29, LEDO ROAD

Details

WHITTLESFORD

1767/0/10047 LEDO ROAD 01-DEC-05 West side 29

GV II Married officers' house. 1936-7, to a Group V design for Flight Lieutenants by A Bulloch, architectural advisor to the Air Ministry's Directorate of Works and Buildings. Drawing No 6537/36. Red cavity brick in Flemish bond, pantile roof and brick stacks.

PLAN: entrance hall, drawing room and dining room to ground floor, bedrooms above include servant's room.

EXTERIOR: 2 storeys. All windows are timber sash with glazing-bars, to flush boxes, with brick voussoirs. Garden front to S has canted bay window to left of 4-window range with 12-pane sashes; late C20 conservatory addition. N front, facing onto drive, has projecting gable, housing entrance hall and stair, with 8-pane sashes to returns and to gable face a panelled door set in classical doorcase with bracketed cornice. End and axial stacks.

HISTORY: This is a distinctive design of 1935 by the Air Ministry architect, A Bulloch. Detailing is restrained throughout, but massing, spacing and proportions are carefully considered, in the neo-Georgian style favoured at this period, and influenced by the impact of the Royal Fine Arts Commission, especially though the architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens. By the 1930's, the issue of airbase design had become inextricably bound with that of national identity, from the Moderne styles found in Finland and Italy to the self-consciously traditional style adopted for 1930s German training bases. In Britain, and in contrast to the more stridently modern styles for civil terminal architecture, the planners for the post-1934 expansion of the RAF were required to soften the impact of new bases on the landscape by politicians mindful of public concerns over the issues of rearmament and the pace of environmental change. The Air Ministry's main consultant in these matters was the Royal Fine Arts Commission. The result, for the first generation of bases constructed after 1934 and designed by the Air Ministry's first architect, A Bulloch, was a blend of Garden City planning and architecture for married quarters, neo-Georgian propriety for the barracks and other domestic buildings, and a watered-down Moderne style for the technical buildings.

This is one of a well-preserved group of married officers' houses, set to one side of the domestic site of former RAF Duxford, that represents the finest and best-preserved example of a fighter base representative of the period up to 1945 in Britain, with an exceptionally complete group of First World War technical buildings in addition to technical and domestic buildings typical of both inter-war Expansion Periods of the RAF. It also has important associations with the Battle of Britain and the American fighter support for the Eighth Air Force. For more details of the history of the site see under entry for the Officers' Mess (Building 45).

(Paul Francis, Duxford Airfield, report for Imperial War Museum, Duxford, 2001)

Legacy

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501632

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LBS

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