Yesterday's To-morrow - Bristol's Garden Suburbs
A short pamphlet picked up at the anarchist book fair I went to a couple of weeks ago giving an introduction to Bristol's garden suburbs and their links to libertarian sensibilities. I was interested cos the guy on the stand said that it included the Fry's Chocolate factory model village at Keynsham, near where I grew up and where my parents live, but it also includes other developments such as Shirehampton west of Bristol. The suburbs are an interesting mix of developments by libertarian planners, influenced by people such as William Morris, and those built by industrialists for their workers to give them a pleasant place to live - no doubt to ensure loyalty, healthiness (compared to slum dwelling) and proximity to the factory. No doubt some individualist libertarians felt claustrophobic in these surroundings and there is some paternity in not building pubs for the good of the residents but I guess better than the tenement slums a lot were used to. The booklet draws parallels with other garden cities built at the time and covers briefly how the Bristol suburbs are surviving today with the pressures of packing more people into less space. A good read.
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #8
http://www.brh.org.uk/publications.html
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