DURING the later nineteenth century various influential personalities shaped the Garden City Movement in the immediate run-up to the creation of the first garden city. Underpinning its philosophy were the ideas of writers such as Augustus Pugin (1812–52), John Ruskin (1819–1900) and the towering Arts and Crafts and Socialist figure William Morris (1834–96) who promoted universal dignity of labour, improved design and ‘decency of surroundings’. Morris described a Utopian rural way of life in his visionary Socialist novel News From Nowhere (1890) in which all work is creative and pleasurable, based on the premise that ‘the material surroundings of life should be pleasant, generous, and beautiful’. In 1891 a review in The Guardian described his book as an ‘idyll of Communism … beautiful but perverse,’ to be read ‘as poetry not as political economy’.
The Arts and Crafts Movement is now best known for its aesthetic of craftsmanship expressed in traditional styles, but this was only part of a whole lifestyle expressed practically by architects, planners, designers, and craftsmen on a small scale during the later nineteenth century. Ironically this was largely via individual houses for middle- and upper-class patrons who could afford what was not economically available to working-class people. Morris’s ideas mixed political reform with a romantic artistic simplicity, which fitted well with the ideals of the Garden City Movement, bringing Arts and Crafts concepts and a pleasurable lifestyle to the masses.
In the nineteenth century much consideration was given by progressive thinkers to urban planning to improve living conditions for workers. Theoretical models for communities were proposed. An influential model on Ebenezer Howard, and ultimately the Garden City Movement, was James Silk Buckingham’s ‘Victoria’, described and depicted in his book National Evils and Practical Remedies (1849). Buckingham included social and economic aspects to make the town viable, as well as to make it physically practical and pleasing. Victoria would be a self-contained town on a large scale, self-financed and run with each resident owning at least one £20 share. The town was zoned concentrically into various areas of use, with an expansive ornamented landscape, and a surrounding agricultural belt to supply food.
Buckingham’s model town of Victoria shows an early concept of concentric zoning, which influenced Ebenezer Howard’s garden city model (National Evils and Practical Remedies, 1849).
Executed on a smaller scale, Bedford Park in west London was one of the first coherent Arts and Crafts housing developments. It formed a complete, if compact, suburb whose harmonious architecture was set in gardens in spacious streets, in concept following on from the spacious developments built to help finance public parks. It was developed privately over several decades from 1875, with stately Queen Anne-style houses mainly by the great architects Richard Norman Shaw (1831–1912) and Philip Webb (1831–1915). Around 350 houses were built, the estate incorporating extant trees, and providing community facilities. It is regarded as the world’s first garden suburb, a model that was emulated not just by the Garden City Movement, but by suburban developments worldwide. Sir John Betjeman described Bedford Park as ‘the most significant suburb built in the last [nineteenth] century, probably in the western world’.
Bedford Park, west London (1875 onwards), was one of the first coherent Arts and Crafts suburbs and was highly influential on planned settlements.
Port Sunlight, Cheshire, in 1900 before its layout was completed by Thomas Mawson. This industrial village was built to the highest standards by Lord Leverhulme from the 1880s, for workers at his adjacent palm oil soapworks in the Wirral.
Alongside the genteel Bedford Park two late nineteenth-century industrial villages epitomised the social and economic benefits of attractive housing for workers in a landscaped setting in Picturesque style. William Hesketh Lever (1851–1925), later Lord Leverhulme, built Port Sunlight for his adjacent palm oil soapworks in the Wirral. The Cadbury family’s Bournville village served the recently relocated chocolate factory on the outskirts of Birmingham. Port Sunlight is the more important architecturally but Bournville is the more significant socially.
Although Port Sunlight and Bournville reflected the values of Robert Owen and his followers, together with developments like Saltaire and Akroydon they showed other influences and innovations. House plans were improved, becoming more convenient and spacious. Houses occupied a largely irregular layout, their arrangement embracing a proportion of detached and semi-detached as well as short terraces, developing the Picturesque heritage by using the English vernacular in a suburban context. Most innovatively these villages were designed to be full of gardens and greenery: large hedged gardens, public open spaces and spacious tree- and grass-verge-lined streets and boulevards, responding to existing features and retaining mature trees and woodland wherever possible.
Vernacular styles proliferated in highly ornamented fashion at Port Sunlight, including fine imitations of the local Cheshire timber-frame tradition, such as the Post Office.
At Port Sunlight from 1888 Lever executed his architectural dream in a philanthropic new village. He employed many notable architects to create an exceptionally attractive, Picturesque layout, with tree-lined streets, open spaces and parks, and imposing formal spaces and buildings at the civic heart. The houses, initially in local vernacular village styles dubbed collectively as ‘Old English’, were grouped in broad streets with open frontages and back yards, with communal allotments behind. Even the Post Office was a fine example of the local Cheshire timber framing style. Houses were relatively spacious, each with a kitchen, scullery, parlour and three or four bedrooms.
Port Sunlight was one of the first industrial villages to depart from a grid pattern layout and to emphasise the amenity setting of the houses. Thomas Mawson’s development plan (1914) used formal Beaux-Arts-style boulevards to unite the design, in a similar manner to Letchworth.
Port Sunlight attracted much comment and was widely and approvingly publicised. In his seminal 1904 book Das Englische Haus (The English House), the German Anglophile Hermann Muthesius wrote, ‘Port Sunlight will always be honoured by the highest recognition.’ In the handbook to the 1910 International Town Planning Conference, Patrick Abercrombie wrote of Port Sunlight that it was ‘one of the earliest of the self-contained “garden villages”, which has exercised an enormous amount of influence on English and foreign planning.’ Its key drawback as a model for the wider world was that it was never intended to be a self-sufficient commercial proposition and was heavily subsidised by the company.
George Cadbury’s Bournville, begun in 1895, was not restricted to his factory workers. As at Port Sunlight, the large factory dominated the settlement and the green spaces around the houses were important.
Hallway and stairs of a cottage at Bournville (1906). The layout was designed to be practical and efficient, making the most of the space available.
Still more influential on the Garden City Movement was Quaker George Cadbury’s (1839–1922) Bournville, begun in 1895 on 120 acres of land. It was always a more realistic commercial proposition than Port Sunlight, less ostentatious in its civic provision and buildings, so that commercial rents would eventually cover the costs. The delicate balance of affordable and attractive living standards (and the religious connection) soon led Bournville to become a model for another Quaker chocolate manufacturer’s industrial village, Joseph Rowntree’s New Earswick, York. This, in turn, was the practical proving ground for the architects and planners Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, immediately before the embarked on laying out the first garden city, Letchworth, in 1903.
The ornamental layout of Bournville, like Port Sunlight, had both formal and informal lines and open spaces and parks, but it was less self-consciously Picturesque and grew in phases without an overall development plan. The initial layout was drawn up by the Quaker surveyor A. P. Walker in 1894, responding to various existing features including roads, woodland and mature trees. The provision of private and public open spaces and their arrangement was as important as the buildings. Gardens were extremely important for produce and their carefully considered size was intended to be enough for a worker to manage alongside his main job, reducing his outgoings. The Cadburys had a great influence on the way of life especially via the range of amenities, the cottages and their layout and gardens. Various educational and religious institutions were built around a large green, and shops and recreational facilities were provided. To give the residents more control, the Tenants’ Village Council was founded ‘to promote the Social, Educational, and Recreative life of the village’. It was an industrial village with industrial decentralisation, which became the central tenet of the garden city ideal.
The houses at Bournville were less selfconsciously ornamental and more cost-effective than at Port Sunlight, while providing a good standard of housing with large gardens and much open space.
Bournville was an experiment in housing reform. It was intended to have a wide audience as a financially realistic solution to decent housing for the masses. Unlike conventional industrialists’ settlements it was not built exclusively for Cadbury’s own employees but was handed over to an independent body, the Bournville Village Trust, in 1900. Like Port Sunlight, it was much publicised via contributions to conferences, articles, and handbooks such as Harvey’s The Model Village and its Cottages: Bournville (1906), and Typical Plans [of] the Bournville Village Trust (1911).
Plan of living areas from The Model Village and its Cottages: Bournville (1906, Alexander Harvey). The living spaces were carefully planned for comfort, efficiency and hygiene. Harvey was one of the main designers of the cottages at Bournville.
The 1901 Garden City Association Conference was held by invitation at Bournville, promoting the Garden City Movement, which attracted three hundred delegates (the 1902 conference at Port Sunlight attracted one thousand). This was a gathering of many who became influential in the planning world, including key personalities such as Muthesius, the landscape designer and planner Thomas Mawson, and Patrick Geddes. At Bournville, Howard observed in 1906, ‘A garden village has been built, a garden city is but a step beyond’. Bournville inspired other developments, but as pioneering and egalitarian settlements rather than industrialists’ villages run on paternalistic lines. These included the nearby Moor Pool, Harborne (1907–12), founded as an egalitarian co-partnership scheme.
CO-PARTNERSHIP MANAGEMENT SCHEMES
Co-partnership management schemes were at the heart of many of these developments and gave residents greater equality and influence in their running. They were intended to ensure both commercial and social solidarity arising from the bonds of common interest. Tenants were made joint owners, with outside financiers or developers, of the houses they occupied, with the estate managed by an elected committee of shareholders. Further land could be purchased and all houses would be held in common, the absence of private individual ownership reinforcing each tenant’s personal interest in the prosperity of the development as a whole. Co-partnerships were a fundamental tenet of many such schemes in the early twentieth century before local authority housing became widespread. The earliest included those at Brentham, Ealing (a suburb, begun 1901), Letchworth Garden City (1903), Humberstone, Leicester (a suburb, begun 1906) and Hampstead Garden Suburb (founded 1905). Further schemes were founded after the First World War, sometimes as Public Utility Societies such as Onslow Garden Village, Guildford (1920) and from 1936 as Housing Associations.
Advertisement for the first co-partnership housing scheme, at Brentham, Ealing, the home of this more egalitarian ownership system.
New Earswick was founded by Quaker chocolate manufacturer Joseph Rowntree (1836–1925), having been inspired by the 1901 Garden City Association Conference at Bournville. Rowntree was impressed at Bournville and met the young and idealistic architect and planner Raymond Unwin. Cadbury advised Rowntree on this development. The New Earswick Trust was based closely on the Trust Deed and objectives of Bournville Village Trust, and it became a testing ground for garden city design standards. It was to be a balanced settlement where houses were available to anyone, not just employees of Rowntree. As at Bournville, a combination of economy with art was required. Even so, Parker and Unwin drew on the traditions of village design tailored to the unique characteristics of the site itself to provide as much individuality as possible. Both villages were influential as exemplary schemes combining visual appeal and good living conditions as well as economical viability, but New Earswick was physically distanced from the factory, unlike Port Sunlight and Bournville where the factory dominated. Other Nonconformist industrialists’ villages based on similar planned lines included Reckitts’ Hull Garden Village and Colmans at Norwich. Woodlands near Doncaster, designed in 1907, applied this kind of layout to the most innovative mining village of the time.
All this pointed towards how Utopia could be achieved in practice. Some believed Bournville was the realisation of William Morris’s Utopia. The radical critic George Haw was dewy-eyed: ‘At every turn in the lanes and tree-planted streets I was reminded of William Morris’ picture in News from Nowhere.’ Even so the adjacent factory was ever present.
Influential town planning movements and architectural styles developed in Europe and North America. In Germany municipally prepared plans were adopted for the long-term development of suburban areas. The term ‘garden city’ had been coined in America well before 1890. The Beaux-Arts style, influential in town planning in the later nineteenth century, became popular in Continental Europe and the United States. It was an architectural style originating in France characterised by classical forms, symmetry, rich ornamentation, and a grand scale. The style was epitomised in town planning by the grand layout of Hausmann’s Paris, where, for the first time, parks and green spaces were integrated into the design.
The 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago celebrated on an extensive scale the discovery of America. It was an inventive and hugely popular exhibition whose innovative spacious and zoned plan owed much to the great American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted had also in 1869 planned the nearby town, Riverside, one of the first planned suburban communities in the United States, in which 700 of its 16,000 acres were occupied by green roads, borders, parks and other features, blending town and country. The layout offered an alternative to the grid plans and high-density housing in New York and Chicago. The exhibition inspired Daniel Burnham to design a plan in 1895 for improving Chicago, which he called the City Beautiful – itself the expression of a movement that tried to bring order, system and pattern to chaotic urban growth in the United States.
Many New Earswick houses were relatively plain but the quality of living was important, with large gardens, much communal space and many amenities.
Howard’s model united the best aspects of the town and country. The central compact population (58,000) in the town of Garden City was linked by canals, railways and roads to further compact satellite settlements through the surrounding agricultural land. From Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898).
