In the past the repeatable, formal, material and economic robustness of Georgian and Victorian pattern book types, seem to have offered architects and builders the means to construct quickly and at a large scale. At its best, such housing has the innate dignity of receding; offering a dignified and well mannered background to both the public and the intimate, domestic lives of our cities. This fundamental quality is something that, for all the contemporary checks and safeguards, codes and regulations, our culture appears to find difficult to match.

Whilst it is a conception that perhaps sits uneasily in a culture increasingly built around expressions of individuality, the strength of such typologies derives from repetition rather than variegation. They inform a collective urbanism where the identity and scale of individual homes is suppressed in relation to that of the street or neighbourhood. The squares of London’s Bloomsbury might be seen as a paradigm of this approach.

Our speculative project for a London Townhouse reflects upon such a model. A similarly repeatable type, it describes the indivisibility of the individual house from its situation within a larger system of order, in this case subsumed by the proportion and grain of a street façade.

Critical re-interpretation of the forms, constructions and spatial configurations that are part of our collective cultural memory, generates associative qualities that allow buildings to situate themselves physically, socially and historically. The masterplan for Newlands in Hampshire is of a scale, which might be thought of as a large village, in relationship to the small town upon whose edge it lies. This association is reinforced by how the green around its central area is defined.

Within this larger plan, our project reflects upon the anatomy of historic English villages. Loosening the emphatic geometries of the block structure, it allows negotiation between a house, its neighbours and the street. These adjustments establish communicative spaces at a number of scales; from tiny spaces for a tree, a bench or a postbox at the widening of a street corner to the subtle shaping of a street to create an informal sense of place. The latter counter-pointing the grander, more formal public spaces envisaged in the masterplan.

Like the London Townhouse, the Newlands house types are derived from archetypes, the detached villa and the terraced cottage. The villas collectively define a formal face to the green whilst the inflected façades of the terraces establish a more picturesque expression to the secondary streets.

Constructed in a simple language of brick walls and tiled roofs with straightforwardly applied secondary fittings, the houses individually present themselves with a heightened but determined ordinariness. They are instead concerned with the qualities of and relationships between the spaces they enclose.

Thresholds to all houses are defined by a porch to which can be viewed obliquely from within the houses. Internally the houses are planned to give appropriately scaled and proportioned rooms, the terraced houses having principle rooms orientated towards the gardens while in the villas they front the street. The houses are planned to minimize circulation yet civilized through the use of a generously wide staircase.