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Figure 2.4
Port Sunlight, near Liverpool, UK, begun
1888. Soap magnate William Lever employed over
thirty architects in the design of this industrial model
village. It is characterized by picturesque groupings
of traditional buildings in counterpoint to the long,
neo-classical that forms the axis of the plan leading
to the Lady Lever Art Gallery, completed in 1922.
Figure 2.5
New Earswick, near York, UK, Parker and
Unwin, 1903. The housing in this model village was
commissioned by Joseph Rowntree, a York
industrialist famous for his chocolate products, to
provide affordable housing for low-income 
workers. Residency was open to all applicants in
need, and was not limited to employees of
Rowntree’s nearby chocolate factory. The housing
layout illustrates the early development of Parker
and Unwin’s picturesque composition and spatial
arrangement.
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Frederick Law Olmsted’s design in 1890 for the
planned industrial village of Vandergrift, Pennsylvania,
that American industrial towns began to follow their
English counterparts by incorporating picturesque
suburban aesthetics (Stern: p. 9). The twin trends of
social reform and romantic aesthetics reached their
pinnacle of physical exposition in Barry Parker and
Raymond Unwin’s designs for the new town of
Letchworth (1904) 30 miles north of London. This
self-financed new settlement was the first built example
of what would become one of the most important
planning ideas of the twentieth century – Ebenezer
Howard’s Garden City.
Howard had published his radical proposal for
Garden Cities a few years earlier in 1898, under the
title 
Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform
. Born
in Britain in 1850 and having lived in America,
notably Chicago, for several years during the 1870s,
Howard understood the implications of the new
garden suburbs in Britain and America very well. He
appreciated that the railway had made rural areas
directly accessible to existing towns and cities, and
this accessibility was fundamentally changing the
long-standing rationales of urban location and urban
form: large populations could be shifted to and from
remote rural areas if efficient mass transportation
could be provided. As noted earlier, one of the most
powerful reasons for moving outside cities was the
availability of cheap land in the countryside, and in
Howard’s time this land was especially undervalued.
In addition to the national urban problems of indus-
trial overcrowding and squalor in British cities,
poverty in the rural areas was also endemic. Britain’s
agricultural industry in the decades before the turn of
the century was plagued by a recession, and Howard’s
intention was not only to relieve urban congestion
but also to alleviate rural poverty by the transforma-
tion of depressed rural areas into prosperous new
towns.
Howard’s practical scheme would utilize the rev-
enue created by the conversion of cheap farmland to
urban use to finance the development of new cities
by reinvesting the profits from the sale of residential
and industrial sites in the public infrastructure of the
community. Despite Howard’s unwillingness to com-
mit to any specific town plan, his famous planning
diagrams clearly illustrated the importance he placed
on this public infrastructure. He located the public
institutions at the heart of the community and sur-
rounded them by a park. In its turn, this open space
was bordered by a linear, glass-roofed structure
enclosing all the retail functions of the city, very
much the precursor of today’s shopping mall.
Radiating from this center, residential areas incorpo-
rated sites of all sizes for a mixture of social classes,
and beyond these lay the industrial and manufactur-
ing zone. This was served by a railway ring and bor-
dered by farmland which functioned as a greenbelt to
define the edges of the community and to limit
growth in accordance with the proposed population
figure of thirty-two thousand people (see Figure 2.6).
While Howard gave a diagrammatic order to the
plan of the Garden City, it was Parker and Unwin
who derived its architectural form in their plan of
Letchworth. The two designers were the conscious
inheritors of the same Victorian reformist social
responsibility that inspired the industrial magnates
Lever, Rowntree and Cadbury, and they combined
this mission with the picturesque aesthetic principles
from the English eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
traditions. There is no evidence that Parker and
Unwin were aware of the American garden suburbs
when they were designing Letchworth: their prece-
dent was the recent revival of interest in English ver-
nacular architecture and its incorporation into what
is commonly called the ‘Queen Anne Style’ (Barnett:
p. 71). This aesthetic had been successfully applied to
recent housing, particularly in highly picturesque
schemes such as Bedford Park in London by Norman
Shaw and others dating from the 1870s.
Parker and Unwin first developed their town plan-
ning technique and vernacular village composition in
the model settlement of New Earswick outside York,
for the Rowntree Chocolate Trust noted previously,
where they had been influenced by the work of
C.F.A. Voysey (see Figure 2.5). The architectural duo
retained this picturesque approach in their design for
Letchworth and added some more formal geometries
to create a partial synthesis of axial and informal
planning ideas. With groups of houses, they created
carefully contrived architectural compositions, relat-
ing them to topography and other natural and cli-
matic determinants. For example, the location of
industry on the east side of town meant that the pol-
lution was blown away from residential areas
(Barnett: p. 72).
Rather than being on the periphery as in Howard’s
diagram, the railway at Letchworth bisects the town.
Nothing in evidence resembles the fully glazed shop-
ping mall; instead there is a traditional shopping area
with a main street. Howard, Parker, and Unwin were
no dogmatic visionaries. They were sympathetic with
local conditions, and they adapted their ideals to the
realities of the place. The success of Letchworth lies
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in its ability to represent Howard’s radical ideas in a
totally non-threatening way, evoking the pleasant
environment of traditional English villages (Barnett:
p. 73) (see Figure 2.7).
In this sense Letchworth is the direct precursor of
much New Urbanist work in America from the 1990s,
when radical town planning ideas in America were
given form by conservative, traditional architectural
aesthetics. The use of traditional neoclassical and ver-
nacular aesthetics in the work of firms such as Duany
Plater-Zyberk and Urban Design Associates soothed
public fears and facilitated commercial acceptance of
New Urbanist planning practice (while at the same
time infuriating modernists and academics). It’s very
likely that if a more adventurous, contemporary archi-
tectural language had been used in American New
Urbanist developments, the movement’s planning
concepts would have been subjected to a much more
difficult process of public acceptance.
This mixing of radical planning with conservative
architecture is another example of the close inter-
weaving of history with present circumstances, and
the advantages and shortcomings of this marriage are
discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. Now that
New Urbanism is moving into the mainstream, it
remains to be seen whether this gives its practitioners
confidence to attempt more contemporary aesthetics.
This theme also resurfaces in the Case Studies
where our desire to create progressive, forward-looking
CHAPTER TWO
●
CITIES, SUBURBS AND SPRAWL