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Kingstanding patio housing

Vivienne14

Kentish Brummie Moderator
Staff member
These were experimental houses built in 1969. There were 63 of them built at Kingstanding Beacon. Any ideas where exactly these were ? Viv.

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I remember these Viv. In Landswood Close off Sidcup Road, they were a group of what we called mono pitch houses. The roof sloped in one direction.

At the time, I nearly fell through the floor when I was told they they had allegedly won an award for design. They had an enormous living room with a really high ceiling that sloped right down to normal height at the other end. Just a load of empty space that must have cost a fortune to heat. The bedrooms were a similar design. I think they had a warm air gas heating system too. Kingstanding Beacon was always quite cold and windy so they were always losing the mono pitch ridge tile that was quite hard to source.

The architect J A Maudsley of course won a reputation for all the wrong reasons in his own right and is worthy of another thread. In my opinion some of his social housing designs were dreadful. I think he turned the 60’s reference library into the cheap and cheerful looking thing it became in a cost cutting exercise.
 
When I saw Kingstanding Beacon I thought it meant the very top of Kingstanding Road, is it in fact where we used to call 'up the gully' between Sidcup Road and Clapton Grove/Ellerton Road where the allotments were?
 
Most architects seem to be like politicians - More interested in their image and their "legacy" than in those they are supposed to be serving
Very apt, have you ever tried to have a discussion with an architect, almost an impossibility, unfortunately they are in a way very much from the arts world, wrapped in their own cocoons, seeking fame and recognition and the problem is they always win as the intelligentsia and literati swoon over the latest concrete and glass monstrosity. Happily there are those local architects, content to produce the ordinary and sensible who have no desire to be the next LeCorbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright.

Bob
 
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