19-27, Sycamore Avenue

This is a terrace of two pairs of houses with a projecting cottage at the left end, built in 1914. It was designed by Parker and Unwin for the Joseph Rowntree Village Trust. The building is constructed of brick with a French tile roof and follows a lobby-entry plan, incorporating a living room and scullery at the rear. It is two storeys high, with fifteen bays and a gabled cross wing to the left. Throughout, the windows are four-pane sashes, and there are half-glazed doors. The left-hand cottage has a pair of windows. The central pair of houses has three bays that project forward, creating a round-arched passage flanked by doors recessed within round-arched porches, with paired windows on either side. The right-hand pair of houses similarly projects forward with entrances recessed in round-arched porches, again flanked by paired windows. The first-floor windows mirror the arrangement of the ground floor, with single windows above the doorways. The roof has sprocketed eaves and is hipped to the right, where there are also eaves stacks. The New Earswick estate is significant for its contribution to the development of low-cost housing in Britain. The experience and practices employed here influenced the Tudor Walters Report of 1918, which was crucial in the passage of the Addison Act of 1919, and also informed the Government Manual on low-cost housing that followed.