ABSTRACT
The social conditions that influenced the rise to dominance of the garden suburb in English-speaking countries were various. Not least there was the separation of home from workplace, of middle class from working class, and the rise of romantic
and religious notions favouring the natural and the rural (Fishman, 1987, pp. 239240). These conditions existed in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. And it was at that time that the single-family house in its private garden (as distinct from the Georgian ‘square’ of terraced houses around a communal garden) started to become fashionable for those middle-class families that were rich enough to afford it. Some such singlefamily ‘villas’, as they were called at the time in the vicinity of London (London County Council, 1936, p. 77), actually date from even earlier, from the lateseventeenth century (figure 4.1a). Many similar houses were constructed in the course of the eighteenth century; most of them were detached rather than semidetached. Most were bespoke houses-that is, built for a specific client, not as a speculative venture. Their occupiers had looked to the country houses of the aristocracy and the gentry for their exemplars. The earliest detached and semidetached houses grouped into estates, and conceived as such, were also probably around London (Thompson, 1974, pp. 84-85; 1982, p. 9). There was clear evidence by the early-nineteenth century of a move away from the very urban building forms and layouts that had hitherto dominated London. Trees, private gardens, and houses with names having rural associations, had all become fashionable. Streetscapes were becoming landscapes. It was this change that marked the advent of the suburb, in the sense of garden suburb.
