From York to New Earswick: reforming working-class homes, 1899-1914

How to improve the lives of the working class and the poor in Britain has been a key concern for social reformers, architects and designers, and local and national governments throughout twentieth century, but the origins of this were in the preceding century. From the middle of the nineteenth century, reformers had understood the necessity of improving the living conditions, diet and material environment of those with low incomes. Housing, at the core of this, was increasingly a political issue, but as this case study of the development of a garden village in the North of England demonstrates, it was also a moral and aesthetic one.