One of our members, a retired architect gave an illustrated talk on the history of housing.

Iron Age Settlement Anglo Saxon House Norman House Lincoln Cruck House Herefordshire

Box Frame House Lavenham Hearth Passage Farm House Co. Durham Houses converted from Wool Store Bibury Almshouses Stamford

Royal Circus Bath Weaver's Houses Cromford Derbyshire Mill Worker's Tenements New Lanark Back to Back Housing Leeds

Tyneside flats, Byker, Newcastle Miner's Houses Co. Durham Four Storey Tenements, Leith, Edinburgh Mill Worker's Housing, Saltaire, W. Yorks.

Anita Street Ancoats, Manchester Port Sunlight Inter War Semidetached Housing Post War 'Pre-Fab' Bungalow

Span Housing South London Park Hill, Sheffield 2020's Refurbishment Ronan Point Disaster Lillington Gardens, Pimlico

Alexandra Road, Camden, London Lambton Village, Washington, Tyne and Wear Accordia, Cambridge Co-Hut Housing, Newcastle upon Tyne

Chris P presented a kaleidoscope of ideas involving human growth and ingenuity in the quest for comfort, security and contentment. He endeavoured to overstretch our mental capacity to absorb new concepts by providing us with a most stimulating and informative race through the history of the evolution of the family home.

I thought I was observant but was then shown so many subtle features of architectural ingenuity achieved through our collective progress: from the mud hut to the Roman villa, to the regression in practice through the Anglo Saxon period subsequently arrested by the slow but effective evolution to current buildings. Chris also, rather subversively I thought, used photographs from earlier Art & Architectural Study visits to highlight certain of these milestones: from the wooden framed buildings in Lavenham, the Jew’s House in Lincoln, to the workers houses in Port Sunlight, along with various local photographs of housing from the nineteenth century to today. It is perhaps not surprising to realise how much I had missed and not appreciated!

I am sure many of us listening to Chris will have marked certain aspects of his presentation with personal milestones in their own lives. I, for example, can recall living in a Victorian workers house, a prefab, a double front-doored Tyneside flat, a “Span” modelled new “garden city” development (with a flat leaking roof, of course!) to a County Council promoted design guide estate. We we given examples of them all. I can also recall visiting a back-to-back house, certain new garden cities and new Town developments, some “Exhibition” estates of the 1920s, along with the visual challenges of The Barbican, Ronan Point, (LB of Newham) and more recently, Grenfell Tower, Kensington and the myriad of new blocks of flats with cladding which appears to circumvent effective fire regulations.

Chris queried the Government target set for new housing development. We were advised of current levels of development. We were asked to assess current building design (were we regressing?) and advised of the apparent paucity of architectural involvement in certain new housing projects. As a former local Government officer who worked in the local authority where the first ever Council house was sold, I was left wondering, “have we got all necessary factors in place to achieve the targets?”

Colin H.