Homes for Welsh Workers: From Robert Owen to 'The Garden City Movement' with a Gazetteer of Planned Communities in Wales 1800 to 1939

摘要

This modest book seeks to 'identify those settlements intended to improve the quality of life of their inhabitants in Wales', looking at planned communities across a wide range of locations and with a remarkable variety of origins and styles. Stephen Kay suggests that 'as ever, more attention has been given to, and more published information exists about, England', but in fact most English examples are just as little known and under-appreciated as their counterparts in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. A handful of celebrated communities - such as Letchworth, Bourneville, Port Sunlight, Saltaire, Styal and Hampstead Garden Suburb - have attracted a disproportionate amount of attention from historians, polemicists and propagandists, and students of planning and design, and in England there are numerous examples of the sort which Kay describes, likewise half-forgotten, barely recognised and seriously under-researched. His regional study demonstrates the considerable potential for investigation on the same lines elsewhere.