At the weekend I made a long-intended detour to Loddon in Norfolk where Tayler and Green built hundreds of sympathetically designed council houses in the 1940s-70s, some now listed. John Seymour in his 1970 Companion Guide to East Anglia writes 'these architects have managed to design homes that blend in beautifully with their surroundings, which continue in the tradition of East Anglia without slavishing aping the past, which do not strive ridiculously into a space-age future, which have unity and yet diversity, which in every case are pleasing to the eye, and which are said by the inmates to be pleasant to live in. ... Every architect in the country should be made to go and look at them.' Being half aware of them, I was expecting a couple of clusters but a large proportion of the small town is from the same hands. There is none of the pretentiousness of the likes of Poundbury or the laboured variety of Harlow's New Hall: the strengths are in the pure pleasure of making decorative design with the process of building - patterned brickwork to otherwise blank gables, little roofs to the chimneys, simple elaboration of barge boards. A thoughtful eye too for devices to enable home-making, such as sheltered set backs by entrances with surface to sit on or put plants. This is top-end 'people's detailing' : 'every house has a porch' but these are delicately designed porches and not all the same. There is a debt to Asplund as well as the local Norfolk vernacular, sweet and pleasant rather than hard and raw. The layouts are hardly radical in terms of relation to fronts, backs, roads and gardens but the use of wide-fronted terraces was unconventional then and still relevant now for making a very liveable environment.
Definitely worth a detour.
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