C O N T E X T 1 1 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 1 19 Mayland is a parish on the Dengie peninsula on the Blackwater, with Maldon the nearest town. It became the chosen place for social and educational experiments conducted by a man born in Virginia in 1853. Joseph Fels made his millions from the manufacture and successful marketing of his Fels-Naphtha medicated soap (still well-known in the USA). The development of model villages became his own choice of philanthropy. Rather like its British counterpart, Port Sunlight, a settlement in Delaware was founded in 1900 at Arden with Ruskinian and arts and crafts principles. Shakespeare and the buildings of that part of Warwickshire provided names as well as prototypes for the architect of the Arden scheme, Will Price (1861–1916). Unlike Arden itself, the two foundations begun by Fels in England from the early-1900s have not survived well. His first experiment, Hollesley Bay in Suffolk, is now an open prison. In 1907 he bought the land at Mayland, Essex with the aim of setting-up a self-sufficient agricultural colony for the cultivation of market garden produce on the French maraicher system, as employed near Amiens in particular. Although Mayland still exists, its buildings and the market gardens have somewhat altered after standing here for more than 100 years. Buildings, including a school, were part of the Mayland project. It is the fragmentary survival of these structures that is significant in conservation terms. Charles Holden (1875–1960, famous later for his modernist/art deco designs for the London Underground and for Senate House, London University) was the youthful architect chosen to provide designs for semidetached cottages at Mayland. This group of small dwellings may still be seen and are thus the leastfamiliar example of Holden’s known work, although mentioned in James Bettley’s Essex volume of The Buildings of England. The same architect, whose partner was a midwife and nurse, was kept busy from 1900 with many other hospitals, and with the designs for the Edward VII Sanatorium at Easebourne, West Sussex from 1903. The sanatorium has open-fronted terraces. The separate chapel is laid out on open-air school principles for worship by male and female patients in separate wings, each of which was fully open to the fresh air and faces inwards to a central altar and pulpit. A German link (through the hospital’s patronage?) may be detected in the chapel’s ornament and detail, as well as in the hospital’s overall methods in the treatment of tuberculosis. In addition to Holden, Fels took on for his Essex project the obscure Thomas Smith as designer for the Mayland settlement’s cooperative store, clubroom, swimming bath and, notably, its school. Drawings for the main brick school building, actually an extension, were submitted to Maldon Rural District Council in 1909.These were drafted by GF Bacon, a builder from Burnham-on-Crouch. These school plans represent the enlargement of the original one at Mayland but on open-air principles. The pupils were not to be recruited for health reasons and with re-habilitation as the aim (as other schools had done since about 1900), but rather to provide an establishment suitable for ‘the children of farmers and small cultivators, who are used to an outside life’. Lessons were held in the fields or, in bad weather, on the large open veranda at the front of the schoolhouse. The growing of market-garden produce was included in the curriculum. Early experiments with open-air schooling had begun first in German cities, soon followed in the USA by Chicago, and then by London and industrial cities in the UK. The Charlottenberg Waldschule (Berlin, 1904) has a likely claim to be the first. It was Germany that provided both the pattern for the schools’ educational aims and the architectural designs of the first buildings. Britain was not slow to follow, due to the pressing needs of its population of industrial workers crowded Single storey-dwellings at Mayland, designed by Charles Holden (courtesy of Essex Record Office, Maldon RDC records) The open-air school extension at Mayland.This building was erected at right angles to the left of the first building, pictured on p18. It is now a pile of rubble. (Courtesy of Essex Record Office, Maldon RDC records)
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