Number 5 And Attached Walls

TL 86 SE 490/4/10005

RUSHBROOKE THE HAMLET (South side) No.5 and attached walls

GV II

Estate cottage. Commissioned 1950, built 1960-63 by Llewelyn Davies and Weeks, job architect John Weeks, executive architect Michael Huckstepp, for Lord Rothschild. White-painted brick on black-painted brick plinth; slate roof largely treated as monopitches, short stacks. Single storey with storage loft, and large integral shed area for storing tools and muddy boots. The main houses based on a rectangle 56 ft wide by 33 ft deep, with a central spine, from which sections were then cut away to provide a picturesque but coherent component in the overall composition. This is the end house of the group, and the last to be designed. Black timber doors, the front door with glazed panels, that to the shed is solid. Timber windows painted black, their opening lights painted white. Large closely-mullioned windows to the first floor stores. Interiors not of special interest. The black and white painted idiom is widely used in Suffolk, and the materials are traditional, yet Rushbrooke is wholly modern in its planning and design. Rushbrooke Llewelyn Davies and John Weeks were commissioned in 1950 to build estate cottages for Lord Rothschild, whom Llewelyn Davies had met when studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s. Its design was based on the award-winning prototype at Poplar Meadow. Though built to a higher specification who public housing, the development of a coherently planned 'house type' and strong visual idiom was much admired at the time. Rushbrooke also broke the established imagery of post-war rural housing. Its ideas ran closely parallel to, but slightly anticipated, the research of the English group of CIAM (the international research group on modern architecture with a particular interest in housing and planning) in 1955, or slightly later. These ideas, by Bill Howell and John Partridge, James Stirling, Alison and Peter Smithson and John Voelcker, were also widely published and were influential in some of the architects' later low-rise high-density schemes for urban areas. They show how the pragmatic modernism of Rushbrooke was to become a powerful force in housing design in the later 1960s and 1970s. 'Simple, single-storey white-painted brick houses sited around an open space ..., it made it clear to everyone that, in the hands of a skilled architect, a very ordinary brief and a modest budget could result in a real sense of place. Coinciding with the Architectural Review's Outrage issues, dealing with the lack of any sense of place in the housing developments of the time, the Rushbrooke scheme was admired as one of the few developments which felt like a real place' (John Winter, in Contemporary Architects, third edition, 1994.

Listing NGR: TL8917661591