The shape of a different Britain

Frinton-on-Sea is a minor coastal resort in Essex with a reputation for sedate respectability. It has come down in the world since its heyday a century ago — when Edward, Prince of Wales played on its links — but the decline has been gentle. Frinton is quietly well-off and retains what guidebooks used to call “old world charm”. The local MP is a little-known fellow by the name of Nigel Farage. It is probably not, therefore, the type of place where you would expect to find the remains of a bold experiment with large-scale modernist housebuilding. Nevertheless, in the wide residential streets to the east of the railway station, you will find many striking houses, insistently angular, with large expanses of flat white wall, minimal ornamentation and distinctive steel-framed Crittall windows.

There are around forty of these homes, interspersed with more conventional red-bricked, high-gabled English suburbia. They are a tantalising glimpse of what might have been. In the mid-1930s, the South Coast Investment Company had plans for an enormous housing development in the area: the Frinton Park Estate was to have had over a thousand new homes, many of them in contemporary styles. Unfortunately, as it turned out, potential buyers were reluctant and the grand vision came to nought. The avant garde architects were a little too far ahead of public taste. 

It is a long-held ambition of mine to see the Frinton Park Estate in the flesh. I can see how some people — my wife among them — might raise a sceptical eyebrow at the idea of making a six-hour round trip to potter round a small town on the North Sea looking at a few dozen houses built in 1935. But there is something about those buildings from the first wave of modernism that I find utterly irresistible.  

Possibly it is not unrelated to their frequent appearances in TV adaptations of Golden Age detective stories, of which I am a huge fan. But more fundamentally, there is the freshness and sincerity of the new forms, the sense of energy and novelty that they embody. I don’t dislike the older styles and idioms of domestic architecture. Quite the opposite, in fact: my bike ride to work used to take me down a street of outstanding Arts & Crafts homes in Balham, and I coveted one of those very deeply. There’s even a lot to be said for that ultimate cliché of bourgeois solidity, the mock Tudor semi. 

But in the immortal words of Walt Whitman, a poetic modernist who has found a place in my trad heart through his undoubted genius: I am large, I contain multitudes. Whether in single family houses like those in Frinton and similar developments, or blocks like the Isokon Flats, or commercial and industrial edifices like the Hoover Building and the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club at Burnham-on-Crouch, the clean lines and stark geometry of interwar architectural modernism proclaim a compelling confidence, a trust in the potential of the new world to which artists and designers were trying to respond.

From the perspective of 2026, it is not always easy to comprehend the scale and breadth of the social, cultural and technological transformations that took place in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

From the perspective of 2026, it is not always easy to comprehend the scale and breadth of the social, cultural and technological transformations that took place in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modernism is sometimes regarded as a response to the civilisational disaster and mechanised carnage of the First World War, and while that conflict certainly acted as an accelerant, the background trends were well-established long before the lamps went out all over Europe. Industrial capitalism and urbanisation, steamships, photography and film, electric lighting, secularisation, first wave feminism, powered flight, the rise of mass politics and popular culture; the world in 1910 was staggeringly different than it had been fifty years before. Intellectuals and artists were beginning to respond to the new conditions of Western life, and attempting to supplant what they saw as exhausted artistic and architectural forms. Walter Gropius, who later founded the Bauhaus movement in Weimar Germany, completed one of his first major commissions, the Fagus Factory in Saxony, in 1913.

Modernist-derived styles and attitudes have come to dominate architecture over the last eighty years. This has resulted in a stifling orthodoxy, established by advocates for aggressively awful buildings. However, we should not let this rigidity blind us to the sheer vitality that characterised those early years. Take the example of High And Over in Amersham, a country home created in 1931 by the pioneering New Zealander Amyas Connell. Nothing quite like it had ever been seen in Britain. It stood out in the Buckinghamshire landscape — and still does, to some degree, despite 95 years of tree growth and uninspiring suburban sprawl — but without the cold aggression of Le Corbusier. 

The interwar years don’t fare well in folk memory. Insofar as people know anything at all about 1918-1939, they have vague memories from school history lessons of strikes, marches and mass unemployment, depression and appeasement. WH Auden didn’t help with his memorable description of the thirties as “a low, dishonest decade”, cementing the idea that the period had been one of wasted opportunities and political skulduggery. But in many respects the overall story is one of development, growth and stability. Britain built around four million homes. Infrastructure was improved almost beyond recognition. New light industries flourished in the Midlands and the south. The middle class expanded significantly. Private car ownership increased tenfold. Political extremism was never a serious threat — even after the Wall Street Crash, unlike in most European countries. It was also a time of enormous cultural ferment and experimentation, with old certainties breaking down and all kinds of new ideas and genres being put forward. 

The high modernists were sincerely and fruitfully engaged with the deep questions raised by a more egalitarian, more sceptical, more uncertain world

Despite my generally traditional sensibilities, there is something very exciting about that interwar atmosphere, and perhaps that is one of the roots of my love of places like Frinton Park. For me, those big bold houses — examples of which can also be seen on the stretch of the Kent coast, where I live now — are inextricably intertwined with the fascinating dynamism of the high modernist era from which they emerged. The high modernists were sincerely and fruitfully engaged with the deep questions raised by a more egalitarian, more sceptical, more uncertain world. And attitudes to modernism didn’t always break down along the political lines that we might expect. Agatha Christie, who was no-one’s idea of a revolutionary, lived in the above-mentioned Isokon Flats during the Second World War — a few years before, the block had been home to the mysterious Soviet spymaster Arnold Deutsch, as well as several Bauhaus designers who had fled the Nazis. High And Over — built for the distinguished classicist Bernard Ashmole — was the subject of a glowingly enthusiastically short film by Pathe News, not usually considered a hotbed of insurgent ideas. Joldwynds in Surrey, another modernist country house finished in 1932, was commissioned by Wilfred Greene, a barrister who earned an MC in the First World War and later became Master of the Rolls and a Law Lord.

We can only speculate about what drew such temperamentally conservative people to such bold new structures. For myself, the emphasis placed on light and air and space would have been one of the main attractions. In the very best early modern designs, the formal simplicity somehow offers a feeling of possibility, an air of optimism, and an aid to mental clarity. 

The men who conceived of these places — like Oliver Hill and JT Shelton, two of the architects of the Frinton Park Estate — are now mostly forgotten. But they have their memorials, for those with eyes to see.