№5.
DIAGRAM

ILLUSTRATING CORRECT PRINCIPLE
OF A CITY'S GROWTH-OPEN COUNTRY
EVER NEAR AT HAND, AND RAPID
COMMUNICATION BETWEEN OFF-SHOOTS.

47 A diagram by Howard illustrating the 'correct principles of growth' of Garden Cities, from *Garden Cities of Tomorrow* (1902). Howard envisaged three 'magnets' affecting people's choices of where to live: the 'Town Magnet', the 'Country Magnet' and the 'Magnet' combining the advantages, as he saw it, of both town and country, which was to become the Garden City.

Londres : les cités-jardins 1905-1925

65

Fig. 14.

WELWYN GARDEN CITY : la prise en compte du site dans le plan de Louis de Soissons.

a. Le site initial caractérisé par la coupure de la voie ferrée à l'Est, la rupture du relief à l'Ouest, les bois et l'arc de cercle des voies au Nord. Un chemin dessert deux fermes.

b. Le plan de Louis de Soissons. La grande composition « Beaux-Arts » marquée par la séquence porte de ville/rond-point/ Parkway/centre et ramenant à l'Est sur la gare se combine, selon les principes d'Unwin, avec l'aménagement pittoresque des rues secondaires et des closes. Le tracé des anciens chemins, les haies d'arbres, les bâtiments des fermes sont conservés et intégrés à la cité-jardin.

c. La réalisation en 1924. Dès le début de la construction l'incapacité à traiter le centre apparaît, de même que le dérapage du grand axe qui ne joue toujours pas le rôle structurant que lui accordait la composition initiale.

85. The Cadbury Brothers' Bournville, outside Birmingham; from the beginning there was emphasis on individual gardens.

86. Map of Bournville after expansion and incorporation within Birmingham in 1911.

The area of the Estate has grown from just over 500 acres in 1907 to 1,086 acres at the present time. Notice the areas developed by Public Utility Societies. Bournville became part of the City of Birmingham in 1911.

## Port Sunlight

Lancashire. W H Lever, developer. Thomas Mawson, landscape consultant. 1888

W H Lever, the founder of Port Sunlight (and one of the original Lever Brothers), appears to have learned from Pullman's mistakes and introduced a complex form of profit sharing which insured not only that the village would be fiscally sound and well maintained, but that the residents would come to regard it as their own.

Begun in 1888, Port Sunlight initially occupied a 52-acre site on a branch of the Mersey River. But the site was awkward, with muddy ravines, and over the following 20 years the town was expanded on filled land to 221 acres, 130 of which were devoted to the village, and the rest to the factories.

The authorship of the original plan for the village is unclear: it would appear that Lever played the decisive role in its formulation, although Thomas Mawson, a landscape architect who had worked at Saltaire, had a relationship with the project almost from its inception. Walter L Creese has written that the planning strategies employed are consistent and impressive: 'In angling the houses at the street

corners and forming rudimentary U-shaped courts out of the larger combinations, Lever's architects effectively forecast certain devices to be incorporated in the garden cities. The most important advance was in the use of the houses on both sides of the road to characterize and punctuate the space between, rather than simply to limit it. At Port Sunlight they were so designed that little or no distinction could be perceived among the individual houses of each group externally. What it amounted to visually was a street of mansions in which the volumes held up remarkably well, a need increasingly felt as the thoroughfares grew wider under the pressure of circular reform ... the superhouse equated with the superblock at last. The Shavian country house had become the multiple.'¹

Many architects participated in the design of the housing, including J Lomax-Simpson, Ernest George and Maurice B Adams. As a result, the overall stylistic character of the village can be described as vigorously eclectic. Creese notes that: 'The sense of stylistic

eclecticism and artificiality which, to be sure, began in Bedford Park, grows almost rampant in Port Sunlight and Bourneville. The only possible way to explain Port Sunlight visually is as a kind of last, ruddy glow of High Victorianism, with all its little dignities and affectations, its prosperity and expansiveness. This eclecticism of forms, styles, and surfaces was to swell until, as W L George put it, each street exhibited its own 'local nationality'.²

Later developments at Port Sunlight reflect the academic planning principles of the City Beautiful movement. Ernest Prestwich won the 1909 competition for the expansion of the village with a formal scheme, which contrasted with the more picturesque original plan. As executed by Mawson, the new development showed the growing importance for English architects of the American Beaux-Arts movement.

### Notes

1 The Search for Environment, Yale University Press, New Haven 1966, p 122.

2 Op cit, p 123.

1 W and S Owens, semi-quad of cottages, Queen Mary's Drive, The Diamond

Bedford Park

London. James Carr, developer. Richard Norman Shaw, architect. 1875

Bedford Park is the best known symbol of both the aesthetic movement and the Queen Anne style. It has been described as 'agreeable (if a little monotonous) but not especially revolutionary'¹: The plan is not 'composed' in the way F L Olmsted's Riverside scheme is, or Parker & Unwin's Hampstead Garden Suburb plan would be 20 years later – it is simply a network of streets which emanate from Acton Green and the station square. The author of the town plan is not known, but he intelligently used the existing amenities – Acton Green and the Turnham Green Railroad Station – to provide a focus for the development. At the same time, as Walter L Creese points out, the relationship between the design of the houses, their placement in the narrow lots and their relationship to each other transformed the 'character of the street itself, which represents a distinct cultural break' with the dense pattern of the typical English town without losing the sense of the street as a contained space as Olmsted's plan for Riverside did.² A church, St Michael's, and an inn, the Tabard, were built at the village green: the latter was a notably successful free style composition at a medium scale.

After a false start, when E A Godwin prepared schemes for some model houses, Richard Norman Shaw was asked to take over. It was he who 'created the architectural character of Bedford Park, one which delighted and surprised the visitors who, emerging from Turnham Green station, felt themselves to be in a village or small country town where nothing had happened for at least a hundred years. In fact none of the houses bore more than a superficial resemblance to anything built in the 17th or 18th centuries; their apparent artlessness concealed a great deal of sophistication'.³

Notes

1. Mark Girouard, *Sweetness and Light*, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1977, p. 161.

2. In his book *The Search for Environment*, Yale University Press, New Haven 1966, p. 105.

3. Girouard, *op cit*, p. 166.

1

2

3

1. James Carr, original plan, 1877

2. Richard Norman Shaw, 'The Stores' (ph: Richard Ball)

3. Richard Norman Shaw, 'Tabard' public house (ph: Richard Ball)