Faced with acute housing shortages, the idea of new garden cities and suburbs is on the UK planning agenda once again, but what of the garden suburbs that already exist?

Over the first six decades of the twentieth century, councils across Britain created a new and optimistic form of housing the cottage estates of corporation suburbia . By the early 1960s these estates provided homes with gardens for some 3 million mainly working-class households. It was a mammoth achievement. But, because of what then happened to council housing over the later years of the century, this is not very...

Faced with acute housing shortages, the idea of new garden cities and suburbs is on the UK planning agenda once again, but what of the garden suburbs that already exist?

Over the first six decades of the twentieth century, councils across Britain created a new and optimistic form of housing - the cottage estates of 'corporation suburbia'. By the early 1960s these estates provided homes with gardens for some 3 million mainly working-class households. It was a mammoth achievement. But, because of what then happened to council housing over the later years of the century, this...