I’d arranged to meet Patrick Ellard, a university lecturer who had lived in New Ash Green since he was four years old. He lived in Knight’s Croft, one of the earliest neighbourhoods. Like many postwar developments, houses weren’t built along roadsides, but overlooked pathways instead, so as we drove through I peered out at anything that might provide a useful clue as to our whereabouts. The driver abandoned me as soon as he could, desperate to be out of the village’s odd road system. I stood for a while trying to get my bearings among the quirky houses with their monopitched-roofs and the showily exotic foliage. There wasn’t much for a stranger to work with, and the numbering system, supposedly based on the route taken by a postman, was almost impossible to follow. For some time I walked in what turned out to be entirely the wrong direction. It became clear almost immediately that even to someone who had managed to navigate Park Hill’s streets in the sky, the underpasses of the Elephant and Castle and the baffling Dashes of Harlow, this was a formidable new challenge. I felt that I had entered a highly sophisticated but altogether alien landscape. Narrow paths, overgrown with shrubbery, led me deeper into the neighbourhood. This cluster of beautiful modernist houses hidden in the midst of dense woodland felt more like the setting for a Lars von Trier film than hop-growing country. Eventually I found Patrick’s bungalow, in the corner of a square, where it sat stealthily clad in its black asbestos tiles. Large, glossy-leafed plants led up to the buttercup yellow front door, still proudly displaying its number in Eurostile, a squared-off sixties typeface.
I’d been told that Patrick was the go-to guy if you want to learn about New Ash Green. He’d contributed to a book celebrating the developer, Span, and their mercurial architect, Eric Lyons. I was heartened to see that, although clearly a huge Span nerd and keen to retain as many original features in the bungalow as possible, Patrick’s house wasn’t a museum; it was a home. Duplo and Transformers showed that small children were at work. There were hints of his other obsessions, from the jazz playing in the background to the books on pop culture ranged along the walls. When he professed a fondness for Saint Etienne, I knew Patrick was a true renaissance geek. We sat in his lounge, with its glass wall opening out onto the garden. The Scandinavian obsession with teak was everywhere in evidence: a teak and glass floor-to-ceiling cabinet divided the kitchen and lounge; the floor was teak block; the doors were teak; and there were teak shelves in the kitchen. The ceiling sloped upwards to one end of the room, revealing a large spandrel panel beneath – in teak. A single steel beam crossed the room, solidly holding the light prefabricated frame together. It was a masterclass in lightness, efficient use of materials, and stylish mid-century living.
‘We arrived here in autumn of 1969,’ said Patrick, in his calm, unhurried manner. By ‘here’ he didn’t just mean New Ash Green, he meant Knight’s Croft, the neighbourhood he still lives in – as do his parents and sister.
‘There were maybe about 200 other families here at the time, so not too many. But the first families started to move in in early ’67. So there’d been enough time for a bit of a community to build up. And immediately we felt welcomed. I think it was very much due to what Span had put in place to promote the idea of a close-knit community. I think that was done through the physical embodiment of the village and the design, through to the position of the houses and really making it work on a pedestrian level.’
I chose not to confess quite how lost I’d been earlier.
‘The paths were designed to be narrow, so that they would bring you into contact with your neighbours. And the residents’ societies empowered people to have a say in how their communities were run so that brought people together again. Obviously my sister and I were quite young at the time, but it was the social life that was so important. As soon as you moved in people would be knocking on your door saying “how are you?” “where have you come from?”.’
Patrick’s family had arrived from Birmingham, via Staplehurst. His parents were typical of the kind of young professionals that New Ash Green was attracting.
‘He was an interior designer, she was a schoolteacher. They were the archetypal Span residents! People had come to New Ash Green to make it work, to participate in what many were describing at the time as a social experiment. It was fantastic. People were interested in people, and interested in the place as well. People coming here in the late sixties and early seventies brought their culture and interests with them so within months you’d have various societies being formed in people’s houses. It was great, a wonderful place to live.’
Throughout our conversation Patrick was keen to impress how universal that enthusiasm had been back in the day.
‘There was always something happening. Span set up shop in the manor house’ – as had the Harlow development corporation, in Terlings – ‘so the earliest societies like the film society held their shows in the manor house. And they put on parties. Every week there was a party to welcome the new residents. The parties were held in this exquisitely designed show hall, where there were scale models of the neighbourhoods, and scale models of the shopping centre, which wasn’t built yet. Span even paid for a little temporary hut and some goalposts for the football club, and gave a bit of land so they could have their pitch. They were very benevolent.’
After a good nose around his house, and its original features – from the big white porcelain sink in the kitchen to the brushed aluminium door handles, the black ceramic tiles in the bathroom and the yellowing plastic light switches and power sockets – we went for a stroll around the village.
It was Span developer Leslie Bilsby who initially suggested that the company should branch out from building small housing estates to creating a whole town. He was eventually talked down to a village. When two adjacent farms in Kent – Newhouse and North Ash – came on the market in the early sixties, Span snapped up the 430 acres with an eye on building something more ambitious than just another suburban estate. It was a change not just in scale, but philosophy. ‘We thought the village was exciting,’ said Geoffrey Townsend, Span’s other principal developer. ‘It was trying to create a society for people; it wasn’t just doing a spec-built job of selling houses.’1 Eric Lyons, the architectural driving force behind Span, was in no doubt of the potential, remarking that ‘this is the most exciting scheme I have ever undertaken.’2
Span were not alone in attempting such grand private projects. There was also Bar Hill outside Cambridge, whose developer Covell Matthews and Partners aimed to build 1,250 houses by 1965; and Vigo in Kent, just seven miles down the road, where Andrew Cunnison was set to construct 650 homes. The Observer suggested that these projects were ‘sparking off a new trend, in an era when city centres are being torn apart, and redevelopment is becoming an OK word’.3 Leslie Bilsby wholeheartedly agreed: ‘500 villages like New Ash Green could be built in the next five years,’ he said, ‘and 250,000 people housed in exceptionally pleasant and functional environments.’4
Yet Span soon discovered that private redevelopment wasn’t an ‘OK word’ in the eyes of Kent County Council, who refused planning permission in January 1964. The train line was poor, they argued. And the project would interfere with their own new housing initiatives, such as the expansion of the nearby village of Hartley. Then there was the loss of all that premium agricultural land. And let’s not forget this was the green belt, the council reminded Span. It was the new Labour Minster for Housing, Richard Crossman, who saved the project. He was convinced that Span’s scheme and Eric Lyons’ designs would ‘show up what’s wrong with the ghastly development in this part of Kent for the last 10 years.’5 This was a direct knock at the sprawl of Hartley, and Dartford Rural District council were furious. Labour councillor Leslie Reeves referred to the decision as ‘Mr Crossman’s unaccountable blunder’ and offered to buy the unbuilt village for the council. The press were all over the story. ‘Mr F. Sims, leader of the Conservative opposition group, told The Times that they gave unqualified support to protests against development at New Ash
Green.’6 To Sims’ and others’ dismay, Kent council finally passed the scheme in 1966.
By that time the Greater London Council had committed to buying 450 houses for council tenants moving out of central London. Here, then, was a mixed community of council and private houses built not by the state, but by a developer. In effect, it was a market-funded new town.
Span houses overlook the ‘minnis’ in New Ash Green.
On a Sunday afternoon stroll with Patrick along the ‘wents’ – the old Kentish word for paths – it became clear how Span thought people would live back in the late sixties, and how much has changed since then. The impression was of green space punctuated with the odd row or cluster of houses – pretty low density for a private development. Buildings were grouped in small terraces, angled in staggered ‘saw-toothed’ layouts. Gardens were designed with steel hook fencing to allow the residents to look straight out onto the ‘minnis’ – the old Kentish word for open spaces. And people could look back in too, over the lawns and low fences, through the picture windows and glass doors. Span’s New Ash Green was all about relaxed informality and openness. Today most of the gardens have been hemmed off with tall fences, and the householders have turned their backs on the communal green spaces. Not only that, the Span homes in New Ash Green are now vastly outnumbered – five to one – by those designed and built by Bovis in the eighties. This hugely expanded modern village now features hundreds of red-brick Brookside houses, and cars and pedestrians were no longer separated: roads ran directly in front of all the houses, in whose driveways fleets of 4x4s were parked. And the small windows of the new houses no longer ‘let the outside in’, giving instead a mean, fortress-like element to the estate. Span’s original village, with its calm Scandinavian-style beauty, was perhaps the most beguilingly lovely place I’d visited on this tour. But something had clearly gone very wrong in paradise.
Eric Lyons’ successful architecture practice, which was based in his garden, grew up in the fifties. His first job had been working for modernist maestro Maxwell Fry and his eminent – if short-term – colleague Walter Gropius. During the mid-thirties they designed and oversaw the construction of Impington Village College in Cambridgeshire, the Bauhaus master’s only major British work. ‘I don’t believe that I emulate Gropius architecturally,’ Eric was later to say, ‘but his rational discipline was something that I needed. I’m basically irrational.’7 A fellow architect described Eric as ‘the most amusing ex tempore speaker I know, slightly satirical, poking fun at everybody, including himself’.8 The shrewd architectural critic Ian Nairn, who would later present a BBC documentary on him, found Eric ‘a robust extrovert … whose forthrightness might well puzzle the earnest sophisticates who on average seem to represent the typical Span-dweller … There is no Corbusian arrogance … each new housing scheme represents a different problem and may need a different solution’.9 Lyons, self-deprecating as ever, was less kind: ‘I am a rehasher,’ he said, ‘and I believe in rehashing, although I call it an evolutionary process.’10 He would design all sorts throughout his career, from cinemas to tower blocks, but it was his work for Span that would define him. His ‘evolutionary’ approach, testing out ideas over time in subtly different estates and developments, was brilliantly suited to the exploration of new ideas in building homes, and Span allowed him to experiment. ‘Few local authorities have, like the LCC, seen their housing problems as a great challenge to be met with new ideas for creating a new domestic environment,’ he wrote in The Times in 1961. ‘Few speculative builders, indeed, see housing as anything but an old business made tricky by changing architectural style, to which they sometimes must pay lip service.’11
Rather than sticking to the tried and tested methods of building homes, Lyons and the team at Span were always looking for new angles and approaches to the problem – from the layout of the estates they planned to the means of construction. He was keen to incororporate elements of prefabrication and standardisation: ‘People dream of their special house because they do not like the ready-made articles available, but there is no reason why needs should not be satisfied by ready-made houses any more than by ready-made cars or refrigerators.’12 He was also a fan of designing terraces, squares and courts, patterns more familiar to Georgian architecture than modern estates with their neighbourhood clusters and precincts of towers. ‘We need grouped houses, not only for the sense of community they impart, but for economic and sensible use of land and to enable us to use modern building techniques by repetitive design.’13
The kind of modern design Eric and Span were championing was somewhere between expensive architect-designed villas for the rich and rational large-scale council developments for the working class. These were viable replacements for the mock-Tudor suburban semis that had come to define the middle classes around Britain’s cities. Selling them to that most cautious and status-conscious of constituencies was as much of a skill as designing them. Placing show houses at many of the Ideal Home-style exhibitions was a trick Eric and Span had learned early. In 1957 they had constructed a home from their Blackheath estate at the second House and Garden ‘House of Ideas’ show, and received rave press reviews. ‘There is no doubt at all that this is an enchanting little house,’ enthused the correspondent from the Manchester Guardian, although ‘the housewife in me would rather not dust that staircase where wooden treads meet iron angles.’ Still, she concluded ‘anything that succeeds in bringing this kind of house to the middle-income groups is a good thing.’14
The Span name was first used in 1957 at Parkleys, their estate in Ham Common, west London. Here Eric’s updated versions of terraces and courtyards, complete with communal gardens, were built to a standardised but flexible design. Robert Matthew, the increasingly eminent former LCC chief architect, was swift to praise the estate. ‘These housing groups are obviously congenial to those living there that it becomes the more difficult to understand why the techniques used by the private developer have for so long remained almost static in a world of great change.’15 A further accolade came the company’s way when in 1959, a Span development was selected to represent a milestone in postwar building. ‘The Minister of Housing, Mr Henry Brooke, yesterday handed over the one millionth house built by private enterprise since 1945 to its owners, Mr and Mrs L. Saunders. The house chosen for this honour was at Corner Green, the latest project by Span Developments at Blackheath Park, London S. E.’16
I’d visited Parkleys the week before heading to New Ash Green, and met up with Oliver Childs, who lived in one of the flats and ran a vintage furniture restoration business. There was a great deal more regularity in the design here than in bespoke New Ash Green. Almost 200 flats were designed in what Oliver described as ‘a sort of Georgian square idea, so you’ve got these lovely courtyards.’ One thing that was consistent with Span’s later village was the astonishing variety of beautiful planting around the estate. The design of the flats and courtyards encouraged a free-form ramble through the backs and fronts rather than the oppressive ‘keep off the grass’ regime favoured by local authority schemes. But the most recognisably Span detail, above all others, was the tiled fronts. For the most part Parkleys is two storeys high, and all the way round the top floor was fronted with terracotta tiles, hung flat against the prefabricated panels. It’s this slightly Arts and Crafts detail on these otherwise recognizably modernist flats that gives them so much distinctive charm.
Classic tile-fronted Span flats at Parkleys.
I walked through the glass-fronted stairwell and up a flight of stairs to Oliver’s flat, and rang a suspiciously ancient-looking doorbell. Some time later, after a bit of tapping, I heard barking, and Oliver came to the door with his excitable Parson Russell terrier, Rufus. Slim, pale and dressed immaculately in the manner of a fifties man about town, Oliver looked rather as if he’d been cryogenically frozen at the opening of Parkleys and defrosted for the occasion. Like his dog, he was sometimes breathlessly quick and eager, and at other times quietly observant.
&nb
sp; ‘The doorbell’s intact,’ he informed me later, proudly. ‘It doesn’t work at the moment, but nothing’s been added to it.’ His flat was, as I’d expected, full of marvels. A long Robin Day sofa (‘his take on a Chesterfield’) divided the room. There were a couple of beautiful austerity-era chairs made by Remploy (‘found in a skip’) and a colourful painting by Anthony Frost on the wall. But the dominant presence, as in Patrick’s house in New Ash Green, was the huge picture window, looking out over a verdant courtyard and the back of a now rather tatty row of shops, also built by Span.
‘The minute we got the chance to buy I knew I wanted Span,’ he said, perched on the edge of a Remploy chair, ‘and we couldn’t have a house, unless we looked for a real run down wreck.’ What was it that made him want to live in a Span house in particular? ‘Initially it was New Ash Green. I remember seeing a postcard. A guy used to come into a shop I used to run and he dropped off a postcard when the New Ash Green website had first been set up.’ I imagined a network of like-minded vintage furniture fans tipping each other off about the latest teak sale. ‘I’d never even heard of it before then. Ultimately, the tiled fronts, aesthetically – just that Span tile – is what I like about these. I’m from Old Amersham, a very little cottagey place, so I always thought as a kid I wanted a little cottage on the high street, and I see these as cottages. It’s a realistic version of where I thought I’d be when I was 14. The idea might have been to buy a bigger one eventually, but now I’m of the opinion of still trying to get that cottage, but keeping this one. I don’t ever want to get rid of this.’ It was clear that Oliver, in his Span flat surrounded by beautiful mid-century Scandinavian furniture, was living the dream.
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