Читать книгу A Guide to Modernism in Metro-Land - Joshua Abbott - Страница 32

Brent has an interesting architectural history, split between the urban southern part featuring Willesden and Kilburn, which developed first, and the more rural northern areas at Wembley and Kingsbury. Wembley is the most significant area in terms of modernist design, being the place used for attracting people out to the suburbs, first through the failed Watkin’s Tower and then the more successful British Empire Exhibition of 1924–5. The exhibition was modern in construction rather than design, with the Owen Williams-planned reinforced concrete structures such as the Palace of Engineering paving the way for his more radical Empire Pool on the same site a decade later. The influx of visitors to the exhibition, 25 million by the time it closed, also provided a population boom resulting in modernist-style homes, designed by Welch, Cachemaille-Day and Lander for the Haymills Ltd, being built on the slopes of Wembley.

At the same time as those flat-roofed houses were appearing, Ernest Trobridge was producing more historically inspired designs in Kingsbury. Like the exhibition buildings, designs like Trobridge’s flats on Highfield Avenue hid contemporary reinforced-concrete construction. Like most of the boroughs featured in this book, Brent has a few underground stations by Charles Holden. At Sudbury Town, Holden produced his breakthrough box design that he spent the next decade refining. Post war, the progressive interwar legacy was not taken on, with local authority housing like the Chalkhill Estate, Wembley being quickly built and equally quickly torn down. Also demolished were the buildings of the Empire Exhibition, now only remembered by the India Pavilion, turned into a warehouse.