The Village of Tomorrow

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