Tracey Logan and Richard Szwagrzak Talk

Tracey Logan and Richard Szwagrzak Talk

A discussion of the genesis of Chiswick’s Glebe Estate and its early development, by the urban historian Tracey Logan and Richard Szwagrzak. Their research links the architect of Brentford’s Italianate water tower, leading Victorian water engineers, and a founder-member of Reckitt’s starch dynasty, with a cash-strapped ritualist Vicar of Chiswick seeking to fund his mission to the poor.  We will hear how Reverend Dale’s 21-acre market garden transformed into terraces fit for Chiswick’s aspirational ‘artizans’, amid major changes to the world of investment as well as working class entitlements:  to vote, for example, and to live in decent housing.  We learn how the Glebe Estate gained its unique, inward-facing feel, and the effects on its construction of the wildly fluctuating late-Victorian economic cycle.  Finally, architectural sleuths will see how original features on the exterior of Glebe houses  – coloured and patterned brickwork, for example, ornate porches, classical figurines and decorative plaster – can be used to date them, and read as a pattern-book of the late-Victorian working class housing.