Fieldend is a small housing development in Twickenham built in 1959-60 by Span, a development company established by Geoffrey Townsend and Eric Lyons. The landscape was designed by Michael Brown, working alongside Lyons and his assistant, Ivor Cunningham.
The site had previously been used as nursery gardens, with the surrounding streets developed for housing from the early 1890s through to 1900. The nursery site was partially covered by large greenhouses, abandoned by the 1930s and their dereliction completed when a bomb landed in November 1940. The land was partly worked for gravel in the late 1940s and was then infilled by tipping, with the rest used as allotments.
Townsend bought the land in 1958-1959, when he made a planning application in the name of Priory Hall Ltd. Each of his developments before 1963 were financed separately although the completed houses were marketed as by his umbrella company ‘Span’. Twickenham Metropolitan Borough granted permission on 30 November 1959 for 51 houses and 43 garages (another seven garages behind 12 Waldegrave Park were approved the next year), at a density of 49.03 persons per acre (usually given as 50 ppa in the literature). The houses, which were designed to Lyons’ standard ‘T7’ and ‘T8’ type, were completed in December 1960. The scheme won a Ministry of Housing and Local Government Gold Award in 1961 and a Civic Trust Award in 1962.
Geoffrey Townsend (1911-2002) and Eric Lyons (1912-80) met when studying architecture part-time at Regent Street Polytechnic in the mid-late 1930s. Townsend set up his own practice in 1937 and was joined by Lyons a year later. Their work was interrupted by the war, but in 1945 they renewed operations and began to develop small infill sites in the Twickenham and Richmond areas. Most were short terraces of houses to a standard design, with a couple of larger developments of flats (one with shops) in Richmond. However, until 1982 the RIBA did not allow its members to act as both architect and developer on the same project and, unable to find a client in tune with their ideas, in 1953 Townsend resigned his membership to work full-time as a developer. They continued to work together, with Lyons providing most of the subsequent designs for Span housing while continuing in independent practice.
Lyons and Townsend’s first large-scale scheme was Parkleys, Richmond-upon-Thames, 1954-55 (listed at Grade II), which brought them to wide attention. Townsend devised a system of covenants and management whereby every leaseholder belonged to a management company responsible for the maintenance of the estate through a committee elected from among its number. The three elements of a simple modern design, lavish planting and a strict programme for continued management and maintenance were all rolled out across subsequent estates, which share a strong common appearance. The residents’ associations are the chief reason why nearly all Townsend’s estates have a very strong sense of community and survive little altered.
Lyons brought in Ivor Cunningham (1928-2007) as his chief assistant in 1955. Cunningham had studied architecture at the Architectural Association and landscape design at Newcastle (then part of the University of Durham), and assisted Brenda Colvin and Sylvia Crowe before in 1954 he spent a year in Stockholm with Eric Anjou. Cunningham introduced a more sophisticated approach to landscaping, including the introduction of open front gardens. Landscape was fundamental to the ideology which underpinned Span developments. For Lyons, landscape was not just the treatment of the spaces left between buildings, it was the arrangement of the buildings to create spaces, ‘visual spaces and functional spaces’. He stated that ‘landscape should be the functional design of the space, not just a matter of bringing in a landscape-decorator to sprinkle some trees and cobbles around the place.’ (Eric Lyons and Span, p 40). Thus Span landscapes were approached holistically, with Lyons contributing to the spatial decisions early on in the planning stages. The emphasis on landscape, the separation of cars and parking from the housing areas to make safe areas for young children to play and the organisation of the estates into small communities reflected contemporary Scandinavian practice. Cunningham set the way, but subsequently he and Lyons brought in designers with a still greater specialism in landscape: first Michael Brown and then Preben Jakobsen. Lyons was responsible for the signage on Span developments, usually using a Clarendon typeface, and he designed a low mushroom topped aluminium light to illuminate the footpaths. A few of these survive on some Blackheath estates but most, as at Fieldend, have been replaced.
The critic Ian Nairn was one of the first to recognise the importance of Span’s work. Following an influential article, ‘Spec Built’, that denounced private developments, he singled out ‘a few successes’, including two schemes by Lyons ‘whose housing for Span Developments stood alone for so long and to whose pioneer work the other schemes illustrated clearly owe much’ (Architectural Review, March 1961, p 170). Fieldend was one of the two he illustrated; the other was the listed Hallgate block of flats. Today Span’s work is admired for bridging the gap between speculative housing and the best public schemes.
Michael Brown (1922-96) studied architecture at Edinburgh University. He worked for the London County Council before securing a scholarship in 1955 to study landscape design at the University of Pennsylvania under Ian McHarg, a landscape planner originally from Scotland who had a strongly ecological approach, interweaving natural and designed elements. His use of levels greatly influenced Brown’s work. Brown went on to work for the eminent designer Dan Kiley in Vermont before returning to London to work for Lyons. He settled at Fieldend, where in 1962 he set up his own practice specialising in landscape design for housing. Commissions included the Brunel Estate, Paddington; Beavers Farm in Hounslow and the Grahame Park Estate on the site of Hendon Aerodrome, both for the Greater London Council; Euston Square Gardens and the landscape plan for Redditch new town (from 1964), where ecology was a guiding principle.
In the early 1970s Brown’s practice had twenty staff and was one of the largest in the country, but with the decline of public housing it declined. Brown moved away from design work, dissolving his practice in 1981 and instead opening his own conference and field study centre to study issues such as sustainability, Yoga, Buddhism as well as landscape. He fell out with the harsh commercialism of the 1980s and produced relatively little, although his landscape for Redland Brick at Horsham won the Brick Development Association Award in 1987.