28 C O N T E X T 1 2 4 : M A Y 2 0 1 2 Right: Marsoville has a similar architectural style to Wavelands but the carriages are on the ground floor. Left:Wavelands: the two carriages are supported on walls to create the firstfloor accommodation. Lindum: below the barrel-vaulted roof, the shape of the carriages can be seen clearly on the front of the property. railway carriage as their basic structure. Contemporary magazines such as TheWoodworker published plans for the conversion and layout of railway carriages. Cheaply purchased carriages formed the basis of some quick-to-build permanent housing. After the first world war, Lloyd George promised ‘homes fit for heroes’ for returning soldiers and their families, but the housing shortage was so great that the supply of new council housing was not sufficient to meet demand. A quick and cheap-to-build railway carriage bungalow filled the housing gap. Very few carriage houses have any form of statutory protection. Listing in England is probably limited to one group of turn-of-the-20th-century buildings and two interwar examples. Some, such as at Dungeness, are in a conservation area. That is an interesting turnaround for groups of buildings erected without respect or regard for rules and establishment. One rare surviving group of the early seaside holiday home type of bungalow were listed Grade II in 1994. In 1901 six Great Eastern railway carriages were placed Left: Chesterford, one of the carriage houses at Bungalow Town in around 1912 (Doris Steers Collection, Shorehambysea.com) Right: Demolished in the 1940s, Bungalow Town, Shoreham by Sea, West Sussex was a highquality railway bungalow development occupied by the celebrities of the time. (Peggy Bailey, Shorehambysea.com) two to a plot close to the beach in Sutton on Sea in Lincolnshire.The list description calls them ‘very early, important and well preserved examples’. Perhaps the most interesting of the three,Wavelands, is a full two-storey house with the two carriages supported on walls to create the first floor accommodation. Aside from having two railway carriages cunningly disguised as a house, it has very much the appearance of a fashionable seaside house of its time, with a first floor verandah with wavy splat balusters, a decorative timber quatrefoil and slit frieze, a large bay window, black-and-white timbering, rendered walls and a plain tile roof. Marsoville has a similar architectural style but with the carriages on the ground floor. The arched open ground-floor verandah has glazed diamond panels set in each end. The third property, Lindum, is the only single-storey building of the three and, as a result, the only one to have received substantial modern extension. Below the barrel-vaulted roof, the shape of the carriages can be seen clearly on the front of the property as well as the window sides. It has a simple appearance alongside its more highly decorated lateVictorian neighbours, almost leading towards art deco. An early photograph shows Wavelands and Marsoville, completed and inhabited, while Lindum was still simply two railway carriages set down some feet away from each other, without any infilled central area. BungalowTown in Shoreham,West Sussex, began in the 1870s when railway carriages, set down as net stores on the spit of land at the mouth of the Rive Adur, were converted to bungalows. Soon formal plots were laid out where railway carriages were supplied at £10 each, with a small additional sum for transport to the beach by horse-drawn trolley and setting on sleeper foundations.
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