Building Boom….

The drainage records tell us that Cranworth Gardens was built between 1899 and 1902 and work was overseen by a Mr H Cave who worked from an ‘Estate Office’ (a local builders base while construction took place) on St Ann’s Road (which is now called Southey Road). The superintending architect was Robert H Matthew.

Cranworth Gardens was built north to south according to the drainage plans, this is backed up by Kelly’s residential directory 1901 and the 1901 Census which lists occupants only up to roughly a quarter of the way along the street, the rest of the street was still being built.

The above street plan shows Cranworth Gardens once completed by the end of 1902 (click it to enlarge). The properties were numbered differently then to now, I’ll come to explain more about that later in this study. The street plan also shows that the two buildings that are separate to the main terraces though still part of Cranworth Gardens originally had their own names, Cranworth House and Russell Mansions. These buildings were destroyed by bombing in WW2, the blocks that stand in their place today were built in 1947 in a very similar style and containing the same number of flats.

The end blocks shown above labelled as 23 and 24 only contain three flats each and are somewhat smaller than those in the rest of the street.

Onto part 4, the architecture, design and layout

An original advertisement for the rental of Cranworth Gardens and the surrounding streets from the Daily Express in 1904.