Garden Suburbs and Garden Cities were responses to poor housing in polluted cities, aimed at creating healthier living environments. This particular approach to town planning reached its peak in the early twentieth century. The popularity of the term garden suburb was so great that it was often used as a promotional label for housing developments that only paid lip service to the ideas of its pioneers. Coventry had just one genuine scheme as well as a few superficial ones.
Radford Garden Suburb was first discussed in April 1911, when a meeting of the great and good of Coventry gathered to form a pressure group to improve housing provision in the city. It was conducted in a high-minded spirit with representatives of the church and various working-class political organisations. The Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909 gave an impetus to improvements in housing.
It was revealed at this meeting that ‘there was already a project for the erection of a garden suburb in the neighbourhood of Radford’. Interestingly, it was revealed that the ‘scheme owed its origin to the public spirit of Cllr Cash’.
Thomas Arnold Cash was the son of John Cash, one of the philanthropic Cash brothers who were responsible for Cash’s Factory in Foleshill, where workers were provided with accommodation and facilities far in excess of those offered elsewhere to silk ribbon weavers.
Cash announced that the scheme run by Coventry Garden Suburbs Ltd needed an input of capital before it could go ahead. Funding for such schemes relied on finance from a number of interested parties, not all of whom had profit as their primary motive. It was also noted that a plan for the scheme had been drawn up by Raymond Unwin, a pioneer architect of the famous Hampstead and Letchworth Garden suburb/city projects.
Radford Garden Suburb was to be built on 14 acres of land just north of Radford Recreation Ground, owned at the time by Sir Thomas White’s Trustees, but which Thomas Cash had taken out an option.
The scheme would offer a contrast to the rows of terraced housing, flush with the street and with a density of forty to fifty to an acre that were being built at the time all over Coventry. In a Coventry Times editorial comment commending the Radford scheme in June 1914, it suggested some of the new streets in Earlsdon were ‘little better than new slums’ and made up of ‘hundreds of the builders’ favourite type of rabbit hutch houses.’
The garden suburb would be much less dense with 16 houses to an acre, each set back from the road and with large back gardens. A reflection of the moral values driving the Coventry Garden Suburbs Ltd was the decision not to allow licensed premises on the estate
Builders’ tenders for the first houses were accepted in August 1912, and at the same time, 200 applications for tenancy agreements were made. It also seems to have spurred the council into putting forward a scheme covering 976 acres to the north of the Radford garden suburb estate.
By January 1913, four homes had been completed in St Joseph’s Avenue – a street already laid out a few years earlier by a more commercially minded developer. By the end of that year, residents requested that the name be changed to Lydgate Road, which the council granted. 1913 also saw the construction of a new road on the estate to be named Middlemarch Road. The following year it was agreed that other planned roads would also adopt names associated with George Eliot.
By the time the estate was officially opened in June 1914, fifteen houses had been built in Lydgate Road and eight in Middlemarch Road. Houses in the latter were smaller (just two up, two down) and rented for 6s 6d. The homes in Lydgate Road were being advertised at 10s rent a week.
All houses had electric lighting, a water heater, and bathing facilities in the kitchen. So far, 40 of the planned 200 houses had been completed or were under construction. The image of the suburb carried by the Coventry Graphic on the opening of the site (see above) shows the housing in Lydgate Road, but also the benefits of having the recreation ground opposite. The recreation ground was not part of the scheme but had coincidentally been provided by the council a few years earlier, in 1909.
Any additional enthusiasm engendered by the formal opening was hit badly by the news of War just a couple of months later, when building work was soon to end.
The 1922 postcard of Middlemarch Road shows the only section built to the original plan, making up 50 of the originally planned 200 homes. The view is from the southern end, with Cheveral Avenue to be built later on the immediate left.
The War confounded the financial arrangement for the original scheme, which had offered very reasonable terms for rent or joint ownership. In 1920, the council paid £5,750 to take over the undeveloped portion of the area to help meet the desperate need for housing.
The term ‘Garden Suburb’ was dropped, and it was to be known by the rather more prosaic, ‘Lydgate Road Housing Site’. The remaining roads on the 12 acres were still given George Eliot related names, but were laid out and completed under the council’s new scheme.
And so the dream of Coventry’s only garden suburb came to a partially completed end. It was not the only contemporary, but those proposed elsewhere in the city, like at Styvechale and Wyken, used the term only as window dressing.
Even as late as 1936, the new Cheylesmore estate was described as a ‘garden suburb’, but demonstrating little of the principles of its founders. By this time, the city council was heavily committed to providing decent housing for the working classes. In the mid-1920s, they had already committed to buying 144 acres in Radford between Holyhead Road and Radford Road, where they planned to build 2,500 houses. A crude estimate indicates they achieved about 17 per acre, which was close to the garden suburb target of 16 and far better than the suggested pre-war figure for private developers of 40 per acre.