CONSERVATION AREA STATEMENT - Stroud District Council

More documents

Recommendations

Info

44 CONSERVATION AREA STATEMENT - Conservation Area No7: FRAMPTON ON SEVERN After the First World War ended in 1918, housing shortages became a major country-wide crisis: there was an estimated overall deficiency of 600,000 thousand dwellings. In response, the provision of housing was made a primary consideration in town planning, but it was apparent that developments by private sector builders could not make up the shortage. The Housing and Town Planning Act (the Addison Act) was introduced in 1919 to help remedy the situation. The Act allowed the provision of state subsidies for local authorities to aid in the cost of slum clearance and the building of low cost housing. During the years of the First World War, Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, who later became Chief Architect at the Ministry of Health, laid out ideas stemming from Ebeneezer Howard’s idealistic Garden City Movement, proposing a new standard of local authority working class housing. These recommendations created the blueprint for local authority housing for the next twenty years and more. They advocated not more than 30 houses per hectare, with their own gardens, built in small terraces or cul de sacs, in a well laid out estate, each house to have a large living room with a sunny aspect, a bathroom and indoor lavatory and a kitchen with a good sized larder. The Oval was built on the medieval Oatfield just before the Second World War by Stroud Rural District Council, utilizing the highly successful basic principles of Unwin’s ideas. The majority of the houses in the Oval have now passed out of local authority ownership following the ‘right to buy’ schemes of the 1980s. The Buildings in Sub Area 4: The Oval Buildings and materials Stroud District Council
CONSERVATION AREA STATEMENT - Conservation Area No7: FRAMPTON ON SEVERN The appearance of the Oval itself is entirely derived from the Garden City Movement’s romantic vision of estates full of cottagey buildings based on old English traditions. The design of the houses owes everything to the influence of Arts and Crafts architects, such as Lutyens and Voysey. Although very watered down and simplified, the Oval’s repeating gables, with their paired windows, the steep roof pitches and tall chimneys, are all typical Arts and Craft references, as are the arched heads of the passageways through to the gardens. The original Arts and Crafts and Garden City Movements had put emphasis on the high quality materials and good craftsmanship in their buildings. This ideology, of course, was prohibitively costly for local authorities, and the quality of the materials and methods of construction were downgraded to an extent. Economic crisis, spiralling inflation and resulting shortages in the 1920s, brought about changes in modern building techniques and necessary experiments with new materials, as well as a revival of traditional ones, such as unfired bricks. The era saw the widespread introduction of metal windows, designed by the firm of Francis and W.F. Crittall, as an alternative to hard to source wooden frames. These became standard in local authority housing. The 1930s’ Oval inherited the use of many of the new materials. Frampton on Severn is largely brick built, but the bricks of the Oval have nothing of the colour variations found in the locally made product, being a rather bright, uniform orangey-red. Allied with the plain tile roofs, this is very much a pleasantly rusty- coloured enclave. The Crittall windows have unfortunately for the appearance of the buildings, now been replaced with UPVc, which can in no way truly reflect the fine lines of the originals. However, the wholesale, single phase replacement of the windows by Stroud District Council has ensured that the uniform look of the terraces has been maintained, and the new windows have the benefit of being non- standard designs that still hint at something of the 1930’s vision. Stroud District Council 45
Page 1: CONSERVATION AREA STATEMENT - Conse
Page 4 and 5: CONSERVATION AREA STATEMENT - Conse
Page 6 and 7: 6 CONSERVATION AREA STATEMENT - Con
Page 8 and 9: 8 CONSERVATION AREA STATEMENT - Con
Page 10 and 11: 10 CONSERVATION AREA STATEMENT - Co
Page 80: 80 CONSERVATION AREA STATEMENT - Co

CONSERVATION AREA STATEMENT - Stroud District Council

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?