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The Sudbury Box

15/7/2026

Sudbury Town Undergound Station. Image from RIBApix.

As the Piccadilly Line expanded in the early 1930s, Charles Holden refined his station designs, seeking to find the optimal layout for a suburban commuter stop. He had begun his London Underground programme with the Northern Line stations on the extension to Morden, a group that were largely fitted into an existing urban fabric. For these he used a three part screen of Portland Stone, creating a distinctive and dignified entrance to the underground. With the Piccadilly Line stations at Hounslow West and Ealing Common, he expanded this idea, turning the three part screen into a three dimensional, heptagonal ticket hall. For his next batch of stations, Holden would move on from the Portland Stone screen, and introduce Northern European modernism, mixed with an Arts and Crafts feeling for materials.

The 1903 Sudbury Town Station. Image from London Transport Museum.

At Sudbury Town, a suburban stop between Wembley and Northolt, Holden produced his first “Sudbury Box”, a form that he would reuse and redesign for the rest of his time producing underground stations. The original Sudbury Town station opened in 1903 as a District Line station on the electrified extension to South Harrow. It was a simple single storey building with a sloping corrugated iron roof and a large name sign on top. Plans for a new station began in the late 1920s, with London Transport chief architect Stanley Heaps preparing a design along the lines of Hounslow West, with a polygonal plan in brick. Holden, who was not employed by London Transport but acted as a consultant, produced an alternative design, with a three storey square building with a central window adorned with a roundel. This proposal was thought to be too large for the site, situated among terraces of suburban houses.

A poster announcing the opening of the new station. Image from London Transport Museum.

Holden and his team of assistants then produced what became known as the Sudbury Box, a double height rectangular ticket hall in handmade Buckinghamshire brick with an oversailing concrete roof. Holden, never one to gild the lily in his words or his designs, called it “a brick box with a concrete lid”. One long side faces the street, with two entrance ways below large vertical window strips, divided by brick piers. The windows face northwards, allowing an even light into the ticket hall throughout the day. Above sits the concrete roof, overhanging to provide an element of protection to passengers from inclement weather. It was poured in situ directly onto the brickwork, and this led to leakages, with later box stations built around a concrete frame to avoid problems.

The station with its neon name sign, now removed. Image from London Transport Museum.

Originally, just below the roof was a neon name sign, with Sudbury Town in red with a blue border. A similar neon sign was also placed on the platform side, unfortunately both were removed sometime between 1939 and 1958 and replaced with simple bronze lettering. Inside the ticket hall featured a timber ticket passimeter, integrated curved kiosk, a clock and barometer on the wall and a ceiling partly painted with light blue paint to contrast with the concrete construction. A bicycle storage unit was also included in the original design, but was converted into a new ticket office and staff accommodation in 1985.

The interior of the ticket hall. Image from RIBApix.

The concrete bridge across the platforms. Image from RIBApix.

The platform on the ticket hall side of the station is home to a passenger waiting room, designed with a curved wall to allow commuters to see their train coming around the bend in the tracks. The ceiling of the waiting room was decorated with a new permanent artwork by Lucy Mckenzie in 2020 called Pleasure’s Inaccuries. The opposite platform is reached by a small concrete footbridge over the tracks. Holden reused the Sudbury Box form for the neighbouring Sudbury Hill , and a number of other new stations along the extension of the Piccadilly Line to both the west and the east. Sometimes it was reusing the rectangular form, either with the long facade to the street (as at Acton Town) or using the shorter end as the entrance (as at Northfields). Even when he introduced the circular into designs at stations like Chiswick Park, Arnos Grove and Southgate, Holden used the same formula of a brick structure with a concrete roof. Sudbury Town was listed in 1971, along with a number of other aforementioned Holden stations, a recognition of his achievement in changing the look of the underground with his brick boxes with concrete lids.

Sudbury Town and many more "brick boxes" are featured in A Guide to Modernism in Metro-Land, available HERE

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Anatomy of a House No.27: The Gane Show House

28/6/2026

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Anatomy of a House No.27
The Gane Show House, Bristol
1936
Marcel Breuer

The Gane Show House (1936) by Marcel Breuer and F.R.S. Yorke. Image from RIBApix.

Like a number of his Bauhaus colleagues, Marcel Breuer briefly worked in Britain in the 1930s, as he fled the rise of the Nazis in Germany. In his two years in the country, he only designed a handful of buildings, focusing mainly on furniture design. The most well known of his British buildings is the spectacular Sea Lane House in Angmering (1937). But for this edition of Anatomy of A House we will be exploring the Show House he designed for Crofton Gane, the businessman who ran the P.E. Gane furniture company. Like Breuer's time in Britain, the lifespan of the Gane Show House was brief, being demolished shortly after the end of the 1936 Royal Agricultural Show for which it was built.

Sea Lane House (1936) Marcel Breuer and F.R.S. Yorke. Image from RIBApix.

Marcel Breuer was born in 1902 in Pecs, Hungary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After studying art in Vienna, he entered the Bauhaus in 1920, chiefly to study furniture design. He graduated in 1924, and after a brief spell working in Paris,he returned to become the head of the joinery workshop at the Bauhaus, leaving again in 1928 to practice as an architect in Berlin. He designed a number of houses and flats, as well as continuing his furniture design, and moved between Zurich and Budapest. In 1935 he explored moving to Britain, as his former colleague Walter Gropius had already done, and arrived in the country in October. Breuer moved into Wells Coates’ Isokon flats and like other emigre architects, went into practice with a young British modernist, in this case F.R.S. Yorke.

Furniture designed by Marcel Breuer at 24 Downs Park West. Image from RIBApix.

Alongside the handful of buildings he designed with Yorke, Breuer also produced furniture for Jack Pritchard's Isokon Furniture Company, like his now iconic Long Chair. The houses he designed with Yorke include the stunning Sea Lane house, (which was never occupied by its owner James Mcnabb due to World War II), a pair of brick houses for Eton College and a house in Lee-on-Solent, now altered and extended. Through Pritchard, Breuer met another furniture manufacturer, Crofton Gane, who was keen to move the focus of modernist design in Britain away from London, towards Bristol and the south west. Initially, Gane asked Breuer and his partner Yorke to remodel his house at 24 Downs Park West, modernising the interior and adding a large ground floor window. The new interior included what was reputed to be the first open metal tread staircase in the country.

A plan of the Gane Show House.

Gane’s next commission for Breuer and Yorke was for a show house for the Bristol Royal Show, to be held between 30th June-4 July 1936. The show house was intended to showcase not just Gane’s modern furniture but a "Design for Living" incorporating furniture, fittings and layout. This modernity was not broadcast through the use of gleaming white walls, nautical trimmings like metal railings or monolithic concrete, as was so often the case for the 1930s modernist house, but through a palette of Cotswold stone walls, plate glass and birch. The single storey house was arranged in an irregular plan with only two exterior walls meeting at 45 degrees, with the southerly facade formed of a concave curve. On one side there was a covered terrace and a pergola providing a shaded area in the garden. Inside there was only one short supporting wall, with the emphasis on the spaces flowing into each other. The rooms, such that they were, consisted of a main bedroom, a children's bedroom, a living room and a study. Being a temporary show house, there was seemingly no need for details like a kitchen, bathrooms or a laundry!

The interior of the Gane Show house, featuring furniture designed by Breuer.

Of course this lack of hard detail was mainly down to the fact that it was less a house and more of a temporary furniture showroom, home to a number of prototype designs by Breuer himself and by Gane’s in-house designers. Unfortunately the five day event was something of a washout with a typical English summer weather of pouring rain, leading to no sales for the manufacturer. However Gane and breuer were both proud of what they had created together, with the architect apparently naming the show house as one of his favourite buildings that he had designs, alongside the UNESCO building in Paris of 1958.

Breuer only stayed in Britain for one more year, following his former Bauhaus colleague Walter Gropius to the US in 1937, to teach at Harvard. He also worked in partnership with Gropius for a few years before going to work solo. He retired in 1976, passing away 5 years later. Gane’s furniture company closed in 1954, after which he established The Gane Trust, dedicated to supporting artists and crafts people in the south West of England and South Wales, which still operates today.

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Classical Concrete: The 1923 Wembley Stadium

11/6/2026

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The twin towers of the 1923 Wembley Stadium during construction. Image from The Engineer.

The old Wembley Stadium, opened in 1923 as the Empire Stadium, became an iconic part of 20th Century British life thanks to the series of events it hosted. From the 1923 White Horse Cup final, through to the 1966 World Cup and onto events like the 1984 Live Aid concert, (as well as John Betjeman taking to the hallowed turf during his ‘Metro-Land’ documentary), the building became part of the backdrop of British life. The stadium had been built for the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, an event that did much to bring people out to what was still part of Middlesex and help kick start the Metro-Land speculative building boom. Like the rest of the exhibition buildings, the intention was to demolish the stadium at the end of the event. In the end a property speculator named James White bought the exhibition site, looking to sell the various buildings for reuse, with the stadium being bought by Arthur Elvin, who had undertaken the selling of the other buildings for White. Elvin formed the Wembley Stadium and Greyhound Racecourse Company and turned the stadium into a venue for hire.

An illustration of the Palace of Industry, designed by Maxwell Ayrton and Owen Williams.

The stadium was built ahead of the Empire Exhibition, which opened in April 1924, being completed four days before the famous FA Cup final of 1923, at which a crowd of over 250,000 ended up spilling onto the pitch and being shepherded off by PC George Scorey and his horse Billie. The design and construction of the stadium mirrored that of the other Empire Exhibition buildings, a Beaux Arts facade hiding radical concrete construction. The stadium's exterior was defined by its iconic, domed Twin Towers, which evoked Roman triumphal arches or Mughal pavilions. Ayrton employed a strict classical symmetry across a sweeping, uniform facade that hid the utilitarian sports arena behind. He also used traditional motifs by ensuring the concrete surfaces were meticulously scored and treated to mimic the texture of expensive, traditional dressed stone.To the spectator approaching from Wembley Way, the stadium felt like an embodiment of Empire, solid, durable and strong.

A cross section of the stand and twin towers, and a plan of the stadium. Image from The Engineer.

Engineering for this feat of concrete construction was provided by Owen Williams. Faced with a tight 300-day construction deadline and a strict budget of £750,000, Williams knew that traditional brick and stone could not be used. He turned Wembley into one of the largest poured-in-place reinforced concrete projects the world had ever seen, a "Concrete City”. Utilizing concrete's immense tensile strength to construct massive, unadorned structural rakers to hold up the grandstands, Williams also developed a pioneering cantilevered roof that provided unobstructed views for thousands of spectators, taking influence in his designs from stadiums in the United States such as Stamford Stadium in Seattle and Ohio Stadium.

A panorama of the empire exhibition site, with the stadium at the rear. Image from Wembly Matters.

The structure of the walls for the stadium were formed of concrete parabolic arches, inter set with monolithic staircase towers in a repeating pattern. For the shells of the twin towers, Williams used 3-inch thick concrete reinforced by curved ribs, sitting on top of the towers which themselves were built in 4-inch concrete. Williams had previously explored ship building using concrete, and applied his findings to these grand structures. Ayrton had also designed the entrance facade with large classical columns, which Williams incorporated in the building as hollow, non-structural elements.

The view of the pitch and track from the restaurant. Image from RIBApix.

The finished stadium had a capacity of 120,000, arranged in a bowl shape around the sports area. This shape, not used in smaller football grounds with the stands arranged around the rectangular pitch, allowed a running track and other facilities around the pitch. The elegant finish given the concrete on the exterior was not repeated inside, with the material left unvarnished, less from the “truth to material” ethos of the post war brutalists, and more from expediency.

Ayrton and Williams were both knighted for their efforts on the stadium and the other exhibition buildings. Both men continued practicing until the 1960s, both keeping to their preferred styles, Ayrton in the Classical mode, whereas Williams stripped away ornament to bare function, like his Wembley Arena of 10 years later. The buildings of the Empire Exhibition were gradually cleared away, with the stadium demolished in 2003 to make way for the current stadium’s sweeping steel arch. The loss of the Twin Towers was deeply mourned, more so than the windy, open terraces that Williams produced, but both had found a home in the stadium built to last a year, but that became a part of British life.

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Medieval Modernism: Charles Holden and the London Underground

11/5/2026

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Arnos Grove station ticket hall. Image from RIBApix.

Charles Holden’s designs for the underground from the mid 1920s to the outbreak of World War II, represents a high point of transport architecture and modernist design in Britain. His collaboration with Frank Pick brought about a marriage of form and function, civic service and commerce. Indeed the collaboration was not just between Holden and Pick, but also between a host of architects, designers, builders, tradesmen and bureaucrats. This army of people, working under Holden and Pick, created what Pick would termed “medieval modernism”, comparing the extension of the underground network to the creation of a great cathedral, many hands and years in the making.

Holden and Pick were not the first pairing of architect and management to adopt a uniform design for the underground network. What we now see as a unified network was originally a collection of competing companies, with different designers. From 1900, financier Charles Yerkes and architect Leslie Green had introduced a standard station design featuring distinctive red exterior tiling, steel frame construction and patterned tiles at platform level. The early deaths of both Yerkes and Green led to financial problems and a loss of design focus. This was not remedied until the meeting of Pick and Holden in 1915 at a conference for the Design and Industries Association, and their subsequent collaboration.

Charles Holden. Image from RIBApix.

Holden had begun working as an assistant to a surveyor when still a teenager, eventually becoming an apprentice to a Manchester architect. He later moved to London to work for architect C.R. Ashbee, before moving on to work with H. Percy Adams. The practice specialised in hospitals, with Holden designing a number of them, such as the former children's hospital in Belgravia. After World War I, Holden worked for the Imperial War Graves Commission, designing cemeteries and memorials for those who died in the war.

Franck Pick. Image from RIBApix.

Pick studied law at the University of London, before going to work for North Eastern Railways. There he became assistant to managing director George Gibb, and when Gibb moved to work for the Underground Electric Railways of London in 1906, Pick followed. Starting as assistant to Gibb, by 1908 Pick had become Publicity Officer, and four years later Pick was the U.E.R.L’s Commercial Manager. It was in this role that Pick started to have a real impact on the identity of the Underground network. Pick wanted to revolutionize design on the underground network, bringing in a new eye catching, modernist influenced look, that would take in everything from station design to advertising posters to platform lighting. Pick commissioned Edward Johnston to create his now iconic typeface for use on all underground materials and Harry Beck to create his tube map, and he saw Holden as the man to modernise the design of the stations. The UERL already had a chief architect, Stanley Heaps, but Pick felt his designs were not modern enough.

Trinity Road station, now named Tooting Bec. Image from RIBApix.

Heaps had been assistant to Leslie Green, and took over his role after Green died of a heart attack in 1908. The first stations Heaps designed by himself used Green’s distinctive oxblood tiling and semi circular windows. His next major set of stations were for the expansion of the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway (now part of the Northern Line). Heaps designed five stations, between Brent Cross, and Edgware that, unlike his previous work, would be situated in the leafy North London suburbs. To fit in with these surroundings Heaps designed the stations in a more suburban style, with tiled roofs and brick colonnades. Pick wasn’t a fan of this style, and brought in Holden to design the other end of the Northern Line, as the tube extended to Modern. Holden’s stations for the Northern Line from 1924-6 introduced a new style for the underground, with double height ticket halls, simply clad in Portland stone.

Holden’s next two projects for the U.E.R.L. would become two of his most famous and would set the scene for the next few years of innovation. First of all came the rebuilding of Piccadilly Circus station, a difficult project that was redesigned with aplomb by Holden. An subterranean elliptical ticket hall was added, clad in marble and adorned with a mural by Stephen Bone. The new building was a great success, and would influence the building of the Moscow Metro in turn. The second building was a new headquarters for the U.E.R.L. at 55 Broadway, replacing the hodge podge of offices the company used in the same area. The gleaming white Portland stone of the finished building brought to mind a cathedral, and proclaimed the might of the growing centralised transport network.

Sudbury Town station. Image from RIBApix.

In June and July 1930, Holden and Pick took a tour of Europe to explore the new modernist architecture of the continent. They travelled through Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, visiting buildings by the likes of Willem Dudok, with whom Pick was particularly taken. Pick and Holden were also impressed by the illumination of buildings at night, something they replicated on many underground stations. They didn’t visit the buildings of Le Corbusier, nor those that came out of the Bauhaus, Holden and Pick were both of a mind that exposed concrete was not the proper material for Britain, both practically or emotionally. They were determined to use what they saw as more suitable materials, primarily brick but also wood and metal, in a bid to make the new station architecture forward looking yet humane.

The first fruits of the European trip were the new stations designed for the Piccadilly Line at the start of the 1930s. The changes were significant, as can be seen at Sudbury Town from 1931. The Portland stone finish was replaced by locally produced brick, the three screen facade jettisoned for a rectangular box and as much light as possible was provided for the interior. This design would provide the blueprint for the rest of the decade. The extension of the Piccadilly Line into the growing suburbs around London provided space for Holden and Pick to bring to fruition their ideal of an integrated transport network that balanced beauty and utility.

The apex of the working relationship between Holden and Pick were the new stations between Manor House and Cockfosters, lauded in the architectural press and in the network's own publicity posters. The commission was given to Holden in April 1931, with the first set of stations opening in September 1932. At the same time as this, a number of stations at the western end of the Piccadilly Line were also being built. This was a heavy workload for a relatively small firm like Adams, Holden & Pearson, and so the ‘one man, one station’ design policy was developed. This gave Holden overall responsibility for the design of the stations, often producing an initial sketch, which was then worked up into a detailed plan by his assistant or the office of Stanley Heaps. Once it was given the green light by a committee headed by Pick, the design was taken up by an assistant who would see it through to completion.

The interior of Cockfosters station. Image from RIBApix.

This method worked well through the early 1930s, but the Golden Age didn't last forever. As the New Works Programme was launched in 1935 to replace older stations with the new modern London Transport style, Holden’s attention and energies were being drawn to the rebuilding of the University of London in Bloomsbury, a project that would be only partially completed. The slack was taken up by the office of Stanley Heaps and a few different outside architects, like R.H. Uren and Leonard Bucknell. The designs produced by this group fell below the high standards that had previously been set. Pick asked Holden to return and oversee some of the new designs, but the genie could not be put back in the bottle.

Perhaps the biggest compliment that can be paid to the stations of Holden and Pick is the fact that they are still in use, helping millions of Londoners travel around the capital nearly 100 years after they were built. The little boxes designed by Holden to facilitate the journeys of passengers have become instantly recognizable icons of London and its suburbs.

The article was originally published as the introduction to London Tube Stations 1924-61, available here

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Anatomy of a House No.26: New Ways, Northampton

8/4/2026

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Anatomy of a House No.26

New Ways, Northampton
1926
Peter Behrens

The garden facade of New Ways, Northampton. Image from Architects Journal.

Over the course of our previous twenty five editions of Anatomy of a House, we have explored a range of modernist homes. We began with the splendid International Style villa High and Over by Amyas Connell, and have moved onto art deco outfits of Tudor palaces, brutalist temples in Hampstead, High Tech dwellings in Camden and much more besides. But all those had to start somewhere, and that place is generally acknowledged to have been a modest house on a suburban road in Northampton. The house is known as New Ways, and it is widely considered to be the first modernist house in the country. It was designed by the German architect Peter Behrens for businessman Wenman Joseph Bassett-Lowke.

Bassett-Lowke founded the eponymous company in 1898, specialising in manufacturing model kits of railways, boats, ships and construction sets. He was born in Northampton in 1877, and in 1916 bought a house at 78 Derngate, in the centre of the town, a Georgian-era townhouse. He then commissioned Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh to remodel it. Mackintosh had come to fame with his designs in Scotland, including offices for newspapers The Daily Record and The Glasgow Herald and Hill House in Helensburgh. At Derngate, Mackintosh added a rear extension and completely remodeled the interior. Ten years after this was completed Bassett-Lowke and his wife Florence had a new house built further out from the town centre.

The front of New Ways. Image from Conway.

The architect he chose to design his new house was Peter Behrens, who was known at the time for his industrial designs, such as the AEG Turbine Hall in Berlin from 1909, and for a range of products made by the company ranging from clocks to lights to kettles. Behrens was born in Hamburg in 1868, and became a founder member of the German Werkbund in 1907, an organization that sought to bring high standards of design to mass produced goods. By the time he was commissioned by Bassett-Lowke he had designed a number of houses, all in Germany, but none in the pared down manner he would bring to Northampton. After his only building in Britain, he would go on to design more right angled modernist domestic buildings, like his apartments on the Wesseinhof estate in Stuttgart (1925-27) and houses in Berlin and Kromberg im Taus.

Peter Behrens' sketch for the front door of New Ways. Image from RIBApix.

Peter Behrens' sketch for the living room of New Ways. Image from RIBApix.

Behrens design for New Ways is fairly straightforward, with an almost square plan for the two storey house. It sits at the front of the typical long, thin suburban plot, close to Wellingborough Road. It was built in brick and finished in a white washed cement render, with concrete construction being rarely used for domestic buildings at this point. The front is enlivened by a pointed window bay that rises vertically above the entrance, with a date sign on top reading 1926. Below the window, and above the centrally-placed art deco double entrance door is a canopy with small pylons. The pylons placed above the date sign originally lit up at night. The ground floor has two windows either side of the door, but there are none on the first floor, a rare sight on an English house. Around the roofline is a crested parapet, with two square chimneys set back to the rear.

Some of the fittings designed by C.R. Mackintosh for 78 Derngate and moved to New Ways. Image from 78 Derngate.

The garden front is more expressive than the street side, with rectangular windows for both ground and first floors, a recessed balcony area on the first floor and a staircase down to the garden from the ground floor. Inside the expressionist style, only hinted at outside, is given fuller reign. The entrance hallway floor has an irregular geometric pattern in tile, and elsewhere there are triangular light shades, cubist mosaic windows and Bauhaus-influenced rugs. There are also some pieces designed by Mackintosh for 78 Derngate that were transferred over by Bassett-Lowke when New Ways was completed in June 1926. These include a hanging light fixture, a radiator cover in lead and glass, a cabinet with an inbuilt clock and walls stencils, all placed in the study of the new house.

New Ways featured on the front cover of Ideal House in 1927. Image from 78 Derngate.

Although there was not an explosion of new modernist houses built in the wake of New Ways, it did prove to be influential for those that did dare bring the contemporary to their designs. Scottish architect Thomas S. Tait used a similar design for one of his houses at Silver End, Essex in 1927, using a very similar front facade complete with a triangular window topped with small pylons and a windowless first floor. The rear face of New Ways also influenced the design of Starlock in Rye, East Sussex, designed in 1930 by Frank Scarlett, who used it for the front of this house. Due to its importance in the history of modern architecture in Britain, New Ways was listed in 1952. Unlike many modernist architects in Germany in the 1930s, Behrens remained in the country after the Nazis took power in 1933. In fact in 1936 he moved from Vienna to Berlin to teach at the state arts academy, the Prussian Academy of Arts, and was chosen by Albert Speer to plan the rebuilding of Berlin. However, he did not live to carry this out and died on 27th February 1940. Bassett-Lowke continued to live at New Ways until his own death on 21st October 1953.

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The Village of Tomorrow

24/3/2026

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An illustration of the Kemp and Tasker Olympia House. Image from C20 society.

The Ideal Home Exhibition, held at the Olympia Exhibition Centre in Kensington, began in 1908 and continues to this day, now known as the Ideal Home Show. The exhibition was devised by Wareham Smith, advertising manager of the Daily Mail newspaper, to promote the paper, then only in its 12th year of existence. The set up of the exhibition then, largely as now, was divided into different sections, with areas focusing on house styles, construction, interior decoration, furniture and food preparation. A newsworthy part of the exhibition was the Ideal House Competition, where house builders would showcase their latest designs, which they hoped would catch the visitors eye, and lead to more house sales. Most of the house designs were along the lines of what the newspaper explained to readers would be on show “red roofed cottages, brown bungalows, and gaily coloured pavilions”. The modern designs that were being built in Europe in the early years of the 20th century, influenced by Le Corbusier, Mies Van de Rohe and Bruno Taut and showcased at the 1927 Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, were largely ignored inside the sheltered avenues of Olympia.

The House That Jack Built (1931) by T. Dalgleish Maclean and D. G. Towner

A few modernist designs managed to sneak into the exhibition such as the two Concrete Houses of 1928 by the Portland Cement Company, the 1931 Hush-Hush house designed by A. Trystan Edwards for W.T. Lamb & Sons or The House That Jack Built from the same year by T. Dalgleish Maclean and D. G. Towner, a design for a house for a married couple to live in without staff. However the influence of modernism could not be resisted forever, and in 1934 the wholly modern Village of Tomorrow was exhibited, in the hope that white walls and flat roofs would prove a popular new look for house buyers. It is not too much of a spoiler to tell you that this did not occur. Home buyers' reluctance to embrace modernist living meant that estates of flat roofed houses did not bloom around the suburbs in the interwar years, although a few attempts were made. Of the nine modern house types exhibited in the Village of Tomorrow, a small number were built of each type and can still be found around London’s sprawl today. Here we will go through the house types and where they were eventually built.

The Wates house, as built in New Malden

The building company Wates, founded in 1887 by Streatham builder Edward Wates and now a large construction firm, employed architect Ronald Aver Duncan to design their entry. Duncan had designed a “House of the Future” for the exhibition of 1928, alongside S. Rowland Pierce, which was packed with labour saving appliances and electrical devices. The house he designed for Wates was less futuristic but moderne in appearance, with a sun deck roof, square staircase tower and horizontal stripes. A group of these houses were built in a slightly modified, semi detached form four years later at New Malden in Kingston upon Thames, and others can be found in Theydon Bois and Fulwell.

The Sunspan house, as built in Welwyn. Image from Conway.

Probably the most recognisable house that came out of the Village of Tomorrow was the Sunspan. Designed by Wells Coates and David Pleydell-Bouveire for the developers E.L. Berg and Co, the Sunspan was the most revolutionary of the 1934 house types, built with prefabricated parts and planned with a curved shape to allow maximum sunlight throughout the day. Coates had previously developed his “Isotype” housing idea in 1927, which had some features that would show up on the Sunspan house, such as the curved glass section. His Isokon building in Belsize Park was officially opened three months after the 1934 exhibition.

The Sunspan house on show at the exhibition was a two storey home with a curved facade on one side. This could be oriented to the best angle on the plot it was built on, preferably in a north-south axis, The Olympia house was fitted out with furniture and devices designed by Coates, such as the circular Bakelite Ecko radio. The building company evidently didn't think Coates and Pleydell-Bouverie’s design was the finished article, and they proceeded to build altered versions of it, with extra storeys and other changes. These can be found again in New Malden, as well as Long Ditton, Hinchley Wood and various other spots in the South of England.

The Davis Estates house, as built in Southgate.

By volume built,the most successful house from the exhibition was probably the one for Davis Estates, which can be found all around the suburbs of London, particularly in Petts Wood in Bromley and in Harrow. As was (and indeed still is) the case with high volume house builders, no architect was recognised as the designer of this house. But whoever did design it, produced a distinctive design with curved metal windows on both floors, a small front balcony and the obligatory sun roof. Like the Wates houses, this model was adapted for semi detached building, although some detached types were built in Belmont, Harrow. Emigre architect Peter Caspari was employed as an architect for the company, and though he did design apartment blocks for them,such as Kingsley Court in Willesden, it is not known if he contributed to this house design.

The G.T. Crouch house, as built in Hendon.

At the more prestigious end of the scale is the house built for the builders G.T. Crouch Ltd, the Sunway, produced by architects C.E. Simmons and Cecil Grellier. The elements of this design were somewhat similar to some of the other show houses; white rendered walls, a flat roof with a sundeck and a staircase tower. Buyers obviously did not think this combination was for them with only two built; one in Hendon and the other in Luton. Like most of the architects who designed the houses at the exhibition (with the exception of Coates and Pleydell-Bouverie), Simmons was not a modernist ideologue, and designed other houses in a variety of styles.

The Morrell Brothers house, as built at Herne Hill.

Also at the grander end of the scale was the house designed by Leslie Kemp and Frederick Tasker for Morrell Brothers builders of Bromley. They produced a two storey, flat roofed design with a curved ground floor window, that they boasted could be built in any site. In the end, it was only built on two, with one in Herne Hill, on a street of houses built by Morrell’s (including their own home), and one in West Wickham. A third was built in Dublin in 1936, but this seems to have been a copy rather than an official design, an occurrence that happened frequently with the house designs paraded in the press. Morrells were better known for their semi detached houses, built on speculative estates such as the Coney Hall estate in West Wickham, which was the site of a rent strike that ultimately sent them into bankruptcy.

Other companies to show their house designs in the Village of Tomorrow included John Laing, J.J Hodgson, Coalelectric Estate Development and the Universal Housing Company. The last of these probably had the most interesting design of the others, with a boxy design featuring a colonnade looking onto the garden, although when a couple of copies were built, a central staircase tower was included. All this fairly serious modernism was somewhat upstaged by another house on show at the exhibition, The Gadgets model house, as designed by illustrator W. Heath Robinson. The house sent up the era's craze for the labour saving appliances, as also showcased at the exhibition in Staybrite Street, with a variety of odd looking gadgets inside the 20ft tall house.

The John Laing 1935 house, exhibited at Kings Cross. Image from RIBApix.

As well as the exhibition at Olympia, the building companies also showcased their houses at various locations around London. John Laing installed a copy of their three bedroom model outside Kings Cross railway station, with visitors admitted from 10am to 10pm daily. Davis Estates had model houses at both Vauxhall Bridge Road and next to Charing Cross station, whilst both E.L. Berg and G. T. Crouch had show homes in situ at Clapham Junction. However all this effort was in vain, as homebuyers did not take to the modern style and at the 1935 Ideal Home Exhibition, the “Jubilee Village” featured just one design with any modernist influence, the Davis Estates submission, with its curved Suntrap windows and corner entrance. The Village of Tomorrow had quickly become the village of yesterday.

Many of the houses mentioned here feature in our Speculative Suburban Houses 1933-39 Mini Guide, available HERE

References
The Ideal Home Through the 20th Century- Deborah S. Ryan
Semi Detached London Alan- A. Jackson
Wells Coates: A monograph- Sherban Cantacuzino
Modernist Semis and Terraces in England- Finn Jensen

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The Inbetweeners: Ealing Common and Hounslow West

25/2/2026

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Ealing Common Underground Station. Image from Bright Underground Spaces.

Charles Holden’s first set of stations for London Transport, the Northern Line extension to Morden in 1926, introduced a fresh new look for the underground, based on a three part screen facade. This design could be adapted for a variety of sites, easily fitting into an existing shopping parade or onto a street corner in the already built-up sprawl of London. The 1930s saw the tube rapidly expanding, stretching beyond the inner suburbs into Middlesex and Essex. This meant station buildings could sit in larger plots, not having to fit in with the existing suburban scene, and so could be more expansive in form. This led to some of Holden’s and the underground’s most celebrated stations; Sudbury Town, Arnos Grove, Southgate and a number of others. But in between the first Northern Line stations and the “brick boxes with concrete lids” as Holden called them, were a couple of stations that bridged the gap from one design to the other; Ealing Common and Hounslow West.

Ealing Common station under construction. Image from London Transport Museum.

The stations opened in 1931 as part of the Piccadilly Line extension westwards from Acton Town towards Hounslow and South Harrow, both replacing earlier station buildings. Ealing Common was opened on March 1st, with Hounslow West following on July 5th. Holden adapted the flexible screen facade from the Morden extension,into a fully fledged station building, using a seven-sided double-height ticket hall as the main structure. Around the seven sides of the upper portion of the ticket hall are rectangular windows with an underground roundel on six of them. The station also had a blue enamel name sign which went around the edge of the roofline (now removed at Ealing Common), and the first use of an illuminated name sign at the front of the station, an integral feature of later stations. Like the Northern Line stations, Ealing Common and Hounslow West were built in Portland stone, with concrete roof slabs. At these new stations Holden added a granite finish at ground level, intended to prevent wear and tear from passenger flow.

The ticket hall ceiling of Hounslow West station. Image from London Transport Museum.

At street level were shop units, and Hounslow West also had a drop off and pick up area for cars, a useful feature in the suburbs where the car was gaining ascendancy. The interiors of the stations used the seven sided structure to create a heptagonal shape in the ceiling. At Hounslow West this was adorned in the centre by a hanging light fixture designed by Basil Ionides. This shape was echoed in the ticket hall floor with the use of polished cement St James's tiles. Ionides also decorated both ticket halls with a dado rail in tile and terrace and a wall frieze in geometric tiled patterns, pink and yellow at Hounslow and green and grey for Ealing.

Ealing Common ticket hall interior. Image from London Transport Museum.

The platforms featured the curved concrete canopies developed by London Underground chief architect Stanley Heaps, and later used at other Piccadilly Line stations. Hounslow West had its platform area redeveloped in 1975 for the extension to Hatton Cross and beyond to Heathrow. As Ealing Common and Hounslow West opened, Holden had already moved on to ‘purer’ geometric forms, using the rectangle, square and the circle at stations like Sudbury Town (which also opened in 1931) and Arnos Grove (which followed in 1932). Both Ealing Common and Hounslow West were listed in May 1994, with the listing notes for the latter commenting on its “richness and completeness…as well as its unusual form”, and both still serve the Piccadilly Line 90 years after opening.

Ealing Common and Hounslow West are featured in our London Tube Stations 1924-61 book, available HERE

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Anatomy of a House No.25: Sewell's Orchard, Tewin

12/2/2026

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Anatomy of a House No.25

Sewell's Orchard, Tewin, Hertfordshire
1936
Mary Crowley

The Garden front of the center house of the three at Tewin.

The work of female architects was few and far between in interwar Britain. We have covered the house designed by artist Dora Gordine in Kingston on a previous Anatomy of a House blog, and there were others such as Justin Blanco White, Norah Aiton and Betty Scott. One female architect who would prove to be the most influential of those who practiced in the 1920s and 30s was Mary Crowley. Her work designing schools in the post war years, alongside husband David Medd, first for Hertfordshire County Council and then for the Ministry of Education, would help transform schools from the regimented Victorian-era layout to a more flexible, child-centred approach. But it is her house design we are interested here, and we will explore the group of three houses she designed at Sewell’s Orchard in the village of Tewin, Hertfordshire

Crowley was born in Bradford on 4th August 1907. Her father, Ralph, was the Chief Medical Officer for the Ministry of Education and was a Quaker, two strong influences on Mary’s future career. Mary attended the progressive Bedales school in Hampshire, a coeducational secular establishment where Mary would become Head Girl. She later attended the Architectural Association, where she met other young women studying architecture such as Judith Ledeboer, Jessica Albery and Justin Blanco White. After passing her qualifications, Crowley worked in the office of Louis De Soisson in Welwyn Garden City, where her family had moved in 1921. It was nearby that Crowley would design and build a terrace of three houses on a plot of land bought by her parents. Mary’s mother thought the plot of land was the right one for them, especially as Sewell had been a name in their family.

The three houses seen in their landscape.

The three houses that Mary designed were to house her parents, her sister Elfrida and her husband Cecil Kemp and the Miall family, all Quakers. Kemp was the head architect for the Miners Welfare Commission and the National Coal Board, designing modernist-influenced pithead baths at sites such as Snowdon Colliery in Kent. Kemp, and Mary’s friend from the AA, John Brandon Jones, assisted Crowley with the drawings and details of the house, but they were all her own design. Mary had taken a trip to Scandinavia in July 1930 as part of her architectural studies, and this proved to be influential on the design for Sewell’s Orchard.

A plan of the houses in their grounds

Most modernist houses built in Britain up to that point took their influence from the International Modern style as seen in the work of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and other heroic figures from the continent. Crowley's houses however took their cue from a gentler strain of modernism as found in Northern Europe, with less emphasis on white walls and monolithic concrete and more on brick, tile and timber. The three houses are largely separate, with two connected by their garages, with mature trees and a vegetable garden in the shared grounds behind. The houses have sloping, monopitch roofs finished in blue pantiles with the facades on the southerly garden side having overhanging eaves. The windows in the houses were constructed from metal casements with wood frames. The bricks are a mixture of yellow local stock from nearby Hertingfordbury and blue brick used for a plinth. The houses were arranged with open plan ground floors with the dining and living areas flowing into each other.

The living room of the second house. Image from RIBApix.

Crowley worked with Hungarian architect Erno Goldfinger from around 1934, assisting him as he set up his practice in England. She worked on the terrace of houses at Willow Road in Hampstead, which would be completed in 1939 and be home to Goldfinger and his wife Ursula throughout the rest of their lives. That project has some similarities in approach with the Tewin scheme, with both sets of houses showing how modernist design can fit into their environments and use local materials. The pair also produced a design for a prefabricated nursery school in the mid-1930s, something that wasn’t taken up at the time, but would prove influential to both of them.

In 1941 Crowley joined the education department of Hertfordshire County Council under the leadership of Chief Education Officer John Newsom, who wanted to bring the county's educational buildings into the modern world, and became part of the newly formed architects department in 1946. As part of the department, Crowley helped produce innovative designs for new schools, using prefabricated units to build schools quickly, and including commissioned artworks and landscaped grounds in the designs. A good example of Crowley’s work for Herts is Burleigh School in Cheshunt, built from 1946, and designed with David Medd and Bruce Martin using a modular system to enable quick construction.

5 Pennyfeathers Lane, Digswell (1954) David and Mary Medd. Image from RIBApix.

She married Medd in 1949, who she had met whilst working for Goldfinger, and the couple would work for Herts and live in a house they designed together in the village of Digswell in 1953. The house on Pennyfeathers Lane also takes its inspiration from Scandinavian modernism, with its single storey, stock brick structure, formed of two halves connected by a covered walkway. The couple then went to work for the Ministry of Education overseeing the design of the new schools throughout the country, such as Woodside Jr School in Amersham (1957). The houses at Tewin were listed in March 1982, recognized as a pioneering group of houses,with a design “which would not have appeared out of place thirty years earlier”. The Medd's house in Digswell was also listed in April 2007, with the listing noting its unchanged interior and careful integration in the landscape. Mary Medd had passed away in 2005, with her husband David dying in 2009.

Burleigh Primary school, Cheshunt (1948) Herts County Council. Image from RIBApix

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The Archer

4/2/2026

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Eric Aumonier putting the final touches to The Archer statue, 1940. Image from London Transport Museum.

The casual commuter travelling along the High Barnet branch of the Northern Line may notice something a little unusual as they pass through East Finchley station. Come rain or shine, a determined looking figure points his bow and arrow south towards the centre of London and beyond to the line’s terminus at Morden. The Archer sculpture, poised on the eastern wall of the station just above the south bound track, was created by artist Eric Aumonier for the station which had been rebuilt from 1939.

The sculpture and the station rebuild were part of the ill fated Northern Heights programme, a plan to upgrade and extend the northern branches of the Northern Line. The Edgware branch was to be extended into Hertfordshire, and the Barnet branch was to have a series of station upgrades. The rebuilding of East Finchley station was the only part of the programme that came to pass, thanks to budget restraints and the outbreak of war in 1939.

The Archer seen acroos the platforms of East Finchley Station. Image from London Transport Museum.

The new building replaced the 1867 station which was built for the Great Northern Railway, with the rebuilt station primed for the underground which had been slowly making its way northwards. The initial plan by Leonard Bucknell and Ruth Ellis was revised by Charles Holden, who had been busy with his University of London scheme, another project which was curtailed, leaving us with Senate House.

The new station, completed in 1941, did not have the straightforward clarity of Holden’s earlier work along the Piccadilly Line. Partly this is due to the awkward nature of the site, with the station perched on a railway viaduct. However, at platform level, the streamlined platform shelters and glass bridge over the tracks containing offices, reflects the “Speed, Light and Modernity” that Holden and London Transport supremo Frank Pick brought to the network from the 1920s.

The South Wind releif on 55 Broadway, by Eric Aumonier. Image from London Transport Museum.

The symbol of the station and Holden and Pick’s vision, would be the 10ft statue, installed in 1940. Eric Aumonier was born into the family architectural sculpture business, Aumonier Studios, founded by his grandfather, in 1899. He studied at the Slade School of Art, and became the chief artist for the family firm. He would be commissioned to provide a relief sculpture of the South Wind for Holden’s 55 Broadway headquarters for London Transport in 1929, and a couple of years later would design two statues set into relief panels for the Daily Express building in 1932.

The Speed Underground poster by Alan Rogers, 1930. Image from London Transport Museum.

The Archer was created by using beech timber wood fastened around a steel armature framework, before being covered in reclaimed lead sheets. The bow is made of English ash, and covered in copper and gilt. The symbol of the archer was used to represent the former royal hunting grounds of Enfield that Finchley sits on the edge of, as well as nodding to the concerns of speed and accuracy that Holden and Pick were interested in. Of course the archer motif had also been used by Alan Rogers in his 1930 “Speed Underground” poster for the network. By 1955, the wood used for the original statue had already begun to decay, and it had to be replaced at a cost of £1500, a much steeper price than the £245 paid to Aumonier in 1940.

A sketch of the intended Highgate station with the Dick Whittington statue. Image from Bright Undergound Spaces by David Lawrence.

The Archer was just one artwork planned for the Northern Heights stations. A couple of stops down the line at Highgate, Aumonier was asked to design a statue of Dick Whittington for a new station building, but neither were ever completed. The statue at East Finchley, nicknamed Archie, has become a symbol not just of the station, but also of the surrounding area, with the local newspaper also named The Archer. The station building including the platforms and statue was listed in July 1987.

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Frederick Gibberd and The Modern Flat

4/1/2026

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Pullman Court, Streatham. Image from RIBApix.

Frederick Gibberd was born in Coventry on January 7th 1908. Throughout his career, he and his partnership designed a wide range of buildings, including houses, factories, offices, colleges, libraries, hospitals, power stations, airports and even cathedrals. But the one building type he was most associated with was the flat. After gaining his architectural qualifications at Birmingham School of Art he worked for the firm of E. Berry Webber, best known for their municipal projects in the interwar years, but was laid off as the Great Depression meant construction work dried up. Gibberd then travelled Europe, visiting Prague, Vienna and Budapest, studying the new architecture of the time, before setting his own firm and designing a series of innovative speculative apartment blocks in the 1930s.

Pullman Court as featured in The Modern Flat book in 1937.

As well as his practical work, Gibberd also provided theoretical weight to the idea of the apartment, a relatively new typology to the British urban fabric in the interwar years. Alongside fellow architect F.R.S. Yorke (who was his roommate at Birmingham), Gibberd produced The Modern Flat, a book that provided a survey of modernist apartment blocks from all over the world, including examples from Britain, such as the Isokon flats by Wells Coates and Kensal House by Maxwell Fry and Elizabeth Denby, as well as three examples by Gibberd himself.

Gibberd's birds eye view of the Pullman Court scheme. Image from RIBApix.

The first of those three examples was Pullman Court in Streatham (1935), Gibberd's first major commission, at the age of just 27. The scheme consists of three blocks, two long ones which mirror each other and a taller one at the back of the long, thin plot. The blocks are constructed with reinforced concrete frames infilled with modular panels, the engineering overseen by L.G. Mouchel and Partners. Gibberd arranged the blocks to get maximum light to each apartment, with south-facing balconies and roof gardens on each block as well. The estate also had an open air swimming pool, located at the end of the northern block, now unfortunately filled in. Like many of the new blocks built in the interwar years, it was designed to be occupied by single people or couples, with a range of labour saving devices like refrigerators and fitted kitchens provided.

Two of the Park Court blocks, pictured after completion. Image from RIBApix.

Gibberd also designed Park Court (1937), a speculative estate on the edge of Crystal Palace Park in Sydenham, in a similar fashion. The estate has seven blocks arranged in a semi circle on a triangular piece of land between two roads. The ranges are three storey high and contain 54 four-bedroom flats, built with a reinforced concrete frame and brick infill, painted white to fit the modernist ethos, and steel framed windows. Unfortunately this aesthetic was undermined by the mansard roofs added in the 1980s.

The interior of one of the Ellington Court apartments. Image from RIBApix.

In the north London suburb of Southgate, Gibberd designed Ellington Court for Wells, Wells and Diplock (1937). Unlike Pullman Court and Park Court, Ellington Court forgoes the bright white render or exposed concrete construction in favour of a more suburban brick finish. Formed of two linked blocks, this building's modernity is saved for its bold concrete balconies and curved cantilever porches, along with its mixture of horizontal and vertical window strips. Unfortunately this careful detailing has been somewhat undermined by the exterior service pipes (stipulated by the council in the original planning agreement) and the more recent additional penthouse floor.

The Lawn, Harlow. Image from Conway.

In the post war years Gibberd’s firm expanded greatly, designing larger and more complex projects all over the country. However, one of his most notable projects in immediate post war years was another flat design, The Lawn at Harlow New Town (1951). Gibberd was the master planner of the new town in Essex and designed much of the housing. The Lawn was the first point block in the country, with the flats, specified for single people and couples, arranged around a central service core. The flats were also arranged in a butterfly plan, allowing every apartment a south facing living room.

His partnership would design a range of estates in the post war years featuring tower blocks and lower rise ranges of flats with schemes found in Hackney, Stoke Newington, Enfield, Leamington Spa, Harlow and elsewhere. Gibberd's career would also include prestigious projects such as Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, Didcot Power Station and Heathrow Airport, but it was with the humble flat that he had his biggest influence.

Pullman Court, Park Court and Ellington Court are all featured in our Speculative Suburban Apartments mini guide alongside many other examples from all over suburban London. Get you copy right HERE

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Anatomy of a House No.27 The Gane Show House, Bristol 1936 Marcel Breuer

Anatomy of a House No.26 New Ways, Northampton 1926 Peter Behrens

Anatomy of a House No.25 Sewell's Orchard, Tewin, Hertfordshire 1936 Mary Crowley

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Anatomy of a House No.27
The Gane Show House, Bristol
1936
Marcel Breuer

Anatomy of a House No.26

New Ways, Northampton
1926
Peter Behrens

Anatomy of a House No.25

Sewell's Orchard, Tewin, Hertfordshire
1936
Mary Crowley