9 And 10, Gainsborough Gardens

A pair of semi-detached houses built in 1895 by CB King, a local builder, as part of the speculative development of Gainsborough Gardens. The interior of No. 10 has been refurbished.

Materials and Construction

The houses are built in red brick in Flemish bond with tile-hung upper floors and gables employing alternate bands of plain and fishscale tiles. The roofs are covered with plain tiles. Dressings are of red brick and moulded timber.

Form and Plan

The pair are symmetrically designed, each comprising two bays of two storeys with attics and a basement. The central bays are gabled above a two-storey flat-roofed canted bay. The outer bays have shallow porches over the entrances and half-hipped dormers. A transverse central stack and end stacks run through the houses. At the rear, canted bays rise from basement level (at ground level) to first floor, with flat-roofed dormers.

Exterior Details

Each house has a part-glazed, small-paned and fielded panelled door beneath a shallow-pitched tiled porch on moulded brackets supported on brick pilasters. Doors and windows in the brick sections are set in plain brick openings beneath cambered red brick arches. Windows in the tile-hung sections have flat moulded timber cornices. Windows are horned sashes with small panes in the upper sashes, except for the gable windows which feature a part-glazed door opening onto a balcony and flanked by narrow margin lights. Tall French windows at the rear, with small-paned upper lights, open onto a shallow balcony with a cast-iron balustrade (original to No. 9). Continuous moulded brick bands run above the ground-floor windows and form a cill band to the first-floor windows. Internal brick stacks have moulded collars and caps.

Interior

Both houses contain open-well stairs with part closed string and part open construction, plain tread ends, turned newels on square bases with small drop finials, and turned balusters (two per tread). Doors throughout are four-panelled. No. 9 retains fine chimneypieces: the drawing room has a simple panelled frieze and mantelshelf supported on Ionic columns; the dining room features a robust moulded cast-iron chimneypiece with tile slips. First-floor chimneypieces are in grey marble with cast-iron fireplaces complete with grates and floral tiled slips. Upper-floor chimneypieces in No. 10 are similar but may have been introduced later. Both houses have deep moulded cornices to plain ceilings.

Historical Development

Gainsborough Gardens was laid out between 1882 and 1895 on land belonging to the Wells and Campden Charity Trust. Plots were developed speculatively under the close scrutiny of the Trust and their Surveyor HS Legg. The development embodied the newly-emerging ethos demonstrated at Bedford Park, Chiswick (developed from 1875), where different building styles cohere informally within a planned, leafy environment. EJ May, recently appointed principal architect at Bedford Park, designed the first buildings (Nos. 3 and 4 Gainsborough Gardens) in 1884, representing a significant architectural and historical shift in attitudes towards suburban development.

This development occurred against the background of efforts to limit expansion onto Hampstead Heath and the preservation of Parliament Hill Fields, achievements attributed to CE Maurice, who built and lived at No. 9A. He was married to the sister of Octavia Hill, the philanthropist and founder of the National Trust.

Gainsborough Gardens holds prominence in the history of the protection of open spaces, particularly in Hampstead, where awareness of national conservation issues originated. The scheme and individual houses are well documented, providing an important record of the Gardens' development.

Nos. 9 and 10, completed in 1895, represent the final phase of building and are contemporary with Nos. 11-13. Their materials echo those used throughout the Gardens, but their form departs from the informality of HS Legg's earlier work to anticipate the formality of Field's neo-Georgian style. CB King also built No. 5 Gainsborough Gardens in 1893.

The whole scheme demonstrates significant historic and architectural importance with particular aesthetic quality, based on a fine balance between building and open space, both of which survive almost intact.