Lyde End is in a field of its own

23 October, 2009

When Aldington & Craig’s Lyde End housing at Bledlow, Buckinghamshire, was completed in 1977, it quickly struck gold. As well as winning several design awards it was widely published, not just in the UK but in such magazines as Baumeister and L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui.

Now 32 years on has come the accolade of grade II listing, which is welcome with one proviso. Sometimes listing a building can make it seem like a period piece, disconnected from today’s concerns. It would be a pity if that happened with this Bledlow housing, which is as pertinent now as when it was new.

Overlooked by the chalk hills of the Chilterns, Bledlow is primarily a village of brick houses with occasional half-timbering. Midway along the main street are the church and manor house, the latter only glimpsed behind an old lichenous brick wall. It’s the home of Lord Carrington, who commissioned the Lyde End scheme for a site diagonally opposite.

His chosen architects were then best known for the group of three houses which Peter Aldington had built in nearby Haddenham in the mid-1960s: with monopitch tiled roofs and rendered walls they cluster around courtyards beside the now celebrated garden which Aldington still tends. Responsibility for the design of Lyde End went to a young assistant in the firm, Paul Collinge, who later became a partner.

Carrington’s commission was for a development of rented housing for people from Bledlow, on the basis of two or three occupants per unit, and he left it to the architect to propose the size and number of dwellings. Notably his brief put an emphasis on quality. “He hoped for something which people 200 years later would think was ‘good for its time’,” says Collinge.

The final scheme consists of six houses (five one-storey, the other two-storey) on a gentle downward slope between the street and a small cemetery, which the architect has made an effort not to overlook. One is right alongside the street while the others are set back around three sides of a courtyard, with a carport on the fourth.

All have the same sharply defined form, combining two monopitch-roof volumes of different height. Collinge conceived the taller one, containing bedrooms, a bathroom and kitchen, as “closed”, with just minimal apertures in its fairfaced brick walls. By contrast the lower one, with the living room, is much more glazed and “open” — though its openness only fully registers when you go inside.

Much of Lyde End’s character comes from the choice and handling of the bricks. They are stocks from Sevenoaks Brickworks in Kent but not of the quality that would usually be considered for facing, being unevenly burnt and sometimes distorted. That made them cheap, of course, but it was their colour and texture that attracted the architect. They look brownish from a distance but have a wide range of hues, with accents of pink, yellow and plum beside the grey-black of the overburnt ones, while the blistering and warping make them seem really tactile.

In his classic study The Pattern of English Building (1972), bizarrely out of print at present, Alec Clifton-Taylor says: “More than anything else, it is the continual variation in colour which imparts to the brick buildings of the Tudor and Stuart periods their peculiar richness — a richness analogous to the palette of the Impressionist painters and their shimmering effects.”

With the Georgian emphasis on greater uniformity and Victorian mechanisation of brick production, such effects were largely lost, so Lyde End could be seen as reviving a tradition that only some vernacular buildings had sustained.

At the same time, it reflects the emergence of brick as a viable modernist material after the second world war, having been sidelined by early modernists in favour of concrete, steel and glass, or camouflaged by render to create pristine white cubes.

Key buildings that gave brick its new respectability were Alvar Aalto’s Säynätsalo Town Hall, Le Corbusier’s Maisons Jaoul and Sigurd Lewerentz’s churches in Stockholm and Klippan, but it’s Aalto who’s most relevant here. Collinge has travelled widely in Scandinavia and happily acknowledges his influence.

Aalto crops up too in discussing Lyde End’s site plan. “The courtyard notion comes from Peter Aldington,” says Collinge, but he goes on to mention Säynätsalo again and Jørn Utzon’s Fredensborg housing — two quintessential courtyard schemes. Just as the brickwork at Lyde End has both a traditional and modern resonance, so too does the courtyard. As Collinge points out, it’s found in many farms.

Lyde End certainly profits from its courtyard form, which makes it feel like a quiet enclave off an already quiet street. As the houses step down the slope to the part-weatherboarded two-storey one, which acts as a visual stop at the rear of the courtyard, there’s a sense of organic growth; but also of quite rigorous control, with exact right-angle turns between adjacent dwellings. Differences between the one-storey houses, whether in floor plan or detail, individualise them without disturbing the overall harmony.

The dwellings are undeniably compact and, with a floor area of just 55sq m, could easily have seemed confined, but there is a very real connection between inside and out.

Like Aldington, Collinge thinks the treatment of landscape is integral to any scheme he undertakes, and at Lyde End saw the gardens and private courtyards as extensions of the living rooms. In that respect, a crucial detail is the way the double-glazed panes of glass in the end walls of the living rooms are set directly into the brickwork, with no frame to interrupt the flow of space.

The continuity between inside and out comes not just with the fairfaced brick wall but the quarry-tiled floor that protrudes beyond the boundary of the living room. Though softened by their timber ceilings, these living rooms are emphatically defined by brick, tile and glass, and perhaps at first some occupants find them austere. If so, the “closed” monopitch volume is more conventionally domestic, with its plaster finishes and carpeted bedrooms.

As there was no gas supply in the neighbourhood, the houses have underfloor electric heating, with an anthracite stove as a back-up if it gets really cold. To a visitor they seem very intimate and cosy.

The direct glazing to brickwork was by no means the only aspect of the scheme to concern the contractor, who later wrote that “the majority of details issued by the architect called for a non-traditional approach”.

Were all those unorthodox details strictly necessary? One impulse behind them, which Collinge shares with Aldington, was “to express construction” — hence, for instance, the exposed timber battens of the living-room roofs. But while a detail like that is integral to the scheme, the number of different window-frames (more than two dozen types) might seem a little indulgent — or at least the luxury of an architect not too concerned with cost.

As Collinge later showed with his housing projects at Quarrendon near Aylesbury and at Woolstone in Milton Keynes, the Bledlow model could be simplified and built more cheaply without too much compromise.

Though some of the houses and gardens at Woolstone aren’t particularly well maintained, and many sprout conservatories or other add-ons, the underlying strength of the scheme was plain on a recent visit.

Which raises an obvious question: why does Lyde End still seem much more an exception than the norm?

Just as Eric Lyons and Span did in the suburbs, so Collinge did here in the countryside. He came up with a model that could have wider application: contemporary but in touch with tradition without resorting to retro styling. Perhaps the struggle that he had to obtain planning permission suggests that even such judicious modernism is more than some authorities can take. There was too much blank brickwork, said the planners; but happily they assented in the end.

Today’s occupants of Lyde End tend to be people who are downsizing because of age or health and in essence they’re retirement homes. “They have certainly been popular with those who have lived there and are significantly oversubscribed when we have a vacancy,” says a spokesman for the firm that manages them.

Given current building regulations and other codes, if the houses were built now they would have to be different, but not hugely so. Higher insulation levels, elimination of steps — “tweaks”, says Collinge, nothing drastic.

So they still have validity as a model.Shortly after the completion of this Bledlow scheme, Aldington & Craig contributed to a book called Architecture for People (1980), along with other socially aware practices such as Maguire & Murray and Darbourne & Darke. In his article John Craig argued that “the average person doesn’t exist” so it was a fallacy to try to design for one by being neutral and nondescript. “People react very favourably and strongly to a sense of character and are willing to go halfway to meet a building that has one,” wrote Craig.

The continuing success of Lyde End proves the truth of those words, which certainly still resonate today.

The resident's view

The houses are owned by a charitable trust and they can only be rented. My son-in-law worked for Lord Carrington and there was an empty bungalow, which I moved into 18 years ago. I really liked the materials inside: the woods and the bricks.

It’s a very nice place to live. All the neighbours are a friendly group and everybody helps each other. You meet people very often in the courtyard and, stood in the kitchen, you can see people go by, whereas at the back it’s very private. I’ve got a nice garden, and in the summer I can open up my doors. In the winter, there’s underfloor heating so it’s warm and easy to run.

The house also has a coal stove but it is quite smokey and gets too hot to touch so I’ve put the fish tank there instead. I don’t need the big coal cellar but I would have liked somewhere to put my ironing board and vacuum, so a cupboard behind the front door would have been really handy. Olive Squire