Eclecticity
It was the mother of all building booms. So much housing stock in London and the southeast of England dates from the 1890s. The busy decade or rather decades stretched up to 1914. After World War I the State became involved in the building of homes and in 1947 the planning system was introduced after which all housebuilding was subject to the consent of the local authority.
The 1890s and subsequent decade and a bit were therefore the last time Britain had a free market of housebuilding without restriction or competition of any significance from councils. Builders could more or less pitch up wherever they fancied, buy some land and get putting up homes. One would imagine this free for all would have spewed out architectural horrors but quite the opposite occurred: some of the best domestic architecture was delivered in the very late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Not that it was universally welcomed at the time. In 1907 the Property Owners’ Journal moaned “the builders go on building, notwithstanding the 90,000 empty houses and tenements in London”.
The housing around Radnor Park in Folkestone, Kent, is a prime example. Radnor Park was donated by the Earl of Radnor as a recreation ground to the seaside town in 1886. Soon houses sprung up around the park boosted by the catalyst of the nearby railway station that would become Folkestone Central. Combining red brick, wall tiles and half timbered Tudor gables with transomed and mullioned windows and rendered quoins sounds like cluttered chaos but the confident handling of materials and details has produced houses. Idiosyncratic features further enhance some of the houses: a buttressed stone porch here, an octagonal turret there.
