Description

TL 86 SE RUSHBROOKE THE HAMLET
(South side)
490/4/10004
No. 4 and adjoining painted walls

GV II

Estate cottage. Commissioned 1950, built 1956-9 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 a series of monopitches, short stacks. Single-storey with storage loft or playroom, and incorporating large ground-floor shed with separate entrance for storing tools and muddy boots. The house plan based on a rectangle 56ft wide by 33ft deep, with a central spine, from which sections are then cut away to provide a picture but coherent composition with Nos. 1-3 (item 10002) to which it is separated only by a gap in the linking wall which runs through the entire composition, and which continues as the spine through the house. Black timber doors, the front door with glazed panels, that to the shed is solid. Timber windows painted black, their opening lights painted white. Door-height vertical strip window to side of front door. Large closely-mullioned window to first floor store. Interior 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. Richard 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. The linking wall defined a sense of enclosure, from which the orthogonal plans developed. The cottages at The Hamlet followed from an award winning pair of cottages built at Poplar Meadow as a prototype. They replaced a group of old cottages which were demolished as being beyond repair. Though built to a higher specification than public housing, the development of a coherently planned 'home 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, indeed 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. 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 these 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: TL8917861590

External Links

• Historic England Listing
• Wikidata Q26539242

External links are from the relevant listing authority and, where applicable, Wikidata. Wikidata IDs may be related buildings as well as this specific building. If you want to add or update a link, you will need to do so by editing the Wikidata entry.

Recommended Books

• 
  Sussex: East with Brighton and Hove (Buildings of England) (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  Norfolk 1: Norwich and North-East: Norwich and North-east v. 1 (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  Northamptonshire: Buildings of England Series (Pevsner Architectural Guides) (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  Churches: An Architectural Guide (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Introductions)
• 
  Maintaining and Repairing Old Houses: A Guide to Conservation, Sustainability and Economy
• 
  Northumberland (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)