Leigham Court Estate: a self-sufficient planned community

Streatham -the village along the road- remained a small village on the through road from London to Brighton until the arrival of the railways in the 19th century. The railway station at Streatham Hill opened in 1856. Local landowners seized on this by first developing the sections of their estates near the station and along main roads. Some of these new buildings were impressive piles, built as small mansions for the London elite. The Leigham Court Mansion and adjoining land was sold to the Artizans,Labourers & General Dwellings Company in 1888. On 66 acres of land, some 27 hectares, were purchased for the development of a mixed housing estate aimed at small business workers, office workers, artisans and other working people. As such it occupies a pioneering place in the history of housing provision on social grounds.

The ideal of the Artizans Company was to create a self-sufficient community for about 2500 people to be housed in nearly 1000 homes. The workmen and artisans housed here would become owners of these sanitary and economic homes in the course of 15 years by the payment of a small additional rent. These ideas are now proposed -rebranded as shared ownership housing- as a novel way of providing affordable housing in London, but hark back to much older notions. A church, a school and several shops were included in the design. The layout was again very formal with long parallel streets in a grid pattern. Here the streets were named following the alphabet,  A through N, and were developed north to south. The first streets built are very reminiscent of the Noel Park Estate.

The earliest streets (Amesbury, Barcombe, Cricklade and Downton Street) show long terraces with embellishments on the corners and the use of gable ends to break the perceived length of the housing rows. The first designs were by Rowland Plumbe, who was also responsible for Noel Park with H. B. Measures. Later this role of estate architect was taken over by Martin T. E. Jackson. The architecture produced in the mixed Gothic Revival - Eclectic idiom shows an astonishing variety of forms with limited materials: red brick yellow brick, glazed brick, clay tiles in terracotta mouldings and cast iron fences and rainwater pipes. The houses are often repeated in alternating pairs of 8 or 6. Turrets are a feature on corner plots and on the ends of terraces. The flat facades are often bay fronted or alternatively have projecting single-pitched entrance porches.

The northern section differs with the absence of the parallel streets. This section was built after 1907 in a distinctive English vernacular idiom. Here bungalows, semidetached cottages, single-storey pensioners cottages and picturesque terraces dominate the streetscape. There is even a pensioners flat. This section has many buildings with part-rendered or partly wood-clad facades.

This estate is a typical model dwellings estate with streets on a grid layout. Along one side of  the high street of Streatham Hill the shops (sh) are positioned not far from the train station (ST). The first building phase makes up most of the estate. The second building phase (shown hatched) stretches along the northern part of the site. Rebuilding after WW2 damage is shown crosshatched. The streets were named alphabetically -excluding j and i. In the north there are two additional w-streets (Wyatt Park and Wavertree Road). At the heart of the estate the church of St Margaret the Queen (C1), community hall (H) and a bathhouse (B) were built. Along the edge, near Hillside Garden (HG), a series of low pensioners cottages (P) were built. The school (S) is just outside of the estate. The same is true of the church of St Simon and Jude (C2).

There are two, three and four storey buildings in the estate. Upper storeys are made useful as attic rooms with dormer windows set into sloping roofs in a Dutch style, or have been executed as Dutch gables of various designs. The types of housing of the first building phase were developed in classes and vary from terraced houses to maisonettes, bungalows and flats. The second phase is dominates by semidetached and short terraces of family housing with a few specific types, i.e. the pensioners cottages and flats. The whole estate is designated a Conservation Area.