Email to request a copy of the original Forestfield brochure

 The Forestfield Estate was a modern ground breaking design when created in the late 1960′s. Prior to this, the land Forestfield stands on was primarily used for farming.  The actual shape of the estate was dictated by natural and man-made boundaries as can be seen from the maps below showing the area in 1879, 1963 and the early 1980’s. 

 PRP Architects the designers of both Forestfield and Shrublands have kindly given permission to reproduce an item from their web site (www.prparchitects.co.uk) which shows the history of the design and construction of not only Forestfield but also Shrublands and many other award winning estates. 

The following article by Martin Richardson appeared in The Architectural Review. September 1972.

Forestfield, Crawley, 1967

A quiet, close enclave of small brick and timber houses, with narrow paved ways, tight little landscaped places, the trees always in the background. And on a sunny weekday morning an impression of contented housewives tending their wisely bought homes; brewing coffee in their intelligently planned kitchens; enjoying the second view from the sitting room on to the danger proof walkways; intently following, now the children are older or perhaps just at the local nursery school, the Open University on the television in the sensibly placed study/bedroom with its work books neatly sectioned from the recreational literature in the sitting room; or merely admiring their husband’s achievements in their small but adequate and not overlooked back garden. A son doing his last minute O Level cramming in his teenage bedroom, a three year old gnawing her safe plastic toy on the deep pile floor to floor, an old man watering his lupins in his patio pen watching curiously — or was it malevolently? — the curious visitor. The dirty urban street, the basement area with its rotting coal in dark vaults, the cracked backyard overawed by sawtooth brick housebacks and fouled by cats — these seem an age away. But so, for that matter, does semi-land with its garden wastes, its harsh displays of domestic competition.

Which is to say, putting it more simply, here is an intelligently designed housing scheme which appears to provide an agreeable, economic, private but not isolated, sociable but not institutional, safe but not inconvenient environment, for a quietly progressive section of the English middle class who are content or constrained to live in a quiet corner of an English New Town in 1972.

Explicitly, this is a 125 house, 13 dwellings to the acre, housing association development situated on the edge of Crawley, adjacent to a forest. The developer is non-profit making; houses are bought on 99 year leases, which ensures that purchasers benefit from capital appreciation when they sell, yet contribute to keeping common areas and facilities. House areas are just over Parker Morris minimal; one garage and one parking space is provided per house.

The scheme is one more patch in a new town quilt. It makes no attempt to relate in organisation or style to its neighbours, a surprise perhaps when one of these is Shrublands built five years ago by the same architects for the same clients. However its inconsistency with most of its surroundings is certainly a merit; and good as Shrublands is, more has been gained than lost by an experiment rather than a continuation.

The scheme is interesting for its qualities as a place to live in; for its approaches to the people/car, privacy/community problems; as a value for money exercise; as the latest in the PRP oeuvre; and as one more step in the peculiarly English tradition of modest, ingenious, progressive, socially oriented housing projects.

The first key to its success is its mastery of the car problem by the building over of the garage courts with clusters of four houses. What would otherwise have been the most intractably dreary part of the scheme is transformed into its central and most agreeable feature — a person oriented not car dominated grouping — yet car convenient. In itself car access is absolutely clear, with the spine road leading to the five garage housing courts. The road itself is pleasant, blank brick walls above green banks leading to the small fortress-like garage complexes. Inside, natural light dispels the dismal horror of subterranean garaging, and provides acceptable spaces for the proper enjoyment of car grooming and for decent arrival and departure.

From the yard a walk of no more than 30 metres along a paved walk, perhaps through a landscaped court, leads to a miniature entrance patio and the front door. This is the one spot where personalisation is displayed in public, in the form of tiny collages of paving, beds, and planting. Walking further than this from court to court is confusing, but probably not unreasonably so, as most pedestrian movement within the scheme is likely to be by residents.