This blog was first published on the MODA website in 2022. Hendon has a fascinating range of housing types which reveal much about social, design and architectural history in just a few streets. Far from being a sleepy suburb, Hendon is a place of rapid change: one house (with a plaque) has now been demolished [...]
As 2023 draws to a close and with so much bad news around housing, I am trying to finish on a positive note. In this post I have drawn together several pieces I have written for the wonderful Municipal Dreams blog https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com which celebrates the fundamental achievements in council housing and the commitment of so [...]
I've long been interested in the development of Garden Cities and #HouseHistoryHour (28 April 2022) offered the opportunity to share some of this information, now available as Moments and forming the basis of this blog. The Garden Cities movement was a response to poor housing in polluted cities and created healthier living environments. The movement [...]
Whilst some may criticise the ‘sameness’ of suburbia of the interwar period 1918-1939, looking more closely we can find numerous decent family homes set in landscaped places and some lovely examples of housing design history, especially those built during the 1930s. Development of suburbia was not of course an isolated event, but part of an [...]
There are two novels written about the estates we are thinking about in this post, as different in many ways as the estates themselves. The estates are very interrelated and mutually used but they are completely divided by a railway line. Locals tend to refer to each of the estates respectively as ‘over the other side’ [...]
