Goodwyns 2.81

Goodwyns is a housing estate in Dorking, a market town in the Mole Valley district of Surrey, England. It is situated on a hillside site in the south of the town adjacent to North Holmwood. Dorking town centre is about 1.7mi away. The area was developed in the mid-1950s as a council estate on behalf of the former Dorking Urban District Council by the architects William Ryder & Associates. The name recalls Goodwyns Place, a Grade II-listed country house to the north. This Arts and Crafts-style building was designed in 1901 by Hugh Thackeray Turner.The design of the buildings and the estate's layout were praised by architectural historians Ian Nairn and Nikolaus Pevsner, who described it as "unusually good" for a council estate. The housing was developed in three parts: first, on the lowest lying land and arranged around culs-de-sac, groups of red-brick houses with rendered panelling; then blocks of red- and pale-brick flats of three and four storeys on the rising land, some with steel balconies and with a mixture of flat and sloping roofs; then two 14-storey concrete-faced tower blocks. Completed in 1965, Wenlock Edge and Linden Lea were described as "more elegant than average" because of the layout of successive projecting and recessed sections on each face. The estate retains large areas of open space and has a semi-rural character, but there is little tree cover. The layout is approximately circular: the residential areas are bounded by two perimeter roads with other roads linking them. These streets are wide and lined with grass verges, encouraging on-street parking.