village

This year my students at UCA, Canterbury have been looking at ruralism and 20th century villages*. Two of these -  East Tilbury in Essex and Whiteley in Surrey - are places I've read about, talked about and generally pontificated on but never visited so over the last month I have made journeys to both. 

What follows are photographs and observations from both trips. The photos of Whiteley in particular were very rushed as I had a bored family drumming their fingers in the car. There are further and far superior photos, drawings and films of the villages on our studio blog ** which I have linked to at the bottom of this post.....

Whiteley lies on the edge of Weybridge, a well-healed suburban enclave in stockbroker belt Surrey. John Lennon once lived there and Elton John still does, along with a welter of other, lesser celebrities.  It's expensive basically, prime real estate on the southern fringe of London. The roads roll gently through a landscape that is leafy and affluent and full of gated communities with little sentry boxes guarding their exclusive avenues.

Sitting amongst all this is Whiteley, a retirement village built  in 1907 by William Whiteley, the owner of the west London department store. It is both entirely typical of the area and strangely alien.  It is laid out as an octagon, a pure geometric form sitting incongruously in the gentle surrounding countryside. From the air it looks like a crop circle or some ancient and very impressive earthwork. It has a rationalist rigour, reminiscent of 19th century architects like Ledoux and Boulee. Very un-English in other words and seemingly free of the picturesque planning that you might expect in a place like this.

Wandering around Whiteley is a strange experience. It is odd for a start to visit somewhere where it is so obvious that you don't belong. No one in Whiteley is under 65 so architectural tourists are even more conspicuous than normal. Its relative obscurity though means that you can pretty much wander around quite happily as they are hardly deluged with visitors. And of course, everyone is very nice.

The other odd thing is the scale. The buildings are small, positively dinky in fact. But they are also set within impressive amounts of space. The density is closer to that of a wealthy US suburb than the more tightly packed European norm. Houses are set within acres of lawn and with the surrounding trees clear visible between them. Even in winter with many of the trees bare and the gardens not in flower, the landscape shares at least equal billing with the buildings.

Whiteley is a model village in that sense of having one of everything you might need: a church, a shop, a post office, a community hall. The hall is the grandest building, a beautiful arts and crafts essay in purple and red brickwork and with a superb proscenium arch interior. When I visited it also had a large metal tea urn gently bubbling away in the kitchen inside, which was pretty much exactly what you would hope to find there. 

Whiteley, like its residents, looks very well looked after. In fact it is quite pristine. The houses and cottages have been lived in and accumulated domestic clutter - including one with a 1/3 scale wooden model of an elephant - but they are also immaculately maintained. There are no additions, no UPVC windows and no pebble dash. Depending on where you stand (and  I'm never entirely sure on this question) this is either a blessed relief or mildly terrifying.

What's true is that you would be very hard pushed to find a better preserved collection of high quality arts and crafts buildings anywhere in the country. There are nearly three hundred listed buildings here, all exquisitely detailed and sharing features such as twisted 'barley sugar' columns and subtly patterned brickwork.

East Tilbury is - to use a technical architectural term - a different kettle of fish altogether. It was built in the early 1930's by Tomas Bata as a UK outpost of his vast, global shoe manufacturing business. It is much better known than Whitely, mostly on account of its modernist housing and factory buildings that loom incongruously out of the Essex marshes just before they disappear altogether into the Thames estuary. It is a kind of twin to the original Bata town of Zlin in the Czech Republic, in which Thomas Bata rather scarily had an office built inside an elevator in order to survey his workforce.



When we visited it one chilly, late winter's afternoon a mist seemed to descend over the buildings giving it an even gloomier countenance than it might normally have. The factory is of course closed now and the bits that seem to be in any kind of use are employed for that growth industry of the UK, self-storage. This is grimly inappropriate, as the future suggested by East Tilbury was one of well-designed, reasonably generous workers housing. Instead, as our housing stock has got both worse and less and less plentiful, our city fringes have filled up with vast warehouses used to store all the stuff we can no longer find room for.

Anyway, the largely empty factory buildings are still hugely impressive, unrelenting slabs of glass and stucco with elegantly rounded columns providing steady punctuation. The flaking stucco and general air of sad neglect offers plenty of money shots for the ruin-porn enthusiast.  As we approached the furthest end of the factory complex, two men who appeared to be digging some kind of hole, looked up and stopped. We stared at each other for a while before deciding it was best to turn around.

A couple of the factory buildings nearest to the town have been refurbished and are being offered as office space, although its hard to imagine anyone having the desire to move out here. Looking in at their vacant factory floors, my companion wondered whether it would be feasible to set up an office in one, surrounded by space and the lowering Essex skies. I can see some downsides. 

The housing is laid out on a garden city suburb plan with roads of small semi-detached worker housing fanning out from a radial center occupied by larger, manager's houses. These latter have large open verandas which seemed particularly optimistic on the day we visited. 

The houses have undergone various amounts of alterations, so that often the original details are buried under innumerable layers of pebble-dash and some fairly bizarre extensions. I'm no conservation purist, quite the opposite really, but much of the original character of the place has undoubtedly disappeared. At East Tilbury, the indignity of the UPVC window upgrade has been extended to the factory buildings with mildly tragic consequences.

It's still possible to discern in some of the houses, the restrained elegance of the original vision, when the flat roofs projected with a modest flourish beyond the wall line. As I say, it's dangerous to be purist about this, not least because I find conservation area stuffiness problematic and because there's undoubtedly a class issue around all this. It's more that the original houses are better than much of what gets built today. 

A large, impressive ocean-liner of a building in the centre of East Tilbury now contains some pretty basic shops but was once the village hotel. This is one of the first buildings you notice as you arrive and its scale and impressive logic is completely unexpected. Even more than the houses, it seems to have set sail from east Europe before coming to rest by a small, country lane in the middle of nowhere.

The cinema and social club have also closed down. The village hall, painted (perhaps originally) in two shades of brown is still going and was encouraging people to hold their party there, albeit in a fairly desultory manner.

East Tilbury is a close cousin to Silver End, another modernist Essex village based around a now defunct industry. Both were featured recently in Jonathan Meades' excellent The Joy of Essex. Of the two Tilbury is the far more desolate. The Crittal window factory that sustained Silver End has closed but the village seems to have lived on slightly more successfully. 

East Tilbury has an undeniably 'end of the line' quality, unsurprising really given that there is little beyond it other than flat fields and muddy brown water. There are plans, which you can read about here, but this is not the Surrey hills and I wouldn't hold your breath.

Looked at as a pair, Tilbury and Whiteley are fascinating. Both are the products of a paternalistic philanthropic vision, an idealistic capitalism that now seems thoroughly benign in relation to the version we have today. They could hardly be more different either, a beautifully preserved arts and crafts retirement village and a crumbling industrial suburb. It's remarkable really that they were built just twenty odd years apart. In their current condition they exemplify much about our current situation too. 

* The subject matter for this year's studio was partly inspired by Gillian Darley's book Villages of Vision.  The book's final chapter - No New Villages? - was the jumping off point for proposing some 21st century rural settlements. 

** Some of their work can be seen over at the studio's Electric Edens Tumblr. For more about Whiteley, watch UCA students Sam Brewer and Michelle Sweeney's very nice film here. And for an intriguing mash-up of present day East Tilbury, historic footage and heroic Bata promotional music watch this film, by Maria Mantikou, Dana Mahmoud and George Liaramantzas.