Aeroville

Social Housing at Aeroville, Hendon

Aeroville comprises 30 houses designed for the Grahame-White Aviation Company by company architect Herbert Matthews in 1917 and completed in 1919. The buildings have been subject to late 20th-century alterations.

The complex is constructed in yellow stock brick with red brick dressings, pebbledash, roughcast and deep gambrel and mansard tile roofs. The plan is quadrangular, arranged around a landscaped garden (now mostly occupied by car parking) with an open entrance to the north-west. The scheme comprises approximately 30 two-storey houses with additional flats in the attic storey.

The architecture is executed in neo-Georgian style. The inner elevations are faced in yellow brick with red brick dressings and feature tall square and rectangular chimneys topped with tiled mansard and gambrel roofs. Pedimented dormers appear on the inner elevations of some ranges (mixed with flat-roofed examples on the south-east range), while flat-roofed dormers occupy the outer elevations. All outer elevations and the inner first floor elevation of the two north-west ranges are finished in pebbledash. The inner elevation of the north-west ranges features a ground floor colonnade with paired Doric columns supporting the overhanging first floor to create a loggia. The central bay of the inner elevation of the south-east range is marked by a Doric portico with cast-iron railings on top and a first floor French window, originally marking the refreshment room (now converted to a flat). The original fenestration to the inner elevations comprised six-over-six paned sash windows on the first floors and six-over-nine pane sashes on the ground floor; the north-west range is differentiated by a mixture of sash and casement windows. Front doors originally featured nine-pane glazing with a narrow transom and hood. Considerable ad hoc replacement of windows with uPVC has occurred on both inner and outer elevations, and front doors have been replaced in a variety of styles and materials. A row of four breeze-block garages with corrugated roofing and metal doors has been added to the side elevation of the southern of the two north-west ranges at the entrance to the square; these are not of special interest.

Two houses were inspected in 2010 and retain their original plan comprising a hall, front parlour, living room and rear kitchen, with three bedrooms and a bathroom at the rear upstairs. Original doors, cupboards, fireplaces and tiled hall floor survive in these examples, though this is likely to vary within individual houses. The original serviced cubicles on the attic floor have all been converted into flats, accessed by corridors from concrete stairs at the corners of the ranges.

The housing was developed following an initiative by Claude Grahame-White (1879–1959), a major figure in early aviation. Having attended the world's first aviation conference at Reims in France in 1909, Grahame-White briefly worked in Louis Bleriot's aircraft factory while learning to fly, then opened a flying school in Pau. He returned to England in April 1910 and entered the Daily Mail-sponsored inaugural flight from London to Manchester, bringing significant public attention to himself and to Hendon, where the race started. In early 1911 he formed the Grahame-White Aviation Company at Hendon, which operated a flying school, built aircraft, pioneered air mail services and organised air displays, establishing Hendon's pre-eminent position in British aviation.

On the outbreak of World War I, Grahame-White offered his services and those of his company to the government. The London Aerodrome at Hendon was requisitioned and Grahame-White commissioned as a Flight Commander. After initial aircraft repair work, the company was awarded its first wartime production contract in October 1914 for the BE2c aircraft. This led to a substantial expansion programme, with reportedly 1,000 staff employed by August 1915 and a new factory opening on the Hendon site in 1916. Further contracts followed for the Avro 504 and DH6 aircraft, and by the end of 1917 the factory site covered 50 acres. At the war's end, the sudden cancellation of Air Ministry contracts severely affected the company. Grahame-White attempted to convert his factory to car and furniture production but was unable to regain control of the airfield; his involvement with the air industry ended after a prolonged legal dispute with the Air Ministry, culminating in his sale of the aerodrome to them in 1926.

In April 1917, faced with a shortage of employee accommodation, Grahame-White secured approval from the Welfare Department of the Ministry of Munitions for an ambitious housing scheme west of the aerodrome. This was intended not as temporary war-time housing but as infrastructure for the anticipated growth of the civil aircraft industry after the war, a prospect Grahame-White outlined in his 1919 book 'Our First Airways, their Organisation, Equipment, and Finance'. Herbert Matthews, the company architect and a fellow aviation enthusiast, drew up the designs in 1917, though it is unclear whether construction had begun by the war's end. A prospectus from the Grahame-White Estate Department detailed three types of accommodation: three and four-bedroom houses let at between 19 shillings and sixpence and 23 shillings and sixpence per week, and serviced cubicles for temporary accommodation on the attic floor at 10 shillings per week. Plans were published in The Building News in March 1919, showing the accommodation types and a perspective drawing of the complete development, which was originally conceived as part of a symmetrical scheme with additional housing blocks and a crescent. A first-aid hospital was also proposed. The post-war climate of uncertainty regarding Hendon's future, however, prevented the company from proceeding with the wider development, and the present square remains the only completed section of Aeroville. The building was eventually sold to the London Borough of Barnet.