Abstract
The First Garden City of Letchworth might have seemed the ideal site for the introduction of housing with communal facilities, but the Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin plan for its development contained only traditional housing, albeit often situated in threesided squares or quadrangles.1 The houses were grouped for good architectural effect, as Unwin had suggested in his paper to the 1901 GCA conference, and arranged round large areas of open space. Any lingering wish Parker and Unwin may have had to encourage communal developments with new housing probably vanished when First Garden City Limited failed to attract sufficient funds to finance model housing schemes.2 The Cheap Cottages Exhibition of 1905 provided increased publicity for the city, 60 000 people visiting the exhibition which aimed to show that good cottages could be built cheaply. A total of 119 dwellings were entered in the various competitions, the main prize being offered for a £150 cottage for an agricultural worker.3 Parker and Unwin felt that building cheap cottages of a low standard would not solve the housing problem, insisting that ‘no cottage that is not a good cottage shall be built at all’.4 Their article on cheap cottages made no mention of communal facilities whatsoever, suggesting only that groups of cottages were economic to build.
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Notes and References
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© 1988 Lynn F. Pearson
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Pearson, L.F. (1988). The Cooperative Housekeeping Boom. In: The Architectural and Social History of Cooperative Living. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19122-2_6
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