Linnell Drive and Linnell Close
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Immediately behind the Great Wall, leading off Hampstead Way is Linnell Drive, which has some extremely good examples of neo-Georgian. Number 2 was designed in 1924 by C H James (Hennell & James) as the residence of three ladies, all professionally employed and each requiring a separate sitting room. This was a complicated requirement which James clothed in admirably quiet brickwork with relieving arches to the windows and little Adamish paterae in the spandrels.

Number 4 is a handsome house in Lutyens Georgian, with the large areas of brickwork and small windows which he favoured; it was designed by Barry Parker himself in 1924. The next house is something special, designed as early as 1909 by Sir Guy Dawber as one of a pair of houses facing each other (in the end number 8 was built to a different design, albeit a handsome one, again in Lutyens Georgian, and this time by Paul Badcock for Soutar). Dawber was primarily a country house architect, specialising in the Cotswolds, and number 6 is the one example of his work in the Suburb which shows his use of materials at its best, in an extremely clever synthesis of Georgian and Elizabethan ideas. The main entrance with its pediment and swags is Georgian, in plum-coloured brick with good carving to the stone dressings, but the end elevations looking towards the Heath and towards the Suburb are provided with tall thin oriels of Elizabethan derivation.

Number 10 is also an especially good house, by H A Welch, 1914-15. Although its windows are of Georgian shape, it illustrates the Gothic Revival background to most of the Edwardian architects in its asymmetry and in the functional expressiveness of the two tall chimneys rising up the middle of rectangular bay windows. Number 5 is also impressive (by Badcock for Soutar), though with fussy brick piers to the porch.

This group of houses has entrance fronts facing away from the Heath and enclosing one end of Linnell Close, the first major example of neo-Georgian in the Suburb and one of the best. The Builder of 1912 explains that three architects originally prepared designs for different houses, but Michael Bunney (in his capacity as secretary of the Garden Suburb Development Company) succeeded in co-ordinating their efforts and imposing elevations designed by himself. The result is a group of eight neat brick boxes forming a three-sided courtyard possessing a kind of New England simplicity in the admirably sustained puritanism of their detailing, brown brick, with small arched hood moulds to the ground floor windows as the main accent. The stern uniformity is softened by the individuality of the hipped roofs which emphasise each separate house.



 
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