please empty your brain below
I wonder if there is a parallel with fairly recent times, in communist East Germany and Russia. Dachas were very popular, where city flat-dwellers would spend weekends in what were basically sheds on allotments.

Malcolm | 13.09.16 - 9:08 a.m. | #

Welcome to Langdon Hills, dg. We live in the Great Berry estate up the hill, and I imagine Plotland houses would have been here before our house was built (c. 1980s). A neighbour has an orchard in their garden which I suspect would have been planted at that time. But yes, very few traces. Further up the hill in the (fairly extensive) nature reserve there are various sections of thin concrete path, which I always imagine were laid to help the London weekend trippers between Laindon Station and their Plotland homes.

Dave Walker | Homepage | 13.09.16 - 9:23 a.m. | #

For anyone interested in 'conflict archaeology' the road passing the Bata works leads to a number of coastal defences including Coalhouse Fort (opened by volunteers on certain Sundays), a WW2 heavy anti-aircraft battery (on private land but I gained permission to look) and an older 'quick firing battery' (also private land).

There are also 'plotlands' in Kent: perhaps Dungeness could be described as one? A less well known one, which seemed to remain largely unchanged until recent years, was a small hamlet called Culverstone, between Meopham and Luddesdown (not a great distance from New Ash Green).

RogerW | 13.09.16 - 3:23 p.m. | #

We visited East Tilbury's Bata Town at the weekend (throwing in the Tilbury Forts to make a day of it) but we couldn't help comparing the kind of once utopian company town built by philanthropist employers like Messrs Bata, Crittall and Cadbury, with their present day equivalent - that nice Mr Ashley and his gleaming Sports Direct complex up in Derbyshire, which now employs only slightly fewer than the 4000 employed in the East Tilbury Bata factory at its peak.

But who needs a company health centre when the staff can give birth in the toilets? Why build company houses or a hostel when the workers can cram into subdivided rooms in the nearby towns and villages? Why provide social clubs, coffee bars and public conveniences for your workers when they can drink and relieve themselves in the streets where they live? Why have efficient assembly lines and modern machinery when it's cheaper to make your workers walk 20 miles a day fetching and carrying things around the warehouse? Why build schools and roads and swimming pools for your workers when you can rely on the local authority to do it for you? And why give workers a job for life when you can call them in or sack them or get someone else at a few minutes notice? Because that's modern business and nobody will stop you.

ActonMan | 13.09.16 - 3:39 p.m. | #

My long dead great uncle and great aunt moved into a plotland property in Billericay after the First World War. When my great aunt died my side of the family had a legal tussle to get the flat that a redeveloper had sold her and we spent some weekends circa 1980 renovating the place.

We had a holiday in Dungeness last summer and one comment was that the place looked American; was it the telephone wires, the construction materials or just that cheap houses had been built one by one?

Sprout Eater | 13.09.16 - 3:56 p.m. | #

Don't forget that these were company towns, as the original post said,

'Management got larger houses at the end of the street, each with an upper balcony, and the estate slowly grew as production stepped up'

So if your'e idea of utopia is your manager living at the end of your street checking what you are up to, then great.

| 13.09.16 - 6:28 p.m. | #

Bata was much-celebrated internationally between the wars as 'the European Henry Ford' for modernising shoemaking, building modernist company towns and so forth. For Czechoslovakia, he was an embodiment of the new national project, and the modern architecture was part of that. As with Essex, his big complex in Zlin, CZ was located far away from traditional shoemaking centres. It drew on the sons and daughters of the peasantry rather than the skilled [and organised] workers of the shoemaking towns.

Scott Fletcher | 13.09.16 - 9:18 p.m. | #

The two Modernist houses designed by Douglas Niel Martin-Kaye are just round the corner from us in Westcliff-on-Sea.

No. 62 Clatterfield Gardens has had all its windows boarded-up for some months now - I assume for some decorating work; it must be very dark inside.

The big front window was framed in white (see picture at http://www.imagesofengland.org.uk/Details/Default.aspx?id=427555), but has just been replaced by one framed in black - not sure what Historic England will think about that!

Unfortunately, we couldn't visit because it was a family birthday w/e; did anyone reading this go?

John Simmons | 13.09.16 - 9:39 p.m. | #

Is the statue of Mr Bata still there? It was last year.

C Whiting | 16.09.16 - 11:41 a.m. | #











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