22 C O N T E X T 1 1 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 1 CRITTALL WINDOWS: NEVER OUT OF FASHION STEEL WINDOW SPECIALISTS FOR OVER 150 YEARS " Like-for-like replacement of steel on " ! " maintenance life cycle " Duralife finish - no on-site " from our technical team " Each project personally to meet Crittall Windows Ltd, Francis House, Freebournes Road, Witham, Essex CM8 3UN. Tel: 01376 530800 Fax: 01376 530801 Email: [email protected] www. crittall-windows.com 4259 Crittall Ad.indd 1 23/3/09 17:10:53 where weak or troublesome boys were accommodated for a week at a time.This ceased in 1937, and the school site was built over. Almost all of the other seven retreats in Epping Forest, built of wood, corrugated iron and asbestos, perished. They were the holiday destinations of the millions but are largely forgotten.Their lineal descendants were the seaside holiday camps of Fred Pontin and Billy Butlin. Opposite the camp house was the Oriolet Fruitarian Hospital, financed in the 1890s by the evangelical vegetarian shipping magnate, Arnold Hills, and run by the remarkable dietician and medico-legal philosopher, Dr Josiah Oldfield, pioneer of diet cures, and friend and room-mate of Mohandas K Gandhi. This was a large house of 1870, to which arts-and-crafts ward blocks were added, each with a food preparation area. There were moveable screens as walls, to ensure maximum exposure to fruit (sole component of the diet) and fresh air. When Hills became insolvent, so did the hospital. It was sold to the Salvation Army, and run by a Miss Booth for a while, then to Essex County Council to form the first home for Loughton County High School for Girls. It later served as St Ethelburga’s Home for Waifs and Strays, then as a hotel. It was sold and demolished in 1930, its sole architectural legacy being a dragon finial on the gable end of one of the replacement 1930s houses. The Staples Road Conservation Area was adopted in 1995, after the local historical society and the Hills Amenity Society requested Epping Forest District Council to do so. The main reason for designating the area was the unchanged appearance of the houses from that of 1900. That also applied to its most prominent single building, the primary school, designed by James Cubitt in 1888–91. The district council’s conservation officer stipulated that conservation area designation was viable only if residents agreed to an Article 4 direction protecting the frontages. They did agree, and the street has been spared the post–1995 attentions of double-glazing salesmen. Although most of the information about the history of the area as a health resort was known in essence, only the more detailed research (by volunteers rather than conservation staff) that followed the designation and appraisal process fleshed it out. The saving of Epping Forest, ‘the playground of East London’, in the 1860s and 70s was seminal in the national, and indeed world, conservation movement. It served notice that woods and commons were no longer merely wastelands to be grubbed up and turned into productive fields. The history of this one, almost accidental, conservation area has roots grounded in that struggle. Chris Pond is an amateur architectural historian, particularly of suburbs and chapels, and an independent Essex county councillor. His Buildings of Loughton was reviewed in Context 118, March 2011.
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