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You are here: Home / The Suburb / The Exhibition that saved Bedford Park

The Exhibition that saved Bedford Park

The Background continued

Pre-war development

Some redevelopment of larger sites took place before WWII. The first was as early as 1904-1906, when the run-down and unwanted Georgian Sydney House in the angle between The Avenue and Woodstock Road was replaced by a block of mansion flats. (The house, along with Melbourne House, had never belonged to Jonathan Carr.) In 1922, Agnes Fulton, mother-in-law of Jonathan Thomas Carr, who had survived both him and his wife, her daughter, died, bringing her life tenancy of Bedford House to an end. The site was redeveloped with Bedford Corner, whose story is taken up on page 5.

The late 1930s saw another phase of redevelopment, soon brought to an end by WWII. Blocks of flats were built on the combined site of Jonathan Carr’s own Tower House in Bedford Road and its neighbour 5 Newton Grove; and on the site of 38 The Avenue (Ormsby Lodge), whose original garden had been extended to Blandford Road in late 1896. 2 South Parade was replaced by an admittedly handsome modern house, and houses on Bath Road, which had been rather attractively laid out, were demolished to make way for an extension of Chiswick Polytechnic, the successor to Jonathan Carr’s Chiswick School of Art.

Click on the photograph to enlarge it and move to the next one.

Tower House (centre) and part of 5 Newton Grove (right) as depicted by Manfred Trautschold in a lithograph of 1882.
Houses in Bath Road as seen in a lithograph of 1882 by Berry F Berry
Sydney House as originally built. The ornamental gables at the south end (on the left) disappeared by 1911, but those on the Woodstock Roof façade lasted at least until the 1930s. [Chiswick Library Studies]
The same view in 2011. Only three chimneys in Queen Anne's Grove, visible in the left background of the lithograph, are recognisable. [D W Budworth]
The extension to Chiswick Polytechnic built on the site of 14-26 Bath Road depicted by Berry. [D W Budworth]
The 1938 replacement house at 2 South Parade, with extended upper floor. [D W Budworth]
Ormsby Lodge (38 The Avenue) as originally built. The house was an example of the Wilson modification of Godwin’s design for a corner house (Original Exhibition Panel 1: 3/7), but was one of only three examples with a two-storey bay on the shorter façade. [Chiswick Library Local Studies]
Ormsby Lodge flats of 1938. The redevelopment of the site was commercially attractive because the original garden of the house had been greatly extended to reach Blandford Road by the purchase in 1896 of a site originally earmarked for the erection of four houses facing The Avenue. [D W Budworth]

Post-war development and the Bedford Park Society

When conditions eased by the late 1950s, redevelopments again began to be made. By this time, some people, notably John Betjeman and Tom Greeves, an architect who had moved into Bedford Park with his architect wife Eleanor in 1951, became concerned that Bedford Park, by then widely recognised as the first garden suburb, was in danger of losing its character, and that efforts should be made to save it from further deterioration, particularly by listing the houses.

Bedford Park, although scarred, had lost only three buildings to war damage. 13 Queen Anne’s Grove, the house in which Jonathan Thomas Carr died, was replaced by an unobtrusive red brick block of local authority flats. 9 Blenheim Road was replaced by a modern house which itself was replaced by a Bedford Park replica house in 2005-2007, and is featured on Page 3. Maurice B Adams’s Chiswick School of Art was destroyed by a flying bomb and replaced by a plain brick block.

The 1963 Local Authority flats at 13 Bedford Road, seen from the east. [D W Budworth]
A turning point was reached in 1963, when local indignation was triggered by the replacement of a run-down large house at 13 Bedford Road by a five-storey block of old people’s flats whose incongruity was emphasised by building it in a bright yellow brick. This event stimulated Harry Taylor, a retired builder active in local politics, to call publicly for a Bedford Park Preservation Society to be formed.

Tom Greeves, who had had the same thought but had not pursued it, made common cause with Taylor, and his knowledge combined with Taylor’s political ability and connections, supported by encouragement and advice from John Betjeman, resulted in the formation of the Bedford Park Society that year. The Society, which was joined by recent, mainly young, arrivals in Bedford Park who could appreciate its potential, continued to campaign for listing of the houses, initially meeting with an unsympathetic and even uncomprehending response from the relevant branch of government.

There were, however, some successes in the period before listing. A proposed redevelopment of 3 Newton Grove was refused in 1963, as was a 1965 proposal to demolish Bedford House and replace it with four more shops and a block of flats. Although the redevelopment of 1 Marlborough Crescent went ahead in 1965, the resulting block of flats was sympathetically designed for a housing association with Greeves’s advice.

Rather less successfully, the redevelopment of 5 The Orchard, which had been the subject of a compulsory purchase order by the local authority in 1956 was enforced when the elderly owner died in 1963. The new building was of only three storeys and was supposed to be in red brick, although the colour chosen was more of a pink shade.

1 Marlborough Crescent as built (The photograph appears to be one of a series taken by Bedford Lemere in 1881, of which the only known copy is this reproduction in Das Englishe Haus by Hermann Muthesius, 1904.)
The equivalent view in 2011. [D W Budworth]
Chiswick School of Art as seen in a drawing by its architect Maurice B Adams, published in The Building News on 25 November 1881
The replacement building for the School of Art (by then part of Chiswick Polytechnic, and now of the Arts Educational Schools). [D W Budworth]
Chestnut House, the replacement for The Gables at 5 The Orchard. [D W Budworth]
3 Newton Grove as seen from 2 Newton Grove. [D W Budworth]
Bedford House, saved from demolition in 1965 and listed in 1977. [D W Budworth]
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5
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