ALAN CASH - web pages
Collection of books on Welwyn Garden City
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ALAN CASH - web pages Collection of books on Welwyn Garden City |
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This book is illustrated with 73 black and white photographs of houses through the ages, arranged chronologically, the earliest being a priest's cell at Dingle, Ireland dated 700 AD, and the most recent being an attractive house with a flat roof near Kingston, Surrey, architect E. Maxwell Fry. The penultimate picture is of a house at Welwyn Garden City of 1927, architect C. H. James, reproduced below.
Some of the houses included are quite grand, and include Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland (1190), Hatfield House (1607-11), and Blenheim Palace (1706-24). The author explains at the beginning that most of the pictures are taken from Nathaniel Lloyd's "History of the English House".
There is half a page of text describing each picture. The text accompanying the Welwyn Garden City house is as follows:
"After the Great War a new Georgian revival succeeded the Tudor style of the generation before. It is notable for greater simplicity, aiming at charm and dignity instead of at picturesqueness. The Georgian framework being essentially rational and a logical form for the small house, the period character lies only in the manner of the details and in the proportions. The small house no longer apes the form of the house of grander scale. The example illustrated is from Welwyn, which is also typical for the domestic town planning of the twentieth century. The spread-out garden suburb type of development, which showed itself first in Norman Shaw's Bedford Park already mentioned, came as a reaction from the closely packed horrors the Victorians had made of their towns, but resulted in the loss of the compact unity of the eighteenth-century street."
(click on the image for a better view)
