Читать книгу Sunnyside Gardens - Jeffrey A. Kroessler - Страница 19

In 1907, four years after work began at Letchworth, Dame Henrietta Octavia Barnett dug the first spade of earth for Hampstead Garden Suburb. It was her vision that brought the Suburb to life, and it grew more directly out of a traditional reform impulse than did Letchworth and Welwyn. For years she and her husband, Canon Samuel Augustus Barnett, tended the parish of St. Jude’s Whitechapel in London’s working class East End, but they also had a cottage near Hampstead Heath, a bucolic and unspoiled expanse north of the city. After learning of plans for the extension of the underground to Hampstead, Dame Henrietta formed a syndicate to purchase an extensive open tract to control future development. When Eton College, the owner, informed her they would not sell to a woman unless she had the support of men of substance, she lined up an impressive list of backers, and in May 1906 they purchased the open land. What resulted was, in the words of architectural historian Nicholas Pevsner, “the most perfect example of that English invention and speciality, the Garden Suburb.”²²

The Hampstead Garden Suburb Act (1906) limited the number of houses that might be built on the estate and exempted the Suburb Trust from certain local building ordinances, specifically regarding the width of roads and open space requirements, enabling them to provide “wide grass margins and wayside greens, so as to preserve the natural beauty of the estate.” This governing legislation also proved a strong selling point, because the act would “prevent the possibility of their ever being surrounded by crowded buildings or mean streets, and thereby depreciated in value, as so often happens in ordinary estates.”²³

For the undertaking to be successful in the way they envisioned, Dame Henrietta and her backers recognized the need to break from the common pattern of urban growth, which flowed from the decisions, beneficial or harmful, of individual builders. The 243-acre site adjoining the Hampstead Heath Extension was twenty-five minutes from Charing Cross by a new transit line. Sheltered from the “smoke and fogs of London,” the site possessed “a frontage of some 6,500 feet to open country.” It was the perfect landscape for Henrietta Barnett’s “pursuit of an ideal.” “The Hampstead Garden Suburb was not created as a commercial speculation: the intention of its founders was to preserve for London, unspoiled by vulgar houses and mean streets, the foreground of the beautiful country that forms the western boundary of Hampstead Heath, and to create a residential quarter for Londoners, where the comfort of the inhabitants and the beauty of their surroundings should not be sacrificed to the greed of the landowner or the necessities of the speculative builder.”²⁴ The Suburb Trust knew what they did not want. “Our aim is that the new suburb may be laid out as a whole on an orderly plan. When various plots are disposed of to different builders, and each builder considers only his own interest, the result is what may be seen in the unsightly modern streets. Our hope is that every road may have its own characteristic, that small open spaces may be within reach of every child and old person, that no house may darken or offend a neighbour’s house, that the whole may be so grouped round central features and central buildings, and that from every part there shall be good views or glimpses of distant country.”²⁵

With those principles in mind they created the Garden Suburb Development Company (Hampstead) Ltd. Even by controlling the architectural quality of what would be built by private parties, they could not assure “symmetry and architectural beauty.” They determined that the houses “should not only themselves be examples of the best work that could be obtained, but also should be designed and grouped in proper relation to one another, so that each should form part of a well-considered scheme for making the streets, as well as the houses, beautiful.” To control costs, the Company built many groups of homes at the same time.²⁶

Single-family houses facing green, Hampstead Garden Suburb, 2012. (Author’s photograph.)

The Development Company selected Raymond Unwin to plan the garden suburb and guide its construction. Having spent three years working on Letchworth, Unwin was the perfect man for the job. He recognized that however innovative and attractive a scheme might be, it would be tarnished if control over design was yielded to individual builders. In that case, “each architect will think only of the one house and plot and of developing his own particular fancies upon it, with little or no regard for the total effect of the street. The designs may be good, but, for want of any co-ordination, the result will be little more than an inharmonious jumble. At worst the site will fall into the hands of that type of speculative builder who employs no architect, and who, being intent merely on making all he can out of the ground and houses, is fairly sure to spoil any scheme the designer of the site plan may have had.”²⁷

To prevent that unhappy outcome, Unwin tasked individual architects with groups of houses. Economies of scale would result from “a reasonable amount of repetition of work without doing injury to the whole scheme, or producing monotony of effect.” Underlying this approach was a concentration upon the ultimate beneficiary of the work—the new residents. “It is quite wrong to suppose that the best can be made of all the plots by considering the interest of each alone,” wrote Unwin. “Frequently some quite minor gain, or supposed gain, to one may seriously injure the outlook of many others. It is only by considering them together, and developing each with regard to the whole, that the best result can be obtained.”²⁸

Edwin Luytens designed the three monumental structures around the formal squares at the center of Hampstead: St. Jude-on-the-Hill parish church, the Free Church, and the Institute, each in a distinctive interpretation of a historical style. The section of Hampstead Garden Suburb closest to the tube station was largely built out by the time of the Great War. With increased automobile ownership after the war, construction of more distant sections proceeded with dispatch. The Suburb was essentially completed by the mid-1930s.²⁹