The goal of many couples is to build or buy a house to form their “love nest.”
Other couples, to hide it.
This is the case of the Canadian architect Christopher Tunnardwho designed a fantastic mansion in the center of the United Kingdom specifically to live with her boyfriend Gerald Schlesinger during the 1930s and avoid being sent to prison for being homosexual.
“It was supposed to be a two-bedroom house with its respective bathrooms and beds, but what Tunnard had recommended was that two partitions be located that could be removed and (the two rooms) be converted into a single main room,” he told her. To the BBC Alisson Oram, professor at Leeds Beckett University.
Until 1967, in the United Kingdom, consensual homosexual practices between adults were a crime and, as such, not only involved the risk of facing possible conviction, but also rejection by the whole of society.
“The idea was to build a place where they could preserve their intimacy, their secret, because in those years it was extremely dangerous to be homosexual. You could be taken to jail,” researcher Justin Bengry told the BBC.
For this reason, the enormous house, located in the county of Surrey, about 40 kilometers south of London, became, over the years, a symbol of the fight for the rights of the LGBT community and was classified as protected housing (Grade II*), according to the English building heritage protection system.
And its price has skyrocketed: it’s on sale for $12 million.
The love story
Tunnard was a renowned Canadian landscape architect who gained a reputation for his work in Halland, Sussex, in the central United Kingdom, and for the publication of several books on modern landscaping.
In 1936, with the designs of the architect Raymond McGraththe house designed to hide their love was built in the town of Surrey on a plot known as St Ann’s Court.
“The intention is clear in the designs: every time there were visitors in the house, the divisions were placed inside the room and they remained as two independent pieces,” explained Oram.
The house, financed by Schlesinger, who worked as a stockbroker, became his haven of love for two years.
Not many details of the couple’s life are known. Schlesinger and Tunnardonly that in 1938, according to the report of the HistoricEngland portal, the architect stopped living there.
He then moved to the United States to become a professor at Yale University. In 1945, after serving in the Canadian Army during World War II, he married Lydia Evans and had a son.
Tunnard died in 1979.
gay heritage
The story lived hidden for several years. In the 1970s, Roxy Music guitarist and music producer Phil Manzanera built a studio in one of the mansion’s rooms.
Musicians like the former Pink Floyd David GilmourPaul Weller and Robert Wyatt recorded some of their albums in the same place where the love between two men had been celebrated.
But it was not until last September, due to Tunnard’s idea of partitioning the main room to hide homosexual love, that the round white house at St Ann’s Court became an example of “gay architecture”.
“These historic buildings witnessed how our society was formed,” Duncan Wilson, director of Historic England, which was the entity in charge of giving the title of heritage to the Schlesinger-Tunnard mansion, told the media.
“Our wish is that it increases the recognition that minorities have had today in the United Kingdom,” he added. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
