Designs For Happiness
Country Life UK|May 16, 2018

Clive Aslet discovers how this unsung hero of the Arts-and-Crafts Movement realised his vision for changing lives with thoughtful architecture and planning

Clive Aslet
Designs For Happiness

BARRY PARKER and Raymond Unwin were the two architects of Letchworth Garden City, the utopian Hertfordshire settlement intended to create a green community that would shun the squalor and soot of the industrial city in the early 20th century. Their example, at Letchworth and elsewhere, was hugely influential, creating an ideal to which many English families aspired—although they could only obtain it in suburbs.

Ebenezer Howard, the founder of the movement, envisaged this first garden city as a place where people would be able to work, shop and socialise near their homes, walking or cycling to their destination along roads that were linear parks—a vision that, more recently, has helped shape Poundbury in Dorset.

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