Overview

Join us in a walking tour of the Hampstead Garden Suburb, where we will look to see how the ideas of the wealthy social reformer Henrietta Barnett and architect and town planner Raymond Unwin, made corporeal in brick, tile and timber, have held up during the intervening century, and what they can tell us about how we should build the places that we live in today.

The Suburb was set up in 1907 with the express aims of using architecture and landscaping to create a community, through the mixing of all social classes and the provision of shared amenities usually reserved for the wealthy, as well as providing buildings and funds for several charitable institutions. The buildings themselves were designed with a deference to the greater aesthetic scheme, working together to contribute to the character of the Suburb, with no individual dwellings allowed to outshine any other.