Planning for social reform in the modern landscape: a study of two Yorkshire garden villages, 1902-1940

Although archaeologies of the modern world have increasingly acknowledged the materiality of reform (often through specialised institutions such as workhouses), the role of the everyday domestic landscape in promoting social reform has yet to be addressed. This thesis investigates the relationship between social reform and the landscape as manifested in early-twentieth-century garden villages: garden city-style planned settlements that promised healthy green surroundings and quality affordable housing as an antidote to urban social problems. Two case studies are investigated: New Earswick, North Yorkshire (founded 1902), and Woodlands model mining village, South Yorkshire (founded 1907). An ‘ethnography of place’ (Mayne and Lawrence 1999) approach is adopted, combining documentary archaeology (incorporating historic social data, visual culture, site plans, and archive material) with new in-depth landscape biographies of garden village development. This reveals the myriad ways in which the planned landscape was conceived, executed, and negotiated as an agent of social change: by village founders, designers, and residents. At the intersection of historical archaeology and planning history, the original contribution of this thesis is to challenge the notion of garden village landscapes as passive reflections of reformist ideals. Instead, it locates specific planned landscape forms, as found at New Earswick and Woodlands, within ambitious ideas for a better society: radically new spaces that actively supported cooperation, ‘respectable’ forms of recreation, and better health. While reform in the context of garden villages was entangled with ideas of class, the research demonstrates that the landscape facilitated the active participation of their generally working-class residents. In essence, ‘the reformed’ contributed to the process of reform on their own terms. As a proposed solution to the UK’s current housing crisis, efforts to develop new garden villages for the twenty-first century can benefit from a deeper critical analysis of those of the past, demonstrating their enduring relevance.