The builders, Walter Taylor, had prepared a brochure to sell the anticipated development, with heavy emphasis on its modern features. It mentioned the "maximum light and air” that the houses would admit, and that their concrete construction would offer “warm, quiet, damp -free rooms”, a rejoinder to the council's opinion on the material. The brochure also called the area's existing housing stock, largely built up over the past 30 years, “imitative, conventional, bad copies of bygone styles..” Despite this rousing call to modernity, the shock of the new was obviously too shocking and Kings College ended buying back some of the land it had sold the builders for the development. ​

Hendon Central was built as part of the extension of the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway, later to be known as the Northern Line, as it extended into the growing suburbs. The station opened for service on 19th November 1923, serving as the terminus until the line was extended to Edgware the following year. The station and its parade of shops were designed by Stanley Heaps, chief architect to the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, owner of the new line, in a thoroughly Neo-Georgian manner, a far cry from the continental modernism that Charles Holden was to introduce at the other end of the line. The entrance has a grand portico with a colonnade of Doric columns, with the interior finished with wooden doors, white, black and green tiling and a chequerboard floor. ​

The members of Tecton came and went, with architects joining, like Denys Lasdun and Carl Ludwig Franck, and others leaving, as Harding and Godfrey Samuel did in 1935, setting up as a partnership. They duo designed a handful of houses and other projects before their work was interrupted by the outbreak of war. As with many two person partnerships, one focused on design work, in this case Harding, whilst the other sought commissions and dealt with clients, as Samuel did here. Their first design was for a house at Sundridge Park near Bromley for Mr R.M. Thomas, on Lodge Road, a private, unpaved street next to a large golf course. Like Six Pillars, By-the-Links (1935) was heavily influenced by Le Corbusier’s house designs and features a long strip window at the front and floor to ceiling glazing at the rear, along with a slightly recessed ground floor with the first floor supported by columns, this time thin metal piloti. ​

​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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