Thorpe End Garden Village

Image: © Gareth Hughes Taken: 12 Aug 2009

Thorpe End was developed in the 1930s as a "Garden Village" by Percy and Leonard Howes of the Norwich estate agents Percy Howes and Co, who saw a potential market in the provision of new middle class houses, within easy commuting distance of the city, but in rural surroundings, and bought a site of 90 acres in open country straddling the Plumstead Road. Their brochure offered “the ideal home at Thorpe End” - house designs were not stipulated, but they had to be designed and built under the supervision of members of the Royal Institute of British Architects. The use of “mellow bricks” and thatched roofs was encouraged to lend the development an “old-world character”. The houses were to be built at a density of no more than three to the acre, all gardens having room for a tennis court, a quintessential thirties middle-class aspiration. Although later development has diluted these high ideals, much of the Garden Village has survived. This house, on the north east side of the central green, was occupied by Leonard Howes himself, and is one of the largest and most eleborately picturesque in the development.

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