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Modern living in Suffolk
Modern living in Suffolk

The group of estate cottages at Rushbrooke were "stumbled upon". I hadn't gone out looking for them ...didn't know of them in fact... but simply saw them suddenly disclosed to view as I came round a bend in a lane. Norfolk and Suffolk are delightful counties in which to simply go out exploring. Still overwhelmingly rural and by English standards thinly populated, miles of piggeries and onion farms intervene between the scattered hamlets and villages. In everything but agro-technology they are, perhaps, a little backward by the standards of other, less favoured, southern counties. The "backwardness" is, I think, a consequence of geography. East Anglia lies off the country's main routes of communication, along which urban settlement has developed. So lately, equipped with the relevant Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 sheet ...excellent maps if you can ignore all the horrible blue symbols denoting caravan sites and picnic areas... I have spent many happy hours driving aimlessly around the minor roads of the two counties.
It is one of the pleasures of travelling around in England that small, quirky or interesting things are encountered at every turn. A turnpike toll booth, the scar of a dismantled railway, the basilisk-surmounted gates at the entrance to a great house, abandoned invasion defences from the war, a farmhouse built into the walls of a ruined priory, an estate of unusual council bungalows or, as here, a complete rural hamlet built on Corbusian principles. On this occasion I was also equipped with the relevant edition of Pevsner. Norfolk benefits from a fine two-volume revised edition, but Suffolk has not had an update since 1971. I was surprised to find a paragraph devoted to the Rushbrooke estate. The houses are grouped, it says, in such a way that they form a homogeneous entity instead of a mechanical repetition of identical units in pairs or terraces ..."a principle equally convincing visually and socially". Quite so.

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Taken on: April 16, 2009
Tags: Everybody's photos tagged with Suffolk Suffolk Everybody's photos tagged with Rushbrooke Rushbrooke Everybody's photos tagged with John Weeks John Weeks more » Everybody's photos tagged with Richard Llewellyn-Davies Richard Llewellyn-Davies Everybody's photos tagged with Modernism Modernism Everybody's photos tagged with modern houses modern houses « less
Sets appears in:   • Miscellaneous Modern   
Groups appears in:   • Suffolk    • MODERNISM    more » • Architecture UK    • Post-War Houses in the UK (1945-1980)    « less
Camera: Olympus E-420, f/6.3, 1/100 sec, 42mm, ISO 400 (more info) (hide info)
Camera: Olympus E-420
Aperture: f/6.3
Exposure Time: 0.01 sec (1/100)
Focal Length: 42mm
ISO: 400
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: Auto, Did not fire
Exposure Program: Creative (Slow speed)
Exposure Mode: Auto
Metering Mode: Multi-segment
White Balance: Manual
Light Source: Cloudy
Gain Control: High gain up
Color Space: sRGB
Software: Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 Windows
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