GARDEN SUBURBS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10136, 5 November 1910, Page 4

GARDEN SUBURBS.

Mr John Burns, M.P., in laying the foundation stone of the first house of the garden suburb which is to be built on the Gidoa Hall Estate, at Romford, Essex, delivered a speech eloquent in praise of the garden suburb movement and of the British ideal of cottage home. He said that the garden suburb movement was not confined to Romford, nor to Britain, nor to the Continent of Europe. There was not a community of civilised people who wanted to be civilised, who were not thinking out, scheming, planning, and shaping the future of their houses, towns, villages and cities on similar lines. In the matter of houses, towns, cities, he was soundly British in all his housing and architecturally domestic views. He was for the homestead against the tenement; he was for the house versus the flat, the home against the barrack, and he was for the cottage, and death to the institution. He liked the detached house, the separate garden, the private home and the collective playground. He believed that we had nothing to gain, but all to lose, by imitating Germany, America and France in our domestic architecture and in our neighbourly relations. He hoped the back to back houses were for ever abolished, cellar-dwell-ings gone, the mean street doomed, and he hoped the day was not far distant when the smoke nuisance would be diminished, and that everywhere we should sec parks, gardens, and trees, grow up more rapidly even than in the last ten years.