Temple Fortune shops
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Where Hampstead Way and Temple Fortune Lane meet Finchley Road, Unwin planned the most impressive of his "gates", consisting of two large blocks of shops and flats, Temple Fortune House and Arcade House. The massing of these splendid buildings, particularly the outside steps and the water tower of Temple Fortune House, recalls the photographs of Rothenburg in Unwin's important book "Town Planning in Practice", published in 1909. The tower is closely modelled on the Markusthurm at Rothenburg, though its relationship to the building is also very similar to one at the Chateau de Chillon at Lake Geneva. Unwin was enormously impressed by the medieval German cities, especially the clear dividing line between town and country which at Hampstead he achieved, as we have seen, in the Great Wall.

As with the Wall, the detailing of the shapes owes a great deal to "early Lutyens" and in this case is probably attributable to the Christian Socialist enthusiast Arthur Penty, then working in Unwin's office. The semi-circular arcades under the projecting wings are typical of Lutyens's "Wrenaissance", as first expressed in St. John's Institute, Westminster (1903), and the series of balconies above, connected vertically by moulded steel balusters, are closely derived from Lutyens's bedroom balconies at Crooksbury (1898) and Tigbourne Court (1899). As always with Unwin's buildings as much attention was paid to the back as to the front - notice the low half-timbered wing with hipped roofs at the back of Arcade House. Penty is said also to have designed Temple Fortune Court, a tall plum-coloured block of flats at the entrance to Temple Fortune Lane, in which the Georgian conventions are enlivened by a bold diagonal chamfering of the gables.

Unfortunately, the rest of Unwin's plan for this entrance to the Suburb was never achieved. He intended an attractive public garden behind Arcade House, with a circular pond, from which Asmuns Way, Asmuns Hill, Temple Fortune Hill and Hampstead Way would be seen to radiate towards the various focal points of the Suburb. Before the garden could be made, the first War intervened; and shortly after it the erection of the range of flats called Queen's Court for the United Women's Housing Association (architects, Hendry and Schooling) blocked off the open space preventing the spatial relationship which Unwin intended.



 
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