Shaftesbury Park Estate: Gothic Revival model dwellings

The streets are laid out on a grid pattern of long parallel streets flanked by long terraces. The streets are tree-lined with small trees mostly small fruit trees such as Hawthorn, Flowering plum, June Berry, Rowan, Whitebeam and Service Tree.

Every terrace has a moulded plaque above the entrances indicating the year of construction. The oldest housing have these triangular entrance gables carried by two red brick arches on three corbels. Al the decorative elements have been given a contrasting white colour. Thus lifting the rather gloomy dark yellow brick used for most of the facade.

The streetscape with similar long terraces on either side of the street make this a very distinctive housing estate. The tiny front gardens don't add much to the scene, due to the walls edging them.

The greatest variation in the houses, that for each class share the same floor plan, is achieved in the treatment of the entrances. On the left shallow pointed arches are used to give access to the side-by-side front doors of these homes with mirrored floor plans. On the right a squared-off variation on the triangular entrance. These houses don't have the decorative moulded plaques.

Another terrace, here with angled bay frontage and red brick dressings, also along the arches over the entrances. Also note the decorative dentil course in red brick below the guttering and the fire walls that protrude above the roof.

Turrets are employed as an architectural device in the Gothic Revival style. O the left a house with the entrance in a castellated turret. The white awning over the door mimics gothic shapes. Bands of red brick create interest in the facade. In a few places a long terrace is emphasised by a turret at the end, always on a visible corner. These turrets have windows with shallow pointed arches, a dentil course under the roof and a pointed roof like a witches hat.

Where short side streets meet the long parallel streets of the grid the corners are given no extra or special attention. The blocks simply abut the pavement. This lack of treatment of corners is indicative of Victorian urban design.

This decorative double commercial unit was included for local shops (baker and green grocer). Small turrets emphasise the two individual shops, whilst in between a door gives access to the apartments above. The primary school (on the right) had dedicated entrances for boys and girls, each with their own playground. This separate education was the norm in the Victorian Era.

A typical street with similar housing on each side. Each has a slightly different treatment of the entrances, creating some degree of local identity within the estate. On the whole the estate is very similar in overall appearance, however.

Shaftesbury Park Estate: a Victorian model dwellings project

A large section of Battersea Fields, also known as Pig Hill, near the Thames was acquired in 1872 by the Artizans, Labourers &General Dwellings Company for the realisation of their first socially mixed housing estate. The estate occupies a flat area of land at the edge of the flood plain just north of the slope rising to Clapham Common. Historically the poorly drained common land of Battersea Fields was used for pig herding. Two large ditches cut across to drain the land into the River Effra and Falcon Brook.

At the same time the housing co-operative was planning their house-building activities, the social reformer and peer, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury was pushing legislation through parliament to improve the living and employment conditions of working people and was sponsoring philanthropic efforts to provide schooling for their children. Under Shaftesbury's guardianship new so-called Ragged Schools were established providing free education in 1844. In 1872 Lord Shaftesbury, as president of the Ragged School Union, laid the foundation-stone of buildings at the estate, thus giving it it's name.

The street plan and house designs were by the Dwellings Company's architect and surveyor, Robert Austin, formerly a carpenter with the company. However, financial difficulties, caused by poor accounting, led to replacement of the directors of the company and a change of approach during the construction of the estate. The initial idea was to build small housing projects for sale, the profits of which would be invested in larger estates of affordable rented housing. Rents and lease prices were raised, excluding many lower paid workers who were originally intended to benefit, and the planned area of open space - Brassey Square in the centre of the estate- was built over. Greenery was thus limited to the small back garden and the small fruit trees lining the streets.

The estate is located behind Lavender Hill (L). The streets are laid out on a grid pattern of long parallel streets with shorter cross streets. At the centre a large public garden (green outline) was planned on Brassey Square (B), but this was built over. It is here that we find the primary school (PS), a large former hostel (H), a block of flats (F) and a block of shops with apartments (S). A former Victorian secondary school (SS) is located just outside the estate.

The estate was built between 1873 and 1877 along a grid of wide tree-lined streets and comprises about 1.200 two-storey houses with gardens. The houses of the Shaftesbury Park Estate are of four basic types or classes distinguished by the number of rooms. Only the highest class originally had bathrooms. The street elevations are varied slightly to avoid monotony, creating generally attractive street frontages in a gothic revival style so typical of the Victorian Era.

The buildings are consistently of stock brick with red brick dressings and pitched slate roofs, which with the common architectural style, gives the estate a strong sense of identity and distinctiveness. The grid layout, with streets of varying lengths but always straight (except Eversleigh Road, which is aligned with the railway embankment), allows for easy movement throughout the estate. There is a sense of formality in the townscape arising from the grid layout and the repetition in the building frontages.

At present the Peabody Trust owns most of the estate, but many homes are already privately owned, and the number keeps rising as the Trust gradually releases more units for sale.

Model homes: Artizans Dwellings Company

William Austin, who had worked himself up to become a developer even though he could neither read nor write, founds a commercial housing company in 1867: The Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company. His company is an excellent example of a Victorian, philanthropic, model dwellings exploitation company. These model dwellings companies were a forerunner of municipal social housing and the Garden City Movement. The focus of all these was to provide affordable housing for the working classes in good homes, away from the polluted inner-cities and with amenities (like parks, schools, churches, community halls and shops) nearby.

The goal of William Austin was to provide affordable housing to city dwellers, whose houses had to make way for the rapid modernisation and development of London, e.g. new roads, railways, canals, locks, gas works and factories.

Besides some large apartment buildings in central London the Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company is best known for a handful of large housing estates for working class and lower middle class residents. The first of these was the Shaftesbury Park Estate of 1872. This estate was quickly followed by the Queens Park Estate (1874), the Noel Park Estate (1883) and the Leigham Court Estate (1889). Lastly the dwellings company developed Pinner Wood Park, a true garden suburb, between 1913 and 1952.

The five housing estates developed by the Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company are all similar in layout, except for Pinner Wood Park. Long streets on a grid plan dominate the layout of these estates. The architecture is also similar in a gothic revival style. Each estate differs in building details however. The spatial concept is also similar, with the higher class houses close to the central church and school and the smaller lower class houses around that and duplex housing along the edges. This type of housing estate is typical of the Victorian Era.

Pinner Wood Park is visibly from a later era. Here the spatial and functional ideas of the Garden City Movement were translated into a large estate for the working classes and lower middle class. It's located within Metro-land but not on a prime location near a station, but rather in between the stations at Northwood Hills, Pinner (both Metropolitan Railway) and Hatch End (London Overground). The layout is also rather unconvincing. This garden suburb is part of a belt of dormitory suburbs around Harrow.

An overview of the five housing estates by the Artizans Dwellings Company on the map of the urban province that is Greater London.

All estates developed by the Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company were located on what were then the outskirts of the London Metropolis. Their location is also influenced by the proximity of railways, but they aren't located directly adjacent to any station. The idea was that the workers could live a better life on the edges of the sprawling city and commute back into town for their work. The ideal was that private and professional life would be best separated in temporal and spatial terms.

Subtle Spring: Carpeting the forest floor

Plants that grow in the forest or under the canopies of trees and shrubs mostly flower either very early in spring before the leaves appear or late in autumn. Few forest plants can cope with the shade of late spring, summer and early autumn enough to be able to produce enough nutrients to bare flowers at the same time. Especially in early spring the woodland can be carpeted by often low-growing plants known as cryptofytes, a term coined by the Danish biologist Raubkiaer. These plant all retreat into the ground when growing conditions become unfavourable. Most of these plants have underground tubers or rhizomes; some have bulbs.

The Japanese Liverwort (Hepatica japonica) is a dainty little plant that naturally grows in mountain forests. It is often the first plant to poke its flowers through the snow. The Wood anemone is related to the liverworts and grows all over Europe. The plant disappears completely after it has set seed to resurface early the following year. The Dogtooth violet (Erythronium den-canis) isn't related to violets, but a bulbous plant in the lily-family. As the flowers mature they will fold upwards like cyclamen. Like cyclamen and liverworts the leaves are mottled or covered with spots. This feature enhances the amount of natural light the leaves can process.