The Better Alternative.
The garden city movement was inspired by social, moral and reformist aims. It aspired to the ideal of the socially mixed or balanced community and hoped that a new spirit of co-operation could be fostered in residential areas built in the countryside. It also hoped to end land speculation and therefore lower the cost of housing. The garden city companies were hoping for land values to rise which would benefit the company and not speculators(10).
The classless aim of the garden city movement was a reaction against the supposed evils that flowed from the desegregated aspects of Victorian cities, overcrowded and hopelessly lacking in housing and essential services. However, a survey carried out in Bournville in 1974 showed that in spite of the best intentions of the developers of this garden suburb, 80 per cent of the occupiers thought that the people living around were of the same social class (11). The earliest garden cities, those built by Lever and Cadbury, would, of their very nature, had been one-class estates as there were largely for workers in the factories built by these industrialists. The last major garden suburb at Hampstead, situated in an desirable suburb of London, had houses of a type and price which would have made them generally unsuitable for occupation by members of the working classes. Only the housing estate at Letchworth Garden City, built essentially on low value land, could offer houses of a price range suitable for all classes.
Although some of the lessons preached by Howard in the way the garden city developments were built, planned internally and laid out had not been lost on the speculative builders, they were taken to heart more by the designers and planners of council houses. Municipal houses were, on the whole, built on a larger scale and in a more thoughtful and properly planned manner than were the speculative developments. Every aspect of the occupier's life in the house had been thought through by the middle-class planners and architects who designed them. Such designs were based largely on the 1919 Tudor Walters Report and the writings of Unwin. The ideas of Tudor Walters and Unwin which were conceived at a time before the radical changes in life-style of the 1930s took place. Only the speculative developer could respond to the rapidly changing tastes of the consumer. He was building in response to the demands and styles of the people who had the opportunity of choosing a home from many different developers/builders. The council tenant often had little choice in where he was sent to live.
The estates built by the inter-war speculative builder were not garden suburbs. Indeed, they were in many ways the very opposite of the garden city movement's vision of a garden city planned to provide new houses at low densities, with it combining the advantages of town and country with new industries and amenities grouped nearby. Speculative semi-detached houses were always built near employment for the simple reason that without jobs the working-class purchasers could not obtain a mortgage.
Garden cities were to be isolated from the evils of the city by a green belt, since Howard advocated the principle of building new self-contained towns surrounded by an agricultural or rural protective belt' (12). Swenarton was right in saying that such developments aimed to provide 'low-density housing, quasi-rural surroundings, better housing standards to the ordinary processes of suburban growth' (13). The concept demanded good transport facilities as 'the inhabitants would continue to work in the city but at the end of the day would travel out to the garden suburb' (14). Railways were to be the main link between the garden cities and the place of work.
For Howard and 'in the eyes of Unwin and the garden city movement the physical character of contemporary towns derived from the combination of the greed of the speculative builder and the building controls operated by the byelaw system' (15). Unwin concluded that by-laws had curbed the worst evils of overcrowding, but that 'the rigid insistence on minimum widths and types of roadways made it impossible to construct a type of development that relied upon road construction'. To overcome the problem of byelaws a local Act of Parliament was passed in 1906 to exempt Hampstead Garden Suburb from bylaws covering road construction in return for agreement that the site density would be eight houses per acre (16).
The garden city movement embodied the concept behind the vernacular or domestic revival movement, this was to be 'an alternative based on the village and the countryside' (17). The vernacular revival movement called for a reduction in the size and pretensions of the house. The impact of the movement was shown by 'its influence on speculative housing[which] can already be felt in the development of the twentieth-century standard type' (18). This twentieth-century type contained the ideas of 'retreat into remoteness, nature, smallness, individuality' (19). Such ideals were exactly what the working and lower-middle classes wanted in a home. They could retreat into their own home away from the boring work they were obliged to undertake during the day. As the domestic revival house was small, it could contain just the immediate family of the working-class purchaser, becoming the norm on the new estates. In a survey that the author conducted in 1992 in Hurstfield Crescent built by T.F. Nash Construction Limited between 1936 and 1938, there were only three older family members, fathers or mothers, out of the 140 who had moved into houses with their children (20). And, finally, the domestic revival house gave the opportunity for the individualist nature of working people to express itself by making the house special to the occupier. As Oliver said 'the householders of Dunroamin's semis were able to exercise choice in details and use them as vehicles for expression of individual taste...Prospective house-buyers wished to be part of a community in which their own dwelling did not set them apart...but which was identifiably their own home' (21).
The speculative builders copied some of the aspects of the "better alternative" but above all they constructed the type of house that they thought would sell. All they did was build houses for the working classes, and they were happy to delegate the problem of schools, public areas and employment to others (22). However they cannot be criticised for this oversight. The municipal developers did not, in reality, do much better. The Dudley Report in 1944, for instance, criticised , inter-war council housing by saying that: 'Many serious mistakes were made in the planning and layout of housing estates during the inter-war period. Foremost among these were the following:
(a) The development of large estates in which private and municipal housing are conspicuously separated.
(b) Insufficient attention to the provision of churches, schools, club buildings, shops, open spaces and other amenities.
(c) The location of residential estates too far from the tenants places of employment, thus involving long and expensive journeys to work.
(d) Too rigid an interpretation of density zoning, resulting in insufficient varieties of types of dwellings and in a lack of smaller open spaces and play-grounds.
(e) Failure to appreciate the value to a neighbourhood of good design, applied not only to the houses themselves but to their setting' (23).
(10) M. Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes: The Political and Architecture of Early State Housing in Britain (London, 1981),p.9.
(11) W.Etherington ,A Peaceful Path to Real Reform?A Critical Review of the Ideal of Social Mix (Unpublished M.T.P thesis, 1975, University of Adelaide), Table 5.
(12) Report of the Departmental Committee,Garden Cities and Satellite Towns (HMSO, 1935), p. 5.
(13) M.Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes: The Political and Architecture of Early State Housing in Britain (London, 1981), p. 11.
(14) ibid., p. 10.
(15) ibid., p. 12.
(16) ibid,p.15
(17) ibid,p.7
(18) S. Muthesius, The English Terraced House (London, 1982), p. 100.
(19) ibid, p. 247.
(20) The survey was on Hurstfield Crescent Hayes Middlesex and relied upon interviewing seven of the original home owners who had moved into the houses when they were first built in 1936 and 1937.
(21) P.Oliver,I.Davis and I.Bentley,Dunroamin:The Suburban Semi and Its Enemies,(London, 1981), pp 24 and 158.
(22) Laings (Builders) and Percy Bilton did build industrial estates near to some of their developments and other builders did occasionally construct a few shops and cinemas but they did not generally build factories, shops and commercial building in the manner of a garden city development.
(23) Design of Dwellings, Dudley Report, p. 11, para 22.