Terrace of cottages for the Heatly Gresham Engineering Company, Letchworth

The Heatly Gresham Engineering Company was one of the first firms to build a factory in the new garden city of Letchworth, and they commissioned Dunkerley to draw up plans for employee housing. James Cornes’s 1905 book Modern Housing in Town and Country published a drawing made by Dunkerley showing the proposed development on the road called Bird’s Hill, opposite the factory. It consisted of 20 cottages, covering three different designs. This terrace of four cottages was the most basic design. Each cottage contained a living room, scullery and WC on the ground floor and two bedrooms on the first floor. The cost per cottage was £135, working out at 4 ½ pence per cubic foot. A note in Cornes’s article says that it had already been decided to replace this design with more cottages of the second design. The date of the drawing would be c1904. [Richard Fletcher]