The Decade of the New
The 1930s were, among many other things, the decade in which a new visual vocabulary reached the streets and suburbs of London. Art Deco — the style that took its name from the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes and that combined the geometric abstraction of modernism with the luxury and glamour of the consumer society — manifested itself in everything from cinema interiors and hotel lobbies to domestic architecture, shop fronts, and the design of everyday objects. In Belsize Park, as in many parts of London, the 1930s saw the construction of buildings that embodied this new aesthetic with varying degrees of sophistication and commitment.
The context for Art Deco's appearance in Belsize Park was the continued development and densification of the neighbourhood during the inter-war period. As the area's Victorian and Edwardian housing stock aged and as new residents with new tastes moved into the neighbourhood, developers and architects responded with buildings that expressed a self-consciously modern sensibility — buildings that looked forward to the streamlined, technologically optimistic future rather than backward to the domestic traditions of the nineteenth century. The mansion flats of the Edwardian period had already established a pattern of multiple-occupancy residential development that the Art Deco buildings of the 1930s continued and modified.
The Art Deco buildings of Belsize Park range from the genuinely ambitious — blocks of flats whose design reflects careful thought about the formal possibilities of the style — to the merely fashionable, in which surface elements of the Art Deco vocabulary are applied to essentially conventional building forms without any deeper formal logic. This range is characteristic of Art Deco as a mass cultural phenomenon: a style that began as the sophisticated product of Parisian luxury design and that was rapidly absorbed into the mainstream of commercial and residential building, with results that varied enormously in quality and ambition.
Characteristics of Deco Belsize
The Art Deco buildings of Belsize Park share several formal characteristics that distinguish them from both the Victorian and Edwardian buildings that preceded them and from the more austere modernist buildings (such as the Isokon) that were their contemporaries. The emphasis on horizontal lines — expressed through continuous window bands, cantilevered balconies, and the horizontal scoring of rendered or brick surfaces — was a defining characteristic, reflecting both the aerodynamic aesthetics of the machine age and the modernist preference for horizontality over the vertical emphasis of traditional architecture.
The materials used in Art Deco residential buildings — smooth white or cream render, chrome and glass in the detailing, terrazzo in the entrance halls, geometric patterns in the ironwork of balconies and railings — represented a deliberate break with the warm, textured materials of the Arts and Crafts tradition. Where the Arts and Crafts movement had celebrated the irregularity and warmth of handmade materials, Art Deco celebrated the precision and smoothness of industrial production — the machine-made surface as an expression of modernity's promise rather than its threat.
The interior arrangements of Art Deco flats reflected the changing domestic life of the inter-war period: smaller, fewer servants, more technological assistance (electric ranges, refrigerators, and eventually central heating), and greater informality in the relationship between reception rooms and private spaces. The open plan that would become a feature of post-war domestic design was foreshadowed in some of the more ambitious Art Deco interiors, where the distinction between living room and dining room was softened or eliminated and where the domestic space was conceived as an integrated whole rather than a succession of separate rooms with distinct functions.
The Streamline Aesthetic
One particularly interesting strand of Art Deco design in Belsize Park is what might be called the Streamline aesthetic — the application to domestic architecture of the aerodynamic forms developed for aircraft, automobiles, and ocean liners, forms that expressed the speed and efficiency of modern technology in a visual vocabulary of smooth curves, horizontal emphasis, and minimal surface decoration. The Streamline aesthetic was popular in the United States, where it was applied to everything from railway locomotives to kitchen appliances, but it also influenced British domestic architecture in the 1930s, producing a number of buildings whose curved corners, metal windows, and smooth white surfaces suggest the forms of the great ocean liners of the period.
These buildings are among the most striking survivals of the inter-war period in the NW3 area. Their formal ambitions — to bring the aesthetics of machine-age speed and efficiency into the domestic realm — were genuine, even if the execution was sometimes uneven. The residents who chose to live in them were making a statement about their relationship to modernity: a statement that they were prepared to leave behind the comfortable historicism of the Victorian and Edwardian periods and to embrace the new forms that expressed the spirit of their own time.
Art Deco and the Modernist Community
The relationship between the Art Deco buildings of Belsize Park and the more austere modernism of the Isokon and the Parkhill Road circle was one of coexistence without complete accord. The designers of the Isokon — Wells Coates, the Bauhaus-influenced Gropius and Breuer — regarded Art Deco as a superficial stylistic phenomenon, a use of modernist formal vocabulary without the social programme and philosophical rigour that they believed were inseparable from genuine modernism. The decoration of Art Deco surfaces was, from this perspective, a capitulation to commercial taste, a betrayal of the modernist commitment to design that was simultaneously honest, functional, and socially progressive.
From another perspective, Art Deco's commercial success in bringing modernist visual ideas to a mass audience was precisely what the more doctrinaire modernists could not achieve. The residents of Art Deco mansion flats in Belsize Park were living in buildings that embodied, however imperfectly, the modernist aspiration towards new forms for new ways of living — an aspiration that the Isokon, for all its formal rigour, was too expensive and too radical in its social programme to realise for more than a small elite of progressive professionals.
Deco Legacy in the Contemporary Neighbourhood
The Art Deco buildings of Belsize Park are now themselves part of the neighbourhood's historic fabric — buildings that are protected, or should be, by the same planning designations that protect the Victorian terraces and the Arts and Crafts houses. The quality of their construction, which was often high even when the formal ambitions were modest, has ensured that most of them have survived the decades without serious deterioration, and their distinctive visual character contributes to the neighbourhood's architectural variety in ways that pure Victorian or pure modernist development would not have provided.
Walking through the streets of Belsize Park and noticing the Art Deco buildings — the smooth render, the horizontal window bands, the geometric balcony railings — is to encounter a particular moment in the cultural history of the neighbourhood: the moment when the optimism of the 1920s and early 1930s found architectural expression in forms that were genuinely new without being socially radical, that brought the aesthetics of modernity to the domestic realm without demanding that residents abandon the comforts of conventional domestic life. In this, they were entirely of their time, and their survival is a contribution to the neighbourhood's architectural memory that is not negligible.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*