The approach from Golders Green
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From the start it was appreciated that the Northern Line railway would be a focal line of communication for the Suburb. At first a station was planned for a site at the top of Hampstead Way close to the old weather boarded farmhouse of Wyldes. Fig 6 - Entrance to Rotherwick Road 1997 photo(14k) When Golders Green became the only station, Unwin made it a high priority to build up the approach to the Suburb from it. Rotherwick Road is therefore entered from Finchley Road by the first of Unwin's "gates": four large houses, three on one side and one on the other in an intricate dog-legged plan, so that the Finchley Road street frontage is dramatically set back. The houses, of dark red brick with diapered patterns in an even darker shade, were among those designed in Parker and Unwin's office by Charles Wade.

Wade was a brilliant young architect of independent means who retired to the Cotswolds after the First World War, where he reconstructed Snowshill Manor as a William Morris influenced utopia, with a superb collection of rural crafts which he had begun to assemble when living at Hampstead. The influence of Morris's architect colleague, Philip Webb, is very strong in Wade's buildings, with their stern concentration on the best qualities of their materials, the sheer walls and clipped gables carefully avoiding the prettiness of most picturesque designs.



 
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