38 and 40 Victory Avenue, Gretna

Built in 1916 by the renowned town planner Raymond Unwin, with Courtnay M Crickmer as resident architect, this terrace of two-storey housing forms part of the purpose-built munitions town of Gretna. The grouping comprises 3 rows of 2-storey terraced housing arranged around a courtyard in a U-plan formation—one of only two such green-space-centred housing groups surviving in Gretna and a key element of its Garden City planning principles.

The buildings are constructed in red brick, an unusual residential material for Scotland. The southern row displays a symmetrical 9-bay front with a pair of advanced central gables crowned with ball finials. The eastern and western rows each comprise 8 bays. Entrance doors feature consoled flat canopies, and the ground floors predominantly retain segmental-arched window openings. The roofs are piended and covered in grey slates, with corniced ridge stacks.

The original glazing pattern of small-pane timber sash and case windows, visible in early photographs, has largely been replaced with non-traditional windows in various materials, including pebble dash rendering to the later additions at numbers 46-52.

Gretna was built between 1916 and 1918 to house workers and their families for the nearby munitions factory that stretched 9 miles along the Solway and produced cordite explosives for the First World War. The township was designed on Garden City principles with green spaces surrounding the houses, a wide central street containing shops and community facilities, and curving secondary streets. Beyond housing, the town provided a dance hall, churches, a school, and a cinema. After the war, the factory was dismantled and largely removed, leaving only scattered remnants.