100 Houses 100 Years by Twentieth Century Society

Author:Twentieth Century Society
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849944533
Publisher: Pavilion Books
Published: 2018-01-22T05:00:00+00:00

New Ash Green

Architect: Eric Lyons, Span

Location: New Ash Green, Kent

Span developments had been around, and much admired, for some time when their architect Eric Lyons and his colleagues aired the ambitious project to develop a town in Kent. Buying two farms in 1961, the site would offer an entirely new version of a village. The Greater London Council (GLC) committed to take 450 houses, introducing mixed tenure and a more representative demographic than the professional middle class of Span developments. Two neighbourhoods were built (1966–69) and the shopping centre begun. Then, like a house of cards, the ambitious, idealistic project unravelled – the GLC pulled out, followed by Lyons, mortgages became scarce and funds ran out for the developers. Bovis stepped in and, in John Newman’s words, ‘the sparkle went out of the architecture’. At best, their elegant low-key modernism, embraced by its well treed landscape suggested to John Grindrod in Concretopia a place rather ‘more like the setting for a Lars von Trier film than hop-growing country’.

Gillian Darley

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