George Checkley

[1][2][5] In 1919, he moved to the UK, studying at the University of Liverpool's School of Architecture (1919–22), under a former serviceman's grant from the New Zealand government.

[1][11] There he became part of a prominent group of architects born in the British colonies, including the Australian Raymond McGrath.

[6] Checkley left Cambridge in 1934 to serve as Master of the Regent Street Polytechnic's School of Architecture (1934–37; now the University of Westminster).

[2] The demands of his later academic career seem to have put an end to his architectural practice;[1] Thurso (Willow House) of 1932–33 was his final building.

[14] Checkley's year in continental Europe on the Henry Jarvis Studentship gave him more experience of the Modernist movement in architecture than the majority of architects then working in the UK.

Other early proponents include Berthold Lubetkin, Wells Coates, F. R. S. Yorke, Maxwell Fry, Leslie Martin and Sadie Speight.

[18] Checkley's most notable buildings were completed in the early 1930s in Cambridge: two Modernist-style houses on Conduit Head Road in the west of the town.

[1][23][25] A contemporary report in The Times describes the White House as lacking "ornamental excrescences" to "impair the rectangularity of a long, low elevation" interrupted only by windows.

[17] Dean Hawkes observes that the house adheres to the environmental precepts of Arts and Crafts movement architecture, and detects inspiration from C. F. A. Voysey's Broad Leys of 1898.