Thearchitecture of Bedford Park inChiswick,West London, is characterised largely byQueen Anne Revival style, meaning an eclectic mixture of English and Flemish house styles from the 17th and 18th centuries, with elements of many other styles featuring in some of the buildings.
As well as domestic buildings, theBedford Park estate has a group of public buildings, namely its church,St Michael and All Angels; asocial club, now theLondon Buddhist Vihara; its inn,The Tabard, and next door its shop, the Bedford Park Stores; and its art school, now replaced by theArts Educational Schools.
The garden suburb was created from 1875 over a period of some 20 years, its development byJonathan Carr prompted by the arrival of theDistrict Line atTurnham Green Station.
Major architects involved in the early period of the creation of the estate includedEdward William Godwin,Richard Norman Shaw,Edward John May,Henry Wilson, andMaurice Bingham Adams; later, a modernist building was contributed byC.F.A. Voysey, and another by Fritz Ruhemann and Michael Dugdale.
The Bedford Park estate was developed byJonathan Carr, who in 1875 bought 24 acres (9.7 ha) of land inChiswick just north ofTurnham Green Station on theDistrict Line, opened in 1869. TheCity of London was only 30 minutes by steam train.[1] Carr began with 24 acres of farmland, surrounded by orchards; by 1883, the development had grown to 113 acres (46 ha) acres, with almost 500 houses.[2] By 1915 it had become part of an integrated network of streets.[3]
Many of the best-known architects of theVictorian era contributed buildings in Bedford Park; two of them,E. J. May andMaurice Bingham Adams, chose to live on the estate.[4] Between them, the architects contributed around 30 house designs, used repeatedly in a mix across the estate. The strong influence ofNorman Shaw's designs on the other architects has resulted in a harmoniously unified effect.[5]
Most of the houses are large, oftendetached orsemi-detached, but there are some smallerterraced cottages, such as on Marlborough Crescent.[4] Most, too, are inQueen Anne Revival style, meaning a mix of English and Flemish house styles from the 17th and 18th centuries, and sharply distinct from VictorianGothic Revival style which recalled an earlier era, but elements of many other styles are included in some of the houses.[6] The streets, too, have names from the time ofQueen Anne (1665–1714), as for instance Addison Grove forJoseph Addison (1672–1719), Newton Grove forIsaac Newton (1642–1726), Blenheim Road for theBattle of Blenheim (1704), Marlborough Crescent for theDuke of Marlborough, victor of that battle, Woodstock Road for the site of Marlborough'sBlenheim Palace, and Queen Anne's Gardens for the monarch herself.[2]
Characteristic features of the houses are red brick, walls hung with tiles,gables of varying shapes, balconies,bay windows,terracotta andrubbed brick decorations,pediments, elaborate chimneys, andbalustrades painted white.[6] The eclectic approach is well seen in the estate church ofSt Michael and All Angels, where Shaw has incorporatedArts & Crafts,Georgian,medieval,Tudor, andWren styles.[2]
The first architect for the estate in 1876 wasEdward William Godwin, a leading member of theAesthetic Movement, but his plans were criticised in the leading journalThe Builder, and Godwin and Carr parted company.[1] Godwin's houses were in the Queen Anne Revival style, taken up by the other architects especially Shaw.[7] The houses were thought poor, as they had steep staircases, a toilet in the same room as the bath, relatively small rooms, and narrow corridors. Only a few of his houses were built; they are taller and narrower than those built by other architects.[8]
For a short period from 1876, some designs were commissioned from the short-lived Scottish architectural practice of Henry Edward Coe and Stephen Robinson.[1][9] These were semi-detached villas with tall chimneys and paired gables, their plans published inThe Building News in February 1877.[10]
In 1877 Carr hiredRichard Norman Shaw, the leading architect of his day, to be the estate architect. By then the layout of the Park had been set but Shaw's house designs, in the Queen Anne Revival style, gave the impression of great variety using only a few house types. Shaw built detached,semi-detached, andterraced houses in the estate. These were essentially scaled-down versions of the more expensive houses that he had designed for wealthy areas such asChelsea,Hampstead, andKensington. Some of his early houses had elaborate detail such as decorative sunflower panels; his later buildings were simpler. He designed the focal buildings of the estate, the church of St Michael and All Angels and the Tabard Inn opposite it, in 1879 to 1880.[1][4][5] He resigned the post of estate architect in 1880, tired of Carr's combination of tight requirements and delayed payments.[11] Shaw continued to work as a consultant to the project.[4]
Shaw provided the estate's focus with his community buildings, again in Queen Anne Revival style. Carr's intention was to create a functioning community by providing places for estate residents to socialise, worship, and drink together, and to shop locally for groceries; there was alsoa school of art, designed by theArts and Crafts architectMaurice Bingham Adams.[1] An early building was theBedford Park Club on The Avenue, setting the tone with its red brick and domestic style. The interior, now extensively reworked, was byE. J. May. The building now serves as theLondon Buddhist Vihara.[12] He designed a single block with matching heights but varying architectural details to contain the Stores, a manager's house, and the "Hostelry", nowThe Tabard pub downstairs and theChiswick Playhouse theatre upstairs. This was influential in the design of later suburbs.[13][14][15] His sources of inspiration for The Tabard were most likelyStaple Inn, Holborn, which similarly has seven gables, andSparrowe's House, Ipswich, which has projecting bays.[16]
Shaw built St Michael and All Angels Church in a similar style to his Bedford Park houses, with domestic features from seventeenth and eighteenth century properties. This was an unusual choice for an ecclesiastical building, though he incorporated a measure ofPerpendicular Gothic alongside the Queen Anne style red brick, white woodwork, and dormer windows. The church was consecrated in 1880.[17][18][19]
_corner_view.jpg)
In 1880,E. J. May took over as Estate architect, adding Priory Gardens and some houses in Addison Grove and Queen Anne's Grove; he lived in no. 6 Queen Anne's Grove during the 1880s.[20] Priory House is used as the Chiswick and Bedford Park Preparatory School.[21] May built a terrace in Marlborough Crescent, and many of the houses on The Orchard.[4]
Henry Wilson designed only a few houses, in Bedford Park or elsewhere; he worked mainly on ecclesiastical buildings. He appears to have been the architect of two houses in Queen Anne's Gardens, including no. 7 for the artistT. M. Rooke. It is unusual for Bedford Park in having a large garden, and in being set far back from the road amidst its lawns.[4]
Thearts and crafts architectMaurice Bingham Adams built nos. 12 to 14 Newton Grove for the painter and illustratorJohn Charles Dollman in 1880, with a studio on the first floor.[4] No. 12 later became the home of the architect Thomas Affleck Greeves, co-founder of theBedford Park Society; the building is marked as historic with a Bedford Park green plaque.[22] He designed the Chiswick School of Art on Bath Road in 1881, destroyed by aV-1 flying bomb in 1944,[23] and replaced on the same site by theArts Educational Schools. The school was meant to provide the estate with a feeling of community.[24] Adams designed the parish hall and north aisle extension to the estate church of St Michael and All Angels in 1887.[4]
Carr's company collapsed in 1886, and the remaining house-plots were sold piecemeal to other developers; houses went on being built by a variety of architects on the estate until 1914.[11] The architect and furniture and textile designerC.F.A. Voysey created a distinctive[4] building at no. 14, South Parade, facing Acton Green common, in 1891. It is a tower house with the top floor given over entirely to a studio for his client, the artist and author J. W. Forster. The house is covered in roughcast, and has metal-framed windows with stone dressings. The eaves of the roof project conspicuously and are supported by thin metal brackets. Pevsner comments that the house was clearly intended to oppose the suburb's "red brick cosiness".[4] Voysey added the side extension in 1894.[4] It was Grade II* listed in 1970, with the comment "Of greatest historical importance".[25] The literary critic Ian Fletcher called it "the most remarkable of Bedford Park's houses".[16]
No. 2 South Parade is a lowmodernist house, built 1938–1939 by the German architect Friedrich "Fritz" Abraham Ruhemann and theTecton Group architect Michael Dugdale for Leo Neumann, like Ruhemann a recent immigrant from Nazi Germany.[26] It has a flat roof and a spacious terrace on the first floor with a curving sun roof and a matching flat-topped curved concrete entrance porch. The house is constructed of yellowish-red brick and concrete with an open-plan interior.[27][4] It was Grade II listed in 1991, with the comment that "The house and its fittings are a remarkable survival of a compact house reliant for its convenience on well-designed fitted furniture".[27][28]
Architect: Coe & Robinson. Elevations, sections & plans as published in The Building News, February 23rd 1877.
Published inThe Building News, January 2nd 1880
{{cite book}}:|work= ignored (help)| Ealing |
| .jpg) | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hounslow |
| ||||||||||||||
| Transport | |||||||||||||||
| Other | |||||||||||||||
