ABSTRACT
Strictly speaking, the housing estate presented in this section lies in Surrey, but very close to the south-western boundary of the London borough of Richmond upon Thames. When Howard Houses in 1934 advertised their modern houses on the Upper Farm Estate in West Molesey they were listed, prominently, as lying at Hampton Court. Hampton Court Palace and Park on the northern bank of the Thames are both within the boundary of Richmond upon Thames and only about two miles distant from the housing estate, so Howard Houses might be forgiven this innocent attempt to encourage sales. On a Sunday in the late nineteenth century Molesey lock would have been awash with the colourful dress of boaters, male and female. In Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome writes:
West Molesey Upper Farm Estate Walton Road, 1934 Estate developer: Howard Houses
Howard Houses was set up as a housing development company by the 24-year-old D.G. Howard, who had seen the potential savings in building modern, at-roofed houses and hoped to make a clean prot of £100 on each house sold on the West Molesey Estate. In all, 320 houses were built. Initially advertised at prices from £395 freehold, these houses must at the time have been the cheapest Modernist houses on the market. In their original design the houses were unpretentious white cubes of semi-detached or terraced dwellings of quite pleasing proportions, although one architectural historian later dismissed them as “a gross misinterpretation of the functionalist aesthetic” (Edwards 1981: 173).
