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The best approach to the centre of the Suburb via the Great Wall is from the top of Corringham Road where, instead of turning right up to Wyldes, we turn left along Hampstead Way. Almost immediately the larger individual houses of pre-1914 begin. Number 75, dated 1911, is elaborately detailed, with curious oriel windows to the bedrooms, set on the corners as turrets and given separate curved roofs; the front door is framed elaborately in tiles.
Numbers 79-81 are outstandingly good houses in Lutyens's early style and it would be interesting to know who was the architect. The details are simple, but the accents are subtle. The purplish bricks of a particularly attractive shade have their joints slightly raked (a case where re-pointing could be disastrous if done conventionally), and the sense of grand repose given by the deep roof slopes is heightened by the way the architect has made them flow over the two projecting porch bays in the corners and down over the garages at the extreme left and right. At number 83 Michael Bunney has used herringbone patterns in the gables to enliven a plain brick front. Number 85, with Georgian details and a French mansard roof, was designed in 1908 by Pepler and Allen (Sir George Pepler was a colleague of Unwin's in founding the Town Planning Institute. It was remodelled in 1921 and 1935 by Frank Osler. Numbers 87-89 are a lively pair designed in 1910 by Matthew Dawson, an excellent disciple of Webb and Lethaby who had worked in the LCC Architect's Department and later taught at Cambridge. He favoured the somewhat outre detailing of E S Prior, the Slade Professor at Cambridge, with unexpected combinations of materials and jagged ornament. This pair of houses is in red brick with grey dressings, with voussoirs and window surrounds in bright red tiles-on-edge. One bedroom window is diamond-shaped, another circular, but the front doors are of Georgian shape. Number 97 is a good quiet house by Herbert A Welch, with the same Georgian windows, sheer gables and criss-cross chinoiserie woodwork as Parker's at the top of Corringham Road. Numbers 99-101 also by Welch, 1910, are a good pair in a similar red brick manner derived from "early Lutyens". The tile-hung bay window with hipped roof is typical, and also the large diagonally placed chimney. This end of Hampstead Way leads to the important crossroads with Meadway. |
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