Cottages and Flats on the Duchy of Cornwall Estate, Kennington

Adshead in partnership with Stanley Ramsey, was commissioned in 1911 to design extensive new buildings to replace existing slums on the Duchy of Cornwall estate, Kennington, London, in an initiative by Sir Walter Peacock, secretary to the prince's council. Ramsey characterized their work:  From the outset, Adshead insisted that it was to be a Royal Estate and he it was who laid down the broad principles of development. There remained, and do remain to this day, many fine examples of late eighteenth century and Regency buildings in the neighbourhood, and we decided that the architectural expression for the new buildings should be a modern transcript of these styles. (S. Ramsey, ‘Our work together’, MS, family papers). The main development consisted of terraces of two-storey houses in yellow London stock brick, some of which formed Courtenay Square, and a quadrangle of old people's dwellings. Additional sections, increasingly in flats, were inserted in the existing streetscapes until the end of the 1920s, and a new church of St Anselm was planned in 1914 and completed in modified form in 1933. It cannot be claimed that the Kennington work was influential as an alternative to the tenement type dwellings which constituted the majority model for slum clearance projects between the wars, but it was widely admired.