King’s Knoll, Hilda Mason 1933 © Peter Cook
Anyone who has taken the walk from Woodbridge along the River Deben might have paused near Kyson Point and gazed enviously at an enigmatic, white, winged house on a hill. This sentinel-like vision is King’s Knoll, designed by Hilda Mason and built in 1933 as a home for herself and her sister Elfrida.
King’s Knoll, Hilda Mason 1933 © Peter Cook
Using the International Style, with Art Deco touches, it stands as a testament to the stylistic and technological innovations of interwar architecture – and also to Suffolk-born Mason, a trailblazing female architect at a time when the architectural establishment was almost exclusively male.
King's Knoll © Peter Cook
King’s Knoll has been Grade II-listed since 2019. It is in private hands and inaccessible to visitors. But Mason’s handiwork can be experienced first-hand some 14 miles south-west of Woodbridge. Here she collaborated with architect Raymond Erith on the astonishing and historically vital St Andrew's Church, Felixstowe (1929–1930): the first such church to be built in the UK using reinforced concrete and a soaring modern take on Suffolk’s Perpendicular Gothic wool churches, as seen across the county from Long Melford to Blythburgh, Southwold and Dedham.
St. Andrew's, Hilda Mason and Raymond Erith 1929-31, by Motacilla, licensed under CC BY 4.0
Mason’s interest in concrete might have been informed by her Ipswich upbringing. Her father, Frank William Mason, was a cement and timber merchant, and she was related to William Mason, an architect from Ipswich who made his name in New Zealand. Perhaps these factors influenced her decision to forge a career in architecture. Although the interwar years were very male-dominated, Mason became an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1925 – a huge achievement at the time, when even in 1930 there were just 41 female RIBA members from a total tally of 2,586 architects.
St Andrew’s was commissioned by its vicar, Reverend Henry Greene, to convey the idea of ‘Protestant triumphalism’. Nowadays that concept would be considered antagonistic, but in this fine church one can see how the pared-down ideal of Protestantism – reconfigured through Suffolk’s peerless church-building tradition – has been taken to almost Brutalist ends. Yes, it is somewhat stark, and inevitably not to everyone’s taste. But if the church’s exterior is overly stern to some, the gorgeous interior is calm and minimal, with the interplay between concrete, oak flooring and clear windows (stained glass was rejected by the sniffy purist Reverend Green as making it look like an “Italian ice cream parlour”) creating a soothing, spiritual ensemble that simply urges you to spend some quiet time within its walls. The sense of light and proportion brings a sense of restrained joy.
Like any innovative building, St Andrew's Church enjoyed a mixed reception at its birth. But the Architectural Review hailed it a “brave experiment” and commented upon its “genuine English feeling”. It also had international resonance: St Andrew’s is understood to have been inspired by the dramatic and acclaimed 1923 Église Notre-Dame du Raincy in Le Raincy, near Paris, France, designed by Auguste and Gustave Perrett, architects of the reconstructed UNESCO World Heritage port of Le Havre, and itself the first French church built entirely from reinforced concrete. Sitting in the church a century on, one can imagine the almost feverish sense of ambition attached to concrete and, along with her colleague Erith, dubbed a “progressive classicist”, Hilda Mason was helping to push architecture forwards, marrying cutting-edge building materials to deep tradition. It even has an elegiac quality. As architect Francis Terry has written, “It is, after all, the last flowering of the great and ancient wool church tradition and I doubt there will be any more.”
Sadly, St Andrew’s is facing challenges. The concrete has started to crack in places, revealing the iron reinforcements within. It needs champions in a world where heritage demands are manifold. This sad scenario isn’t helped by the fact that while Mason’s two key projects have been recognised, she didn’t leave a huge body of buildings behind her – indeed, as a member of the Ipswich Fine Art Club, she spent much of her time becoming an acclaimed watercolour painter, with her best-known work being a 1925 design for a poster of Castle Combe, near Bath. She died in a nursing home in 1955, aged 74.
Now, with an increasing interest in the churches of the 20th century, Mason is at last becoming better known for her role in St Andrew’s. She has been one of only eight female architects to design listed buildings in the interwar years and played her part in a trailblazing movement for women to gain greater recognition. In 1930, for example, Elisabeth Scott won the competition to rebuild the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon – the first public building designed by a woman and now a beloved Grade II* fixture in the town. Similarly, Hilda Mason deserves credit – and St Andrew’s needs our care and attention.