The Plotlands Experience

Travelling on the Eurostar train through London 's extensive commuter belt, I have heard the exclamation many times in countless minor variations: 'But the houses are all the same!'. The Belgian and French attitudes to the expression of collectivity in housing are diametrically opposed, but whichever way you look at it, the repetition of identical freestanding houses seems a satisfactory expression neither of individuality nor of collectivity.

Although dominant, this is not however the only tradition of suburbia in England. The 'Plotlands', a series of self-built settlements on regular plots, concentrated in the southeast of England, express altogether different values and traditions.

The plotlands developed over a seventy year period, starting with the agricultural depression of the 1870s and spreading slowly until a peak of activity in the 1920s and 1930s, until their growth was brought to an abrupt halt by the Second World War. Their development occurred on the basis of several interrelated factors, with what we can now recognise as inexorable tendencies played out over the volatile market conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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