Hampstead Garden Suburb Research Articles

Mainstreaming gender in the city

Women and gender became prominent issues in city planning and architecture in the 1970s, propelled by activists and scholars whose ideas seeped in to practice, even as they were fuelled by practice in the feminist movements of the era. Prior to this, initial forays were made by pioneers in the US, including Catherine Bauer Wurster (Bauer, 1934; Wurster, 1963), Jane Addams (Knight, 2005) and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (Shoshkes, 2013). In Europe, collaborative efforts uniting female patrons, architects, social reformers and designers contributed to the building of a great number of women's spaces in Berlin from the German unification in 1871 to the end of World War I (WWI) (Stratigakos, 2008). These collaborations included housing, restaurants, schools and exhibition halls. Women have long played important roles in urban development as patrons and social reformers (Durning and Wrigley, 2000).However, conventional histories of planning and architecture do not always acknowledge these roles or, more importantly, their impact on the built environment. A case in point is the key role played by Henrietta Barnett in the building of Hampstead Garden Suburb (Hall, 1988). While the roles of Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin in the development and design of this important example of twentieth century urbanism are taught in planning courses around the world, the role played by Barnett in securing the actual development and buying the land goes mostly unnoticed. Yet, without it, Hampstead as a model garden suburb would not have been built. Conventional histories have also typically missed the pioneering housing complexes designed for professional women who did not have time to devote to overseeing that domestic chores were properly carried out by service personnel.Women were also active in the aforementioned earlier times in countries not well represented in mainstream planning literature, such as Spain. There, the accomplishments of women such as Concepcion Arenal, founder of Spanish feminism, who founded a company devoted to building cheap homes for workers, reformed the prison system and was the first woman to attend university in 1841 (Martinez et al., 2000), often go unnoticed. Of course, there are many other less-well known women pioneers, in Spain and in many other countries, who need to be rediscovered using local and national historical research and archives and embraced as key players in the field of planning and its history. This would serve to give a fairer and more balanced representation of the roles women played - both individually, as professionals, patrons or social reformers, and through collective action, in shaping urban environments - and how they addressed gender, or 'women's issues' as they would have been called at the time, during the nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth centuries.These activist-professionals primarily practiced, and some came to the academy on the strength of their accomplishments. Since the beginning of the 1970s, a more academic outlook prevailed in the US, with the work of pioneering academics such as Dolores Hayden, Susana Torre, Karen Franck, Mary McLeod, Joan Ockman, Daphne Spain, Diana Agrest, Sandra Rosenbloom and many others. Although significant research had also been produced in Europe since the 1980s, by Clara Greed, Marion Roberts, Chris Booth, Jos Boys, Dory Reeves, Teresa Boccia, Sasa Lada, Liisa Horelli, Ines Sanchez de Madariaga and others, the European approach was more practically oriented overall. Matrix, the Women Design Service in the UK (Matrix, 1984; Berglund and Wallace, 2013), or the Eurofem network in Scandinavia (Horelli et al., 2000) are good examples of this, as well as specific initiatives developed by public administration in many countries, such as in Oslo (Ministry of Environment, 1993), and by professional associations, such as the British Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) (Reeves, 1989). In Latin America, women architects and planners have approached the field from a mostly activist position, even if sometimes grounded in the academy. …

One hundred years in the making: the creation and protection of Raymond Unwin's legacy at Hampstead Garden Suburb

Hampstead Garden Suburb celebrated its centenary in 2007. This paper describes what Unwin created at the Garden Suburb, explains how its special characteristics are protected today and asks whether the way it is managed ensures that it meaningfully endures as an iconic community. It looks at how Unwin developed his role as master planner and consultant architect to the Trust and the mechanisms he used to ensure the quality of the site planning and architecture was maintained. Finally, the work of the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust in protecting the character of the area is outlined, including some details of the background to the current statutory mechanisms of protection and the tools the Trust uses to carry out its role.

Preserving the Historic Garden Suburb: Case Studies from London and New York

The garden city or garden suburb was a response to the social and environmental ills of cities at the turn of the twentieth century. Letchworth Garden City, Hampstead Garden Suburb, and Welwyn Garden City were built outside London in the early 1900s, and each remains a highly desirable place of residence today. From the start, each was tightly regulated, and remains so a century later. By protecting the appearance and enhancing property values, the strict application of historic preservation principles contribute to the long-term sustainability of each place. Similar garden suburbs were built in the borough of Queens in New York City in the 1910s and 1920s – Forest Hills Gardens, Jackson Heights, and Sunnyside Gardens. They also demonstrate the benefits of strict regulation, either by a self-governing association or under New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Factors Managing Design Review for townscape by Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust in United Kingdom

Factors Managing Design Review for townscape by Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust in United Kingdom

C. H. B. Quennell (1872–1935): Architecture, History and the Quest for the Modern

Charles Quennell embodied many of the possibilities and contradictions of British architecture in the first decades of the twentieth century. He is a little-known figure today, but one who deserves further consideration, not only for his own remarkably interesting and varied career but also because of the light he sheds on some of the less explored aspects of architecture in the 1895–1935 period. Throughout his life he combined a strong interest in history with a search for efficiency and design appropriate for the modern world. Both of these preoccupations were widespread among his generation although, apart from a few notable exceptions, rarely can they be found combined to as great a degree as in Quennell. For example, in 1914 he was a keen exponent of standardization and at work on large romantic houses in Hampstead Garden Suburb. By 1918 he had designed what have been called the first modern houses in the country and had just published the first of the bestselling books in the series co-authored with his wife,A History of Everyday Things in England. In 1930 he was writing a contemporary tractThe Good New Daysand he built a neo-Palladian villa. He has been little studied to date, the main accounts being Alastair Service’s of his work in Hampstead, a Masters thesis by Nick Collins focused on issues of building conservation, and Graham Thurgood’s article on his 1920s work in Essex.

Revisiting Hampstead Garden Suburb: A (Cautionary) Tale of Spatial Determinism

Hampstead Garden Suburb has become an example of how a social agenda had initiated a new settlement and eventually had disappeared to yield an empty shell with tree-lined streets and picturesque image. Due to the similarities between the garden suburb concept and the new urbanist ideals, the story of Hampstead Garden Suburb is discussed as a cautionary one, despite the remarkable accomplishments of the individuals involved in its development.

The rise and fall of the internal reserve

The ‘internal reserve’ distinguished world's best practice for the early garden suburb movement. These ‘hidden’ spaces were designed for a variety of reasons: to encourage the formation of community, promote safe play for children, offer sites for small‐scale agricultural pursuits, address topographic and drainage constraints, and facilitate conservation of natural features. They were a feature of progressive plans for British icon developments such as Hampstead Garden Suburb. As these plans travelled globally, however, the purpose of the internal reserve was less clear than their spatial form, and most languished as undistinguished, left‐over spaces. The historical origins, development and demise of the internal reserve are surveyed, with a focus on the Australian experience against an Anglo‐American backdrop.

Linking the Spatial Syntax of Cognitive Maps to the Spatial Syntax of the Environment

This article investigates the effects of the spatial configuration of the local environment on residents’ spatial cognitions of their built environment by examining the relationship between the spatial syntax of sketch maps and the spatial syntax of the environment. Hampstead Garden Suburb in London was investigated in detail. Structured interview surveys were carried out to elicit residents’ sketch maps of their local area. Analysis of the spatial characteristics of the area and of the sketch maps using space-syntax methods provided a common basis for analyses of these data. Strong correlations were identified between residents’ sketch maps and the spatial configuration of the area. The degree of local integration of spatial configuration is the most significant factor in relations with the two variables of sketch maps, the frequency of appearance of configurational elements, and the global syntactic characteristics of spatial configuration in sketch maps. Findings suggest that spatial syntax of configuration in real environments and spatial syntax of cognitive maps in spatial cognition are closely related.

A benevolent tyrant? the principles and practices of Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936), social reformer and founder of Hampstead garden suburb

This article focuses on the formation and application of the principles of Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936). Despite her lifelong and innovative commitment to social and housing reform, she has received only perfunctory recognition in women's history. The aims here are twofold. First, this oversight will be redressed by foregrounding the subtle, shrewd and imaginative means of persuasion Barnett used in the pursuit of her ideals. Second, her principles and practices will be included in a wider debate concerning the means by which middle-class women subverted dominant discourses without apparently transgressing boundaries of decency. Throughout, the intention is to problematise the widely held assumptions of her intransigence and insensitivity, which appear to have confined her to the footnotes of history.

A benevolent tyrant? the principles and practices of Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936), social reformer and founder of Hampstead garden suburb

Abstract This article focuses on the formation and application of the principles of Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936). Despite her lifelong and innovative commitment to social and housing reform, she has received only perfunctory recognition in women's history. The aims here are twofold. First, this oversight will be redressed by foregrounding the subtle, shrewd and imaginative means of persuasion Barnett used in the pursuit of her ideals. Second, her principles and practices will be included in a wider debate concerning the means by which middle-class women subverted dominant discourses without apparently transgressing boundaries of decency. Throughout, the intention is to problematise the widely held assumptions of her intransigence and insensitivity, which appear to have confined her to the footnotes of history.

Kathleen M. Slack, Henrietta's Dream: A Chronicle of the Hampstead Garden Suburb – Varieties and Virtues. London: Hampstead Garden Suburb Archive Trust, 1997. 157pp. No price stated.

Kathleen M. Slack, <i>Henrietta's Dream: A Chronicle of the Hampstead Garden Suburb – Varieties and Virtues</i>. London: Hampstead Garden Suburb Archive Trust, 1997. 157pp. No price stated.

ハムステッド・ガーデン・サバーブのクアドラングルについて : イギリスの田園郊外とその住宅に関する研究(II)

Here is analyzed the syntactic relations between urban and housing designs in the English garden suburbs, which is epitomized in Hampstead Garden Suburb planned by R. Unwin from 1906. Unwin's early interest in college quadrangle and village green is developed into the geometrically enclosed green under the influences of Georgian town planning and C. Sitte. The model designs of cul-de-sac road and quadrangle illustrated in Unwin's book, Town Planning in Practice,1909, are compared to the executed designs in Hampstead Garden Suburb, such as the Orchard by Parker & Unwin, Waterlow Court by M.H. Baillie Scott, Litchfield Square by Parker & Unwin, and Lucas Square by G. Lucas, to reveal that each architect emphasizes the axis of the cul-de-sac road by a terminal element and secures the symmetry of elevations surrounding the green, although in a different style respectively.

ハムステッド・ガーデン・サバーブのバタフライ型住棟について : イギリスの田園郊外とその住宅に関する研究(I)

ハムステッド・ガーデン・サバーブのバタフライ型住棟について : イギリスの田園郊外とその住宅に関する研究(I)

British and American community design: Clarence Stein's Manhattan transfer, 1924–74

Clarence Stein and Henry Wright's 1928 design for the new town of Radburn, New Jersey, was much influenced by Hampstead Garden Suburb, designed by Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin. Radburn was written about and discussed as the ‘Radburn concept’ in the 1930s and 1950s, especially after Gordon Stephenson published Stein's community designs in the Town Planning Review in 1949. Lewis Mumford championed its cul‐de‐sacked traffic safety, continuous pedestrian systems and linear, open space structure of superblocks. Stephenson, Arthur Ling and Hugh Wilson, joined by many UK town planners, designed many Radburnesque higher density layouts in many post‐World War II new town residential areas. The idea was a feature of Cumbernauld's pedestrianized design. It fell into disfavour in the mid‐1960s in Britain and at the same time was transferred again from Manhattan by Stein himself through Albert Mayer and Julian Whittlesey to Kittimat, British Columbia, Reston, Virginia, and via Stein's book, Toward New Towns for Amer...

A. J. Penty (1875-1937) and the Legacy of 19th-Century English Domestic Architecture

Arthur J. Penty, an English architect in private practice in York at the turn of the century, became associated with Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin as a freelance designer and exerted a fundamentally important (though largely unsung) influence on the stylistic principles now associated with Parker and Unwin's work at the First Garden City, Letchworth (founded 1903) and at Hampstead Garden Suburb in London (commenced 1905). He was a competent Arts and Crafts designer during a late phase of this idiom's effectiveness in England, believing it to be both culturally and socially appropriate in its reflection of the English temperament and its demand for high quality production. His concerns for the latter prompted him to be an architectural theorist, to popularize the work of Voysey and Lethaby, and to advocate greater on-site collaboration between architects and craftsmen and the virtual abolition of designing on paper. It also persuaded him to become a political activist and to originate a movement-Guild Socialism-which placed great faith in the potential governance of education and production by restored crafts guilds and which enjoyed a brief moment of success in the form of a National Guilds League just after the First World War. Medievalism is the key concept linking all aspects of his life's work-his devotion to the teachings of Morris, his respect for likeminded 19th-century practical idealists, his wish to encourage a return to systems of quality control and production effective in the Middle Ages, and his "medievalist" detailing of several of Parker and Unwin's landmark buildings.

Analysis of the Spatial Structure in Hampstead Garden Suburb, London

Analysis of the Spatial Structure in Hampstead Garden Suburb, London

Energy consumption implications of physical layout: the case of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

The present paper attempts an inductive approach to a practical planning answer to these grave problems. Urban settlements are proliferating ever further into the countryside. How can these settlements be laid out in a way which would at the same time save land and avoid high-rise building concentrations and the effects of living off the ground. It could be called the high-density/low-rise alternative and takes its inspiration from the traditional pattern in European cities, from the denser parts of the English garden cities (Letchworth, Welwyn Garden City, Hampstead Garden Suburb) and from the less dense parts of recent developments, such as Kevin Lahti in Finland, Reston in the USA, La Verrihe-Maurepas in France and Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium. This last development will be taken as a case-study.

The Record, Hampstead Garden Suburb (Book Review)

The Record, Hampstead Garden Suburb (Book Review)