Excellent Essex by Coach: Some Structures & Stories FULLY BOOKED
Excellent Essex by Coach: Some Structures & Stories - Saturday 19 October 2019 - 10.00 am - 4.45 pm FULLY BOOKED
Led by: Gillian Darley (President of the Twentieth Century Society), with contributions by Christine Townley (former resident of Basildon’s Brooke House and an engineer on the Canvey Island flood defences in the late 1970s) and supported by Adam Coleman.
Our day begins at Basildon, a first-wave New Town planned under the powers of the New Towns Act 1946 to decentralise London’s ‘overspill’ population, sited on land compulsorily purchased from the ‘plotlanders’, ad hoc settlers from east London who arrived from the early 1900s onwards. Led by Basildon Development Corporation, with Basil Spence as consultant, Basildon was designated in January 1949 and inaugurated thirteen years later in 1962. Brooke House, a residential tower, marks the centre. We jump on a coach to Burnham-on-Crouch’s Royal Corinthian Yacht Club, a grade II* listed building designed by Joseph Emberton for Britain's contribution to the International Exhibition of Modern Architecture held at the MoMA in New York City in 1932.
Following lunch at the Yacht Club we travel to East Tilbury’s Bata Estate, built in the 1930s to house workers of the Bata Shoe Factory, part of what became a global enterprise, centred around planned villages modelled on the modernist parent settlement at Zlin. Designed by Czech architects Frantisek Lydie Gahura and Vladimir Karfik, the Bata village contains numerous grade II buildings. With Conservation Area protection, some recent housing additions follow the same idiom. Finally, we travel to the Labworth Café at Canvey Island. Built by Ove Arup with Christiani & Nielsen (1932-33), the circular café was a pioneering modernist building, a design by a very young Arup. Due to its vulnerable situation on the shoreline, it was adapted and incorporated within the flood defences. A coach will take participants back to Basildon train station for their return journey.
Copies of Gillian’s Excellent Essex (Old Street Publications) will be available to buy.
A light sandwich lunch and tea/coffee on arrival at the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club is included in the cost of the tour. Drinks to accompany lunch can be purchased from the club bar.
Event is now fully booked
Meet time/place: 10.00 am / Basildon Train Station (there are regular trains to Basildon from London Fenchurch Street and London Liverpool Street, journey time approx. 40 mins)
Finish time/place: 4.45 pm / Basildon Train Station (there are regular trains return journeys to London Fenchurch Street and London Liverpool Street, journey time approx. 40 mins)
Members £50.00