In 1966, Norman Starrett was an ambitious young architect who had learned his trade working in the practice of renowned Modern architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew. In Hyndewood, he was lucky enough to find a development company that shared his progressive ideas. Together they wanted to see housing in the UK keep pace with architectural advances in Scandinavia, America and elsewhere.

The development is one of a small number in the Southeast London area designed by Starrett for Hyndewood, a development company that is perhaps only rivalled by Span in the postwar era for the quality of its housing. The development was given a Civic Design Award in the 1960s, and the architecture and setting of Greatwood have been recently protected by a local listing. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner also singled out the development for praise in his celebrated Buildings of England series as, "one of the lamentably few good new developments in Chislehurst."