ABSTRACT
‘Community’ was an informing idea of housing improvement, harking back to an image of towns that ‘spread their black tentacles into the green countryside, engulfing some of the old village communities and draining the life from others’; and it seemed to imply that either there were no working-class communities in the slums, or that they were inherently undesirable. It aimed to recreate the life of some ideal village, where ‘squire and labourer lived within the same community’, and where ‘it was possible for a man to develop as a sturdy individual and as a responsible member of a community to whose well-being he contributed, and in whose government he might, in some degree, share’. 1 As the new model housing provided everything essential for the physical health of individuals, the new community would provide everything necessary for social and moral health. Inevitably, the definition of what was socially and morally healthy was the task of those (middle-class) people who were the spearhead of the movement.
