Shipshape and Spick and Span

'It's a fake!' cried Neil Bingham when I called to ask if I could look round his house, after seeing bits of it in Modern Retro, a book he has co-written with furniture dealer Andrew Weaving.

And those bits had been tempting: a streamlined Robin Day sofa on a Flokati rug; sculptural mid-century glassware on a Fifties coffee table; a Sixties orange plastic side table with matching phone.

Here, it seemed, was more than enough material for a feature on mid-century style; surely not all of it could have been wheeled in just for a photo shoot?

Undeterred, I sauntered off to leafy Blackheath to discover, joy of joys, that it wasn't simply the contents of Bingham's home that were worth writing about. The house itself - red brick, terraced, Seventies - may look like any unremarkable suburban dwelling on the face of it (particularly in comparison with its grand Regency neighbours) but anyone with an interest in modern architecture would instantly note its pedigree.

It's a Span house, you see. Though no one seems to know where the term 'Span' came from, this was the name coined for housing designed principally by architect Eric Lyons between the Fifties and Seventies. Grouped into estates all around the country (with 15 in Blackheath alone), Span housing offered families a perfect prepackaged modern lifestyle: affordable contemporary homes surrounded by lots of greenery. With private gardens and huge amounts of carefully planted communal outdoor space, the Span estates are brilliantly integrated into the landscape and designed down to the last detail. 'Every blade of grass was figured out,' says Bingham, with a contented sigh.

The idea of a purpose-built 'neighbourhood' makes me feel uncomfortable, but there is no doubt that it works here. The houses are light, spacious, easy to live in; the location, amazingly quiet; the views across gardens and trees, second to none. And, most important of all, the occupants of these spec-built Spans thrive in their little community and, to keep it intact, are more than happy to abide by the rules of the estate (no 'For Sale' signs; no change of doorknob without a majority vote; no painting your house pink).

Though Bingham - a debonair Canadian with a wry sense of humour and an unexpected taste in trance music - cannot be a typical resident of this quiet suburban enclave, the community must have welcomed him and his furniture with open arms. For, despite his assertions to the contrary, his house is furnished in fine mid-century style with just the kind of pieces the original Spanners would have had. In the living-room, there's the Robin Day sofa with custom-woven upholstery by Gerd Hay-Edie; a radio and bar by HT Cadbury-Brown; a one-off coffee table by Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson; a sideboard by Robert and Dorothy Heritage.

Upstairs, the roll call of 20th-century designer greats continues. In the bathroom, there are plastic panels by Verner Panton; in the guest room, early Conran chairs and injection-moulded pieces by Joe Tilson (originally part of a wall at Expo 67 in Montreal).

And it's not just the furniture that has those mid-century looks. Having ripped out the previous owner's 'Anne Hathaway-style' kitchen when he moved in, Bingham replaced it with something far more fitting: a tangerine and lime scheme inspired by Richard Rogers' 1968 design for his parents' house in Wimbledon. He also laid a parquet floor downstairs and reinstated the sliding door that originally divided the living-room and kitchen (his neighbours, fortuitously, were throwing theirs out).

It wouldn't be unreasonable to think that Bingham got the mid-century look to match the architecture but, in fact, he started accumulating Fifties and Sixties pieces long before he moved here and long before it was popular. 'Collecting is one of my jobs,' explains Bingham, who is a curator of drawings at RIBA, 'and I've always been interested in the post-war period of design; after all, I grew up during it. I started buying the stuff about 12 years ago when it was very affordable.'