ABSTRACT
George Orwell claimed to have been born into “the lower upper middle class,” insisting that without knowledge of that fact, no one could comprehend the map of his life or the shape of his mind.1 Raymond Unwin, the architect and town planner, would, if pressed, have acknowledged that he too sprang from that same particular social subdivision, though he would have argued that the matter was of little importance. Yet for the historian the matter is important. It provides the avenue to an understanding of the difficulty Unwin experienced as he attempted to marry the ideal of democracy to a conception of community, while designing houses and streetscapes, towns and suburbs in early twentieth-century Britain.
