Raymond Unwin
Sir Raymond Unwin | |
|---|---|
town planner | |
| Known for | Improvements in working class housing |
Sir Raymond Unwin (2 November 1863 – 29 June 1940) was a prominent and influential English engineer, architect and
Early years
Raymond Unwin was born in Rotherham, Yorkshire and grew up in Oxford, after his father sold up his business and moved there to study. He was educated at Magdalen College School, Oxford. In 1884 he returned to the North to become an apprentice engineer for Stavely Iron & Coal Company near Chesterfield.
Unwin had become interested in social issues at an early age and was inspired by the lectures and ideals of
In 1887 he returned to Staveley Iron as an engineer, working on development of mining townships and various other buildings, and joined the Sheffield Socialist Society.
In 1893 he married
Planning career
In their various writings, including their book The Art of Building a Home (1901), Parker and Unwin aimed to popularise the
A notable example of one of their earliest collaborations at Clayton, Staffordshire, is dated to 1899, and was originally called the Goodfellow House after the man who commissioned it. Parker and Unwin were involved in designing many of the interior fittings, which remain in the house to this day, and the initial layout of the large gardens. Goodfellow sold the house in 1926 to Colley Shorter who ran the nearby pottery works of Wilkinson's and Newport. He renamed it Chetwynd House and when he married his star designer Clarice Cliff in 1940, she moved into the house and lived there until 1972. It is her association that has made the house particularly famous since.[1]
In 1902 Parker and Unwin were asked to design a model village at
In 1903 they were involved with the "Cottages Near a Town Exhibit" for the Northern Art Workers Guild of Manchester. In 1904 after their plan was adopted they opened a second office at Baldock. In 1905 Henrietta Barnett asked them to plan the new garden suburb at Hampstead, now known as Hampstead Garden Suburb.
Unwin moved from Letchworth to Hampstead in 1906, and he lived here for the rest of his life at the farmstead Wyldes Farm.[2]
In 1907, Ealing Tenants Limited, a progressive cooperative in west London, appointed him to take forward the development of Brentham garden suburb.[3]
Unwin joined the
His demonstration during the Great War of the principles of building homes rapidly and economically whilst maintaining satisfactory standards for gardens, family privacy and internal spaces, gave him great influence over the Tudor Walters Committee and hence, indirectly, over much inter-war public housing. This report marked Unwin's definitive break from the traditional 'garden city' concept, as it proposed that the new developments should be peripheral 'satellites' rather than fully-fledged garden cities.[4] Unwin became technical adviser to the Greater London Regional Planning Committee in 1929 and largely wrote its two reports, the first published in that year and the second in 1933.
Unwin was President of the
Footnotes
- ^ Griffin Leonard. Clarice Cliff: The Fantastic Flowers of Clarice Cliff (Pavilion/Chrysalis 1998/2001
- ^ Letchworth Garden City, "Architects and Planners of Letchworth Garden City"
- ^ Brentham Garden Suburbs, "Architects and Architecture"
- ISBN 0-631-23252-4.
External links
- DSA Architect Biography Report: Parker & Unwin
- Andrew Saint, Unwin, Sir Raymond (1863–1940), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 accessed 2 Nov 2010
- The Town Extension Plan, 1912 Warburton lecture.
- Pollack, Theo Mackey, "The Best Planning Book is a Century Old: A Look Back at Unwin's Town Planning in Practice." New Urbs, The American Conservative, 12/15/2017.
- Raymond Unwin Papers at the John Rylands Library, Manchester
- Town Planning in Practice
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