Rhos Green Garden City, Marine Drive and Abbey Road, Rhos-on-Sea
The Rhos-on-Sea Garden City was established at the junction of Abbey Road and Marine Drive. There appears to have been little in the way of a master plan, nor any provision for communal buildings or public open space. Rather it was a development of detached and semi-detached houses of a type set to become commonplace in the 1930s.
RHOS GREEN GARDEN CITY - ENTERPRISING MOVEMENT AT COLWYN BAY. Situate on the Marine Drive, overlooking the wide sweep of Rhos Bay (writes a correspondent) stands the latest development of garden village design. On the one hand the undulating outline of the Little Orme dips down to the sea, while on the other peak on peak of blue mountain range. Near at hand, and forming the background of the picture, stand the grassy slopes of Bryn Euryn, where the sheep graze within the ruins of the palace of Maelgwn Gwynedd. A visit to the estate brought many pleasant surprises—tile covered and with their walls pebble- dashed, white and sparkling in the early morning sunlight, the well-designed houses group themselves pleasantly into gently curving avenues, each house having its own garden and verandah over which the clematis is being trained to grow. All day long the busy city worker, spending a week-end in his reposeful seaside home, enjoys the welcome retreat from the noisy town. and when the purple evening mist begins to chill a wide ingle nook invites him to the comforts of the fireside. It has now long been an established fact that the inexpensive seaside or country cottage need be neither crude nor jerry built, and in the present instance an attempt has been successfully made to meet the demand of the upper middle class citizen, by giving him an artistic and comfortable cottage where all holidays may be spent, and where the retired elders of the family may spend their days in the invigorating and reposeful air of the seaside far from the maddening crowd It may be of interest to know that a house consisting of drawing room, dining room, kitchen, etc., and three or four bedrooms, with bathroom, are being built for £300, the best corners of the estate being, where possible, reserved for larger houses. A goodly portion of the land is being laid out as private pleasure gardens where evergreens and flowering shrubs will afford a pleasant touch of colour all the year round. By careful laying out of the ground, and by judicious control of the estate, the development and the future welfare of the district will be assured and it is the hope of the promoters to maintain the reposeful character of the locality and the natural beauties of the situation, by building ten instead of forty houses to the acre. One regrets to see so many pleasant watering- places spoiled by the building of streets of houses monotonous in their repetition, and all set out on hard lines, and constructed of materials unsuitable for the locality, and out of keeping with the artistic setting of the surrounding country. All the houses on the estate are being designed to suit the individual tastes of their purchasers, and each plan embodies the characteristic wishes of their prospective occupiers. In order to have a house ready for next Easter it should be commenced before the frosty weather sets in, and the architects, Mr Sydney Moss, A.R.I.B.A., of 4, St. Ann's Square, Manchester, and Mr Joseph Pearce, of Royal Insurance Buildings, Liverpool, have a good store of designs for those who are house-seekers, to choose from, and ai prices to suit all pockets. Many will look forward with great interest to the future of this delightful estate. [Welsh Coast Pioneer 20 October 1910 page 4]
