Author: admin
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Origins Over two million people in the UK live in new towns. The new towns idea originated in the British Garden City Movement. Letchworth (begun 1903) and Welwyn Garden City (from 1919), both in the English county of Hertfordshire, were the realisations of the utopian ideals of Ebenezer Howard. The ‘father’ of the Garden City…
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✴︎ Housing in England
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A walk around the (mostly ex) council estates built in the 1920s and 1930s reveals a generosity of space for front and back gardens few could only dream of today. The ‘cottage estates’ were garden-suburb-lite mass-housing versions of the Edwardian planned communities found at Blackheath, Dulwich and Hampstead. Among the most famous are Dagenham, Wythenshawe…
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✴︎ Our English Towns
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On my regular visits to Reading to visit my family’s grave, I always take time out to walk around Reading’s town centre. Beyond the loss of so many good old pubs, and the unimaginative blocks of flats, hotels and offices, a kind of counter-logical observation emerges: Reading has gone for high-densities, in the pursuit of…
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In the Spring on 2023, the Labour MP Rupa Huq was crowing about her role in preventing new builds in her West London constituency of Ealing. An opponent of the redevelopment of Perceval House, she was basically congratulating herself for exacerbating the housing shortage in the capital city. And for what, votes? No wonder so…