Span, which built thirty housing estates between the 1950s and 1980s, was one of the few mass-housing companies that truly understood the value of good architecture and design. The basic tenets of a Span home were in part a reaction against mock Tudor design, which was so prevalent in post-war architecture. They hoped to illustrate that individually-designed and affordable homes could be built in the middle ground between large council estates and mansions and also hoped to prove that planned estates could be genuine communities.

Eric Lyons (1912-1980) co-founded Span in 1948, along with Geoffrey Townsend and Leslie Bilsby. Lyons’s Span houses are about space and light and blurring the edges between outdoor and indoor space. He paid great attention to the surrounding landscape, designing and building homes around existing mature trees and creating communal areas that encourage residents to mix.

A typical Span house used new construction techniques and featured open-plan interiors with large areas of glass and would be integrated into the Cunningham-designed landscape where “the architectural quality of the village will be achieved by the close relationship between building and landscape”. This relationship is protected by covenants administered by a committee of management most commonly drawn from volunteer residents.

An early Span publication summarises the origin of the name: “It spans the gap between the suburban monotony of the typical ‘spec building’ and the architecturally designed individually built residence.” Lyons carried out several other schemes outside of his Span work, including public housing for World’s End in Chelsea. He was appointed President of the RIBA in the 1970s.