ABSTRACT
Perhaps more than anything else, the suburban home and the suburb typify the twentieth century. Not that they were entirely new, for the process of suburbanization had been going on for centuries, driven by the urge of the wealthy to live away from crowded and polluted urban centres. But after 1918 suburbanization developed with new momentum because it was catering for new or redefined social classes, with what were effectively new tenures in distinctive dwellings and estates. These served, on the one hand, a new category of home owners, and, on the other, a new category of tenant who rented, now, not from private landlords but local authorities. Both groups were in a sense ‘new citizens’ between whom, at the outset, there might be little social or financial difference ( Mowat, 1955, p. 230).
