London Estates
The Artizans Company is best known for its four large housing estates built on the then-outskirts of London. The first was Shaftesbury Park, a development of 1,200 two-storey houses covering 42.5 acres (0.17 km2; 0.07 sq mi) built in 1872 on the site of a former pig farm in Battersea. The success of Shaftesbury Park led to the construction of Queen's Park, built in 1874 on a far more ambitious scale on 76 acres (0.31 km2; 0.12 sq mi) of land to the west of London, adjacent to the railway line out of Euston (Queen's Park station opened 1879), purchased from All Souls College, Oxford. A third London estate was planned at Cann Hall, and a site of 61 acres (0.25 km2; 0.10 sq mi) was purchased.
However, the Queen's Park project suffered serious mismanagement and fraud and in 1877 the company secretary William Swindlehurst and two others were found guilty of defrauding £9,312 (approximately £650 thousand today) from the project. The company was forced to raise rents and tenants were no longer permitted to buy their houses; by 1880 the company's finances had recovered sufficiently to allow further expansion. A third estate, Noel Park, was built near Wood Green north of London between 1883 and 1929, followed by a fourth in Streatham at Leigham Court.
The slow take-up of available homes in Noel Park, particularly due to the Great Eastern Railway's refusal to offer third-class rail fares from the nearby Noel Park and Wood Green station, led the Company to begin building centrally-located tenement blocks more similar to those of other model dwellings companies. Between 1885 and 1892, the Artizans Company built 1,467 dwellings in Central London and the West End, the first being the Portman Buildings in Lisson Grove, Marylebone, opened in 1888.
Read more about this topic: Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company
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