GARDEN SUBURB.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 13989, 26 August 1909, Page 6

GARDEN SUBURB.

THE HAMPSTEAD EXPERIMENT

Efforts are being made in England to beautify the suburbs of many cities and towns. One of the best is known as the Hampstead Garden Suburb- —an experiment which' may lead the way to a great national improvement in the present methods of town expansion. The root idea has been not only to plan a healthful and beautiful suburb, but to make it possible for all the different classes of the community to come into friendly and neighbourly contact with each other. Such friendly relationships, however imperfect, do yet exist to the great benefit of all in villages and in smaller towns; but in great sprawling, soulless aggregations of people like London, rich and poor live to all intents and purposes in different cities; class distinctions and class interests arc emphasised, and all sorts •of evils arise from this unnatural separation. To remedy them various expedients have been tried, notably settlements, but admirable as their work has been, they are still an artificial means lof bringing together people whose lives touched each other at no other point. In the Hampstead Garden Suburb all is different. Within a few hundred yards of each other are mansions standing in their own beautiful gardens, rented at £3OO a year, and groups of cottages let at as fjd a week; And the- cottages liave their own gardens, too —a little private piece of ground for the owner's personal and individual enjoyment, and a large area fit for a tennis court or bowling greeii in common. '

And of course in the G.arden Suburb there are none of those . desolate, straight rows of neat little bow-win-dowed brick villas 01* "maisonettes," as the house agents call them, each as like its neighbour as one pea is to another, each wholly without character and individuality, and which make every newly-developed district a .'place to avoid by everyone who has means to escape from it. Because in the Hampstead Garden Suburb, it is a remarkable, indeed an almost incredible fact, thatb the bouses are actually built to suit the needs of tile people who will live in them. They are not turned out by the score or the hundred all to one pattern like packing cases; they have been planned by architects who have remembered that families vary in size and that the tastes and needs of -peox>le ciilfer. JLSut tue designers have also kept in mind that, 'in some respects, ncii and poor are, or snould be aliKc, so tiiat even tlie smallest cottage lias its own bathroom. JSvcryone will take a keen interest in the iirst .shops to be opened 111 tlie suburb —none are ready at present; because the directors oi the trust say that the shops are to be " things or beauty " too, and it is difficult to imagine now that will be possible. '1 he ugliness of the ordinary suburban row ot shops is so appailmg that nothing but custom could have used people to it. And the directors have, many other schemes in view. A site has been provided lor a Free Church; the hrst section of the institute which is to be the centre of the social lite of the suburb has already been erected; the block of flats —very unlike the ordinary square pile ol bricks that usually goes by that name—for professional women is on the verge of completion; and tne rent-roll is growing so fast that the share dividend will shortly be amply provided for. For the burden Suburb is going to justify its existence lrom the commercial point of view as well as under its national and social aspect.