Eccentric, deeply principled, innovative… these are all terms that normally you would associate with a creative genius.
If you ever drive through the mass sprawl of urban northwest London, focusing in on the town of Kingsbury, you will start to notice a change in the urban topography of the housing stock.
Thatched roofs on 1920s semi-detached houses? Castellated towers on low-rise apartment blocks? Welcome Ernest Trobridge (1884-1942), a Northern Irishman who moved to NW London before WW1. Operating outside of the traditional architectural movement and building principles of his era, he was renowned for combining his love of Arts & Crafts with forward-thinking structural engineering innovations.
A Trobridge home currently on the market at £825,000, clad in elm timber.
He trained as an architect in Belfast before moving to London in 1907, and within a decade was able to work on his true passion: building houses. Post WW1, there was a huge lack of building materials, with brick and timber suffering from chronic shortages, causing a huge backlog of house building.
As part of the UK government’s ‘homes for heroes’ initiative, Trobridge developed a technique using locally sourced elm timber, easily felled and cheap to replenish. Studying how raw wood shrank as it dried, he designed structural joints that naturally tightened as the wood aged.
Leaded windows also formed a strong part of Trobridge’s interesting architectural arsenal.
These houses were strong but light, perfect for insulation purposes, and took only eight weeks to construct. They were half the cost of brick-built dwellings, so were immensely favourable post WW1. Off the back of building these 1920s thatched cottages, he moved into castellated structures and designs in the 1930s, when bricks became cheaper and land scarcer. These were generally social flats, styled as medieval castles.
Beneath Trobridge’s historical Arts & Crafts-inspired facades lay functional interiors serving a purpose. A great example can be seen in his castle flats, where the huge central turrets were not ornamental. They worked to conceal the chimneys from internal bedroom fireplaces. At the top of the turrets, he designed roof gardens with deck-chair cupboards built into the battlements.
He was also a social reformer, hiring local ex-servicemen for his building projects and developments, many of whom were disabled from the Great War. This helped him establish a long-standing building co-operative, insisting on paying all workers full trade union rates for the era.
His most famous ‘castle’ block of flats, Highfort Court, Buck Lane, is instantly recognisable owing to the imposing battlements. It featured as the backdrop for the Madness music video ‘Our House’.
Most of Trobridge’s 200 remaining works still stand today in and around Kingsbury, NW9, and are mostly still lived in and looked after by passionate custodians. It’s incredible they are still relatively unknown despite the dramatic effect they have had in this little corner of northwest London.
