The importance of Hampstead Garden Suburb in the history of 20th Century architecture and town planning cannot be overestimated. The brainchild of Henrietta Barnett, the Suburb was to be a model community with people of all classes living together in beautiful houses set in a verdant landscape. Laid out by Raymond Unwin, with Edwin Lutyens, the houses and flats represent the best of English domestic architecture of the early twentieth century.

Today, it is an environment of international significance. The eminent architectural historian, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, described it as "the most nearly perfect example of that English invention and speciality, the garden suburb".

Hampstead Garden Suburb has been, from the beginning, a planned community. It has not grown up piecemeal, or through the work of speculative builders, but was carefully designed in terms of architecture, landscape and town planning. It is recognised worldwide as one of the most important utopian developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Hampstead Garden Suburb covers some 880 acres (excluding the Heath Extension which is technically separate from the Suburb). The Suburb comprises over 5,000 properties which range from studio flats to some of the largest mansion houses in London. There are examples of the most influential town planning developments and architectural styles of the early twentieth century. It has the greatest concentration of statutory listed buildings in the Borough of Barnet (two Grade I, forty one Grade II*, and seven hundred and forty Grade II Listed buildings). St Jude-on-the-Hill, the Free Church and the former Institute (now Henrietta Barnett School) in Central Square, are the major public buildings in Britain by Sir Edwin Lutyens.

Trees and the landscape were of particular importance to the design and philosophy of the Suburb. The history of the Suburb is of 100 years of a managed environment where the character and appearance of the architecture and landscape have been successfully protected.