Historical Context At the beginning of his career, Gibberd was an early pioneer of the Modernist movement in the UK, a strong believer in the ideas coming out from CIAM (Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne).5 Designing one of Britain's first flat developments in the international style, Pullman court in Streatham Hill (1936). Pullman court included a seven-storey flat in a double cruciform plan, similar to those famously advocated by Le Corbusier in his unrealised Plan vison for Paris (1925).6
style".10 Rather than rejecting all modernist principles and reverting to a traditional approach, Gibbered sort to incorporate picturesque ideals of variety in aesthetics and visual planning into his expression of modernism.11 After the war had finished the government set huge targets to provide new housing and repair bomb destroyed sites up and down the country.12 Armed with these new ideas, and considered a leading voice in housing design, Gibbered was able to put this newly formed approach straight into practice. 13 Commissioned in 1944 to design a housing scheme for 9 acre plot in hackney, named Somerford Grove.14
Gibberd was invited to join MARS (Modern Architectural Research Group) the British arm of CAIM months after its formation in 1933. By the Age of 29, Gibbered had quickly become a leading voice in Britain calling for a rejection of lowdensity suburban sprawl, that had been influenced by the garden city movement. Advocating instead for Le Corbusier's modernist approach of "tall buildings in a park, with common amenities air and view" views he published In "The Modern Flat" in 1937 .7 World War two broke out, Gibbered was deemed unfit to serve and after briefly working for Hampstead council producing Airraid shelters he took a professorship at The AA (architectural association) to further develop his thinking. Like many of his contemporaries, driven by the knowledge large areas of the country would need to be rebuilt, Gibbered started to become more interested with design at a greater scale, 8 studying historic approaches to town planning in the UK. The studies comprised of photography and annotated sketches, ranged from unplanned traditional vernacular towns (Safron Walden), to the planned Georgian cities of bath and the Garden Suburbs movement, the last an approach Gibbered had previously publicly criticised. 9 What united all these wartime studies was a focus on aesthetics, Gibbered admired the complexity and variety of street scenes created by their built form, something Gibberd was starting to believe was lacking in the modernists "international 4
