​Walter Gropius and his wife Ise arrived in Britain in October 1934, having fled Germany via Rome as the Nazi’s rise to power made his stay in his homeland impossible. Since 1919 he had been the master of the Bauhaus design school, an institution that aimed to unify artistic expression alongside 20th century functionalism and mass production, with artists such as Paul Klee, Laszlo Mohloy-Nagy and Wassily Kandinsky. Gropius was also an architect in his own right, designing early modernist buildings such as the Fagus factory in 1911 and the new school building for the Bauhaus when it relocated to Dessau in 1925. He had gone into private practice in 1928 but received little in the way of commissions as he was seen as a ‘degenerate’ designer. The British architect Maxwell Fry, who had befriended Gropius on an earlier trip to Britain, arranged for Gropius to visit a conference in Italy and escape to Britain.

Brian Housden was born in 1928, and studied at the Architectural Association at the beginning of the 1950s. Brian and his wife Margaret began searching for a plot to build their own home in north London, eventually buying a small piece of land from John Killick (future partner of Stanley Amis and Bill Howell in the HKPA partnership) in 1958. It would take another six years before the Housden’s moved into the still-uncompleted No.78, with Brian rethinking his early designs after a trip to the Netherlands were they saw the 1924 Rietveld Schroder House, designed in 1924 by Truus Schroder-Schrader and Gerrit Rietveld, also meeting the architects themselves. 
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On the same trip, the Housdens also met architect Aldo Van Eyck, known for his Structuralist designs, such as Amstrdam Orphanage of 1960, which was designed with spaces that mirror the different ages of its residents and a mixture of facilities that make it into a mini city. Housden’s design for his new house was also influenced by the Maison de Verre house in Paris by Pierre Chareau, Bernard Bijvoet and Dalbert from 1932, with its use of glass blocks and exposed services and structural elements. 

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Compared to its neighbours at Nos 80-90, the house was seldom mentioned in architectural literature, although it has apparently been compared to a “ruined Japanese town hall”, (possibly Kenzo Tange’s Kurashiki Hall?) and Buildings of England's North London volume remarks it is a “strange brutalist composition”. However, the house has gained somewhat more fame in the digital age being fixture on concrete obsessed social media accounts (guilty!). No. 78 was Grade II listed in November 2014, with the listing notes calling it “a completely unique piece of architectural vision and ingenuity”. Brian Housden passed the same year and the house was finally sold by the family in 2018. 

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The extension of the Piccadilly Line eastwards from Finsbury Park into what was then Middlesex took place between April 1931 when the first plans were submitted and the opening of Cockfosters station in July 1933. Eight stations, as well as signal boxes, electricity substations and a new depot were designed by consultant architect Charles Holden and the design team of London Transport, headed by Stanley Heaps. The first section was completed on 19th September 1932 with Manor House, Turnpike Lane, Wood Green, Bounds Green and Arnos Grove opening for service. Six months later on 13th March 1933, two more stations opened, Southgate and Oakwood. The latter station was designed by C.H. James in a Sudbury-box style, with brick walls and a concrete roof. But it was the design of Southgate that caught the attention of both the architectural press and the public at large.

Southgate and the other Piccadilly extension stations were the highpoint of Holden’s time designing for the underground. Although he would design a number of other stations after the completion of the extension in 1933, his design never quite reached the heights shown here. The Piccadilly Line stations were well received, and seen as the first set of modernist public buildings in the country. Pick linked the work of designing and building new stations as akin to that carried out by he great cathedral builders, with armies of people employed in creating these masterpieces, something he termed “medieval modernism”. 

​The stations on the extension were given statutory listing in February 1971 as part of the first batch of modernist buildings to be protected, but by the 1990s had fallen into disrepair. A refurbishment programme was undertaken with original elements either restored or replaced with replicas, although today the stations could do with a bit more TLC. Southgate and the other stations on the eastern extension still operate today as a testament to the vision of both Charles Holden and Frank Pick, and their quest to bring modernity to the suburbs. 

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The ticket hall is circular in the mode of Chiswick Park or Southgate with clerestory windows and a central passimeter ticket booth, and a tall, square tower proclaiming its presence to motorists speeding by on Western Avenue. Connected to this is a curving parade of shops and flats, all constructed from the same light brown brick. As with a number of new tube stations from the 1930s, the name of the stop changed in the years after it opened, beginning as Park Royal (Hanger Hill) before dropping the name in brackets in 1947. ​

Gordon would go on to  design the striking Target House on St James Street, Westminster, completed in 1984. It is clad in anodised bronze and aluminum and has a strong vertical emphasis. Like his earlier work with Luder, it is multi-functional, containing shops, offices and flats. Gordon died in 2008, and was largely forgotten save for Jonathan Meades who remarked that “There are as many ideas in a single Gordon building as there are in the entire careers of most architects” and his work was “haunted by Russian constructivism, crusader castles, Levantine skylines”. ​

The elevation that greets visitors from the driveway has a double-height rounded window bay with thin, vertical windows. The longer facade onto the garden is divided in the centre by a square staircase tower, with an arched doorway, vertical windows at first floor level and half moon windows above. The northern facade is maybe the most interesting. It has two floors of angled, metal framed windows, designed to bring an even light into Gordine’s studios. Depending on which elevation you face, the house appears to be a miniature castle, an expressionist-influenced factory or an artist's workshop. The house is constructed in red brick with some concrete apparent above the doorways and around the balconies, but otherwise hidden. ​

Inside, over the three floors, are a sequence of small but perfectly designed spaces to accommodate Gordine and Hare's private and artistic endeavors. The ground floor was originally home to the servants' bedrooms, with Gordine’s plaster studio also on this level. On the next floor up is another studio space, along with a gallery area, lit by the long, vertical windows. The second floor is home to the couple’s apartment, with a bedroom, and living room and dining room joined by a Chinese moon door, echoing the half moon windows on that level. The living area also has fireplaces which replicate those designed by Perrett for Gordine’s Paris residence. The rooftop is covered in a terrace that the couple used to sleep out on on occasions. From this vantage point, they could see Richmond Park to the north and Roehampton Vale to the south. ​

Also in the centre of this new town was the Ritz Cinema, designed by architect Major WJ King, who designed a number of cinemas around the suburbs. The Ritz opened in May 1932, and its design was quite eye-catching, with the profile of an art deco castle, with an array of tower-like projections on its exterior, Inside, it was decorated in a Spanish garden theme. Complete with painted woodland scenes. The cinema was modernised in 1968 with a blue metal screen installed at the front. It remained as a cinema until 2001, when it closed, being demolished the following year. ​

The most obviously modernist building of the interwar expansion of Edgware was the new church on Deans Lane, the John Keble Memorial Church (1937), designed by D.F. Martin-Smith, who had won the competition for its design, judged by Edward Maufe. It has a square tower with a concrete lantern, constructed of reinforced concrete and yellow stock brick. Inside, the ceiling is constructed in a diagrid pattern, with a diagonal pattern in coffered concrete. The church is now Grade II listed.

Certainly not modernist, but definitely worth mentioning, is the Railway Hotel, an “improved” pub of 1931. It was designed by A.E. Sewell for the Truman Hanbury and Buxton brewery, in a Neo-Tudor style with half timbering, decorative brick chimneys and leaded windows. Improved pubs were built by the chain breweries in the 1920s and 30s, seeking to attract a better class of clientele such as families, and designed to include parking facilities, comfortable saloon bars and dining rooms. They were built all around the suburbs, quite often next to or just off the new bypass and circular roads of the era. Some were built in a moderne style, but most harked back to earlier eras, as seen with the Railway Hotel, Unfortunately this example has not been treated well by the 21st century, and is currently in a dilapidated state, despite its listed status. ​

1939 was a high watermark year for the private modernist house in Britain. In this blog series, we have already covered Erno Goldfinger's terrace at Willow Road and Seely and Paget's Studio House in Highgate, both completed the same year. Peter Moro’s Harbour Meadow house at Birdham in West Sussex was also completed in 1939, but perhaps the finest house that year was The Homewood in Esher, Surrey, designed by 26 year old architect Patrick Gwynne for his parents, and later to be his own home.

Gwynne was born on 24th March 1914 in Porchester, Hampshire. His parents were Naval commander Alban Gwynne and Ruby. He attended Harrow school, where he apparently saw Amyas Connell’s High and Over on a sketching trip, a pivotal moment for the young Gwynne. Avoiding his fathers plans for him to go into accountancy, Gwynne trained with former Lutyens assistant Ernest Coleridge, before joining the office of Canadian architect and Isokon designer, Wells Coates, alongside a young Denys Lasdun. Gwynne designed The Homewood just after leaving Coates, after his parents sold an inherited plot of land in Wales, allowing them to pay for the demolition of the old “Homewood” house they had lived in for 25 years and the construction of a new one. The old house was sited next to the main road which had got progressively busier since they settled here, and Gwynne placed the new house at the back of the 10 acre plot amongst mature trees. ​

The house's patrons, Gwynne’s parents, did not live long enough to enjoy their son's designs. They both died before the end of World War II, and his sister decided not to live there, leaving Patrick as the house's inhabitant for the next 46 years, alongside his companion, pianist Harry Rand. The Homewood also acted as his office and showroom for his clients over the next half decade, with many of Gwynne’s future commissions featuring design details Gwynne first tested at his home. Gwynne also designed a few more residences neighboring The Homewood. Firstly Gwynne designed a rebuild of a garden cottage to the south of The Homewood in 1958 with an extension in 1966. He then designed two new houses, Amanda on Meadway, a circular house in 1971 (now demolished), and Winterdown, a V-shaped house with a mansard roof from 1985 (recently sold, with planning permission for redevelopment). ​

The Royal College of Physicians building on St Andrews Place, opposite Regents Park was officially opened on 5th November 1964 by Queen Elizabeth II. The society, founded in 1518, had decided to move their headquarters from their building in Pall Mall to a new site, previously home to Someries House, a John Nash building damaged in World War II. The new headquarters was designed by Denys Lasdun, chosen after a process involving the interviewing of five architects. The new building had to fit into the surrounding stucco terraces, incorporate historical elements transferred from the old RCP headquarters and provide offices, meeting rooms, a dining room and a library. ​