2011
TF0820 : Into the 21st century
taken 13 years ago, near to Bourne, Lincolnshire, England
Into the 21st century
This estate was started in the 1960s, and these houses finished in the early 1970s. For many years the estate was substantially unchanged, partly because the planning laws and covenants on the title deeds specified an "open plan" design, forbidding individual fencing. The standard design had a flat projecting porch over the front door, supported by steel poles and completely unenclosed, and a single storey garage.
In recent years people have refurbished extensively, and in this view can be seen a magnificent revision of the conventional plain grass, and on the far side of the road the addition of a pitched roof on a porch, and front gardens completely paved and gravelled, and enclosed with a brick wall.
One house has bedrooms added above the garage, and there are a variety of enclosed porches added to replace the original suspended flat roof. Not one of these houses has the front elevation unaltered since the original build.
Parker Houses Parker Bros. of Spalding built these houses in the mid 1960s, in their house style. The porches have a flat roof with a steel pole support, the panel below the upstairs window is tile-hung. Although most of these houses are found in the two large estates to the west of the town, they are also scattered here and there whenever 1960s infill occurred.
The Westwood estate to the south of West Road was not 'open plan': rather the houses had vestigial brick garden walls. And they used a cast concrete assembly at the bottom of the roof, instead of soffit boards, with an integral gutter hidden in it. A small number of houses was built near Mill Drove in the same style.
To the North of West Road the slightly later Westbourne and Westfield estates had conventional roof construction with wooden soffits and plastic gutters, and no front boundaries. The houses were thus closer to the road, there being no grass verge.
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