Fieldend *

Site on The National Heritage List for England, Parks & Gardens, for Register Entry see https://www.historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list. The Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England was established in 1984 and was commonly called English Heritage. In April 2015 it split into 2 separate entities, Historic England (HE), which continues to champion and protect the historic environment, and the English Heritage Trust, whose role is to look after the 400+ historic sites and monuments owned by the state. HE manages the National Heritage List for England (NHLE) that includes over 400,000 items ranging from prehistoric monuments to office blocks, battlefields and parks, which benefit from legal protection.

The Span development consortium grew from the partnership formed in 1938 by architects Eric Lyons (1912-80) and Geoffrey Paulson Townsend who embraced Modernist ideology. In the late 1940s the partnership evolved whereby Townsend would act as developer, acquiring the site for a housing scheme that Lyons would then design. In 1957 Townsend acquired a company, Span, and this led to the establishment of Span Developments Ltd, which also included builder and developer Leslie Bilsby, who had worked with such Modernist architects as Erno Goldfinger and Denys Lasdun. In 1955 Eric Cunningham had joined Lyons' architectural team and became particularly responsible for the design of the landscaping for the schemes, the partnership becoming the Eric Lyons Cunningham Partnership in 1963. The Span schemes were often set within existing planting, for example the Parkleys Estate (q.v.) in Ham is sited on a former nursery. Part of the ethos was to engender a communal spirit whereby the residents took responsibility for the overall environment and initially nearly all Span schemes were originally leasehold properties, Span remaining ground landlord, with tenants covenanted to keep the estate in good order. Maintenance of communal areas was undertaken through residents' management committees. At Fieldend this is Fieldend Residents Association Ltd (FRA), set up as a limited company that is run by an elected board made up of current residents, who participate on a voluntary basis. Each household is a shareholder in FRAL, and homeowners are encouraged to take turns as directors. Main roles are 'to maintain the estate for the enjoyment of its residents in a cost­efficient manner, to safeguard the appearance and integrity of the estate in line with the original Span concept and to represent the interests of Fieldend'. The communal gardens are maintained by a family firm who have been undertaking this role since the 1960s.

In 2018, as part of a ‘Compiling the Record’ campaign, HE in partnership with the Gardens Trust (TGT) invited nominations from members of TGT and the general public for post-war landscapes that might be added to the NHLE in order to widen the knowledge base and seek protection for a category of landscape hitherto deemed to be under-represented on the Register. A shortlist of 25 cases was selected by an expert panel comprised of external and internal partners to go forward to full assessment for registration. This shortlist included the landscape associated with Fieldend, which has now been registered at Grade II.