Romford's Garden Suburb: the origins of Gidea Park
The name 'Gidea Park' was coined in 1909 for a small-scale housing development (in North America, it would be called a 'subdivision') close to the Essex market town of Romford, now part of the Borough of Havering, and included within Greater London.
The project of Herbert Raphael, a wealthy Liberal MP, Gidea Park was influenced by the Garden City movement, which had produced Letchworth (begun 1903) and Hampstead Garden Suburb (from 1906). Raphael had been hoping to develop his Gidea Hall estate – the park attached to one of the area's grandest mansions – for some years. He had acquired the property while hoping to be elected as MP for the Romford constituency, which included a wide swathe of Essex suburbs. Since Gidea Hall had previously belonged to a building company controlled by another Liberal politician, Jabez Balfour, a notorious swindler, Raphael presented his scheme in a philanthropic guise. Segments of the estate were hived off, to form a golf course at one end and a public park at the other. This left a relatively narrow central corridor for housing, with the result that Raphael's Gidea Park would eventually become at least overshadowed if not swamped by the suburban sprawl of the interwar period. Two other points may be noted at this stage. First, Raphael's plans were hampered by problems of providing transport links to the planned subdivision, necessary since the quality of housing envisaged was aimed at the families of professionals and businessmen who were employed in London. Much of the Edwardian decade was taken up by fruitless schemes for a local tramway network, of which Raphael would have been a beneficiary although he does not seem to have been actively involved. When the tramway projects were abandoned, he persuaded the Great Eastern Railway company to open a station at the lonely hamlet of Squirrels Heath, which soon annexed the Gidea Park name. The solution was not ideal for the Garden Suburb, but the new suburban halt encouraged large-scale local building projects from the nineteen-twenties, not all of them aimed at the same select clientele. Second, the invented name acquired a distinctive pronunciation. The balance of evidence strongly suggests that the 'Gidea' of Gidea Hall had been pronounced as two syllables, identical with 'giddy'. However, in the derived version, Gidea Park, 'Gidea' became trisyllabic. This may well have been a marketing ploy, but how it was achieved is a mystery. This study looks at the origins of the Garden Suburb project. A separate Note will discuss the pronunciation.[1]
The Gidea Hall estate and Romford c. 1900. The growing town was becoming an uncomfortable neighbour.
Gidea Hall: a fine mansion in the wrong place? It had been obvious for a quarter of a century before the project was launched that the Gidea Hall estate was a likely target for house-building. Its land-holdings extended for three-quarters of a mile along the north side of the Great Essex Road, from Pettits Lane in the west eastward towards a lonely junction called Gallows Corner which, in the twentieth century, would become the location of a notorious roundabout. As an auctioneer pointed out in 1893, the main-road frontage "could be developed for building without interfering at all with the hall and the seclusion it enjoyed".[2] The mansion itself stood about half a mile north-east of the town of Romford. A large and handsome structure, it had replaced an earlier grand house around 1720 and had been further embellished in the seventeen-eighties. It was surrounded by formal gardens which included a five-acre lake, known as Black's Canal, after Alexander Black, who had purchased the estate in 1802. In fact, in its sinuous Victorian form, this ornamental sheet of water was the product of eighteenth-century landscaping – and its origins went back several hundred years before that time, almost certainly to a former water mill.
Gidea Hall, about 1900. Rebuilt shortly after 1720, it was one of the finest mansions in Essex. Picture kindly supplied by Havering Libraries Local Studies.
Perversely, the elegant magnificence of Gidea Hall became a disadvantage during the nineteenth century. When Alexander Black died in 1835, he left two daughters as co-heiresses and, at some subsequent stage, Gidea Hall was divided into a massive 'semi-' to accommodate the sisters and their husbands.[3] By late-Victorian times, the two segments were let to tenants, some of whom quickly moved on.[4] However, Henry Hollebone, an engineer-turned-stockbroker, arrived in the eighteen-eighties and remained for over twenty years. Hollebone functioned as the unofficial squire who gave permission for flower shows and cricket matches in the park, and took a leading part in local activities. He was "much esteemed for his genial nature". To judge from the frequent and highly specific advertisements for domestic staff placed in the press by his wife, Emily Hollebone, may have possessed a less sunny personality. "Wanted, a Young Man as Single-handed Footman; German not objected to. Write age, height, and full particulars, Mrs. H., Gidea Hall, Romford, Essex," was a characteristic example from 1888.[5]
"Converted into one residence it would be one of the finest in Essex," the 1893 auctioneer optimistically claimed.[6] Unfortunately, any millionaire who could afford to buy such an impressive residence was unlikely to wish to live alongside one of the busiest main roads in Essex and so close to the growing town of Romford. The foundation of the town's prosperity was its weekly cattle market, and the high road that passed the gates of Gidea Hall was congested with drovers and their herds, although some of this traffic was transferred to the railway from the eighteen-forties. In 1801, the extensive parish of Romford had counted a population of 3,179, of whom perhaps slightly more than two thousand lived in the town itself – barely fifty percent more than in late-Tudor times.[7] By 1841, the parish contained 5,317 people, suggesting that the town itself had doubled in size. The arrival of the railway two years earlier had not only emphasised its existing position as an important local market centre, but encouraged the development of a major enterprise that would become synonymous with Romford. In 1845, Edward Ind's local brewery acquired new investment to become Ind, Coope & Co., which operated on an industrial scale: within a couple of years, it was exporting its branded Romford Ale as far away as Australia. By 1908, 450 workers were employed at the brewery complex, which occupied most of the ground between the High Street and the Great Eastern railway line, to which it was connected by a network of sidings. In earlier centuries, the owners of Gidea Hall had been able to dominate the small community located so close to their gates, but this ceased to be possible by the middle of the nineteenth century. Not only was the mansion itself no longer home to a powerful landed family but Romford gradually acquired its own institutions. In 1851, a Local Board of Health was established for the immediate area of the town. Thirty years later, the parish had a population of 9,050 people, of whom 7,176 lived in the Local Board district. Local government reform in 1894 upgraded the Board into an Urban District Council, with greater powers and broader ambitions. By the time of the 1901 census, the parish – now shorn of the outlying districts of Havering village and Noak Hill – recorded 13,915 people, pointing to an urban population well over ten thousand. Romford was certainly not a particularly turbulent town. Although prevailing westerly winds probably wafted the unmistakable smells of the brewery as far as Gidea Hall, it is unlikely that Romford was any dirtier or less healthy than other contemporary small urban centres. But its growing size, its administrative autonomy and its increasing proximity – with residential development moving eastward from 1855 – made it a less-than-ideal neighbour for any would-be lord of the manor.[8]
Jabez Balfour: swindling scoundrel, 1883-97 In 1883, Gidea Hall was sold to the Lands Allotment Company, whose title suggested both the ability and the determination to develop the 510-acre estate. Sadly, this was not the case. The Lands Allotment Company was a front company controlled by a Liberal politician and swindler, Jabez Balfour. Creating an illusion of probity by working with a network of contacts from the Temperance movement, Balfour established the Liberator Building Society, which attracted deposits from small savers lured by its favourable interest rates. Not surprisingly, the ensuing frauds were obscured by complex paper trails but, essentially, the building society was the source of cash that enabled Balfour and his nominees to purchase properties which they then re-sold to other companies in the Liberator group at inflated prices, with the phantom profits shared among the co-conspirators. Thus the Gidea Hall estate was acquired for £52,606, but promptly transferred to the Lands Allotment Company for £102,000, a scam that netted its perpetrators close to £7.6 million in 2025 values. The investment was then used as a prop for fraudulent accounting: the Gidea Hall estate yielded an income of about £1,200 a year, but Balfour wrote it down as growing annually by five times that amount.[9]
Not surprisingly, the Lands Allotment Company lacked the resources and perhaps the willpower to do much about house-building. It was probably at this time that six large villas were constructed along the main road frontage to the east of the mansion, an initiative that severely reduced the options for access available to the 1910 project. In 1885, an attempt was made to auction nineteen large plots on the western side of Black's Canal, "a moiety of them being bounded in the rear by the waters of the lake".[10] This may have been the origins of Lake Rise, although the houses here were probably erected later, and on smaller sites. Not until 1889, by which time the Liberator group was returning its Gidea Hall investment as having grown by one-quarter, was any move made to build houses in the core of the estate. The Lands Allotment Company insisted that the estate should be "properly sewered" as far east as the roadside hamlet of Hare Street. Its demand did not meet with the approval of the Romford Rural Sanitary Authority, one of the ad hoc bodies that provided half-hearted local administration, in this case for the rural fringes of the parish beyond the town. Members considered that "there were very few houses on the Gidea Hall Estate, the rateable value was very small, and … it would be premature to drain the district at present". No action was taken.[11]
The following year was marked by a pantomime episode. The Lands Allotment Company sent thirty labourers into the park to lay a drain intended to discharge surface water into the lake, presumably as a preliminary to marking out building sites. Protesting that his tenancy agreement entitled him to three months' notice of any such work, Henry Hollebone mobilised "five sturdy labourers armed with shovels" and instructions to fill in the trench. It is unlikely that anyone employed in Jabez Balfour's corrupt empire acquired much sense of loyalty to the organisation, and the two groups of navvies quickly agreed to engage in a non-violent competition, which produced "a good deal of chaff" between the competing teams. The difference in numbers between the two sides was neutralised by the fact that it was easier to push soil back into a hole than to dig it out. The excavators tried to frustrate their opponents by carting the spoil some distance away, but Hollebone's small platoon quickly mobilised wheelbarrows to bring it back. At the close of a bizarre day, the Lands Allotment Company called off its army, leaving the defenders victorious in this ersatz trench warfare.[12] It is possible that the whole charade was an exercise in window-dressing, an attempt to demonstrate some serious intention by the company to develop the Gidea Hall property. Certainly, no further activity ensued before the whole fraudulent structure began to crumble two years later. The Liberator Building Society crashed, wiping out the savings of thousands of small investors. Jabez Balfour fled the country, but was brought back to face trial in 1895 and a long sentence of penal servitude.
Herbert Raphael and a park for Romford, 1897-1904 With Balfour still at large and the tangled affairs of his business empire continuing to unravel, little enthusiasm was generated by the attempt to sell the Gidea Hall estate at auction in 1893. Bidding was sluggish, and stalled altogether at £34,000. To the vocal amusement of onlookers, the auctioneer complained that "he could not sell at this price. It was only about a fifth of what the property had cost the present owners." Gidea Hall, now with 480 acres of land, eventually found a private buyer in 1897, who was believed to have paid roughly the price that had been rejected four years earlier.[13] The new owner, Herbert Henry Raphael, was a very different personality from Jabez Balfour. (Notably, although he was in his mid-fifties at the outbreak of the First World War, he insisted on enlisting in the Army as a private, a patriotic gesture that would hardly have been forthcoming from any of Balfour's gang.) Yet the story of his slow development of the Gidea Hall estate needs to be understood at least partly in terms of his need to demonstrate, one might almost say 'flaunt', the purity of his motives. A member of a very wealthy Jewish banking family, Herbert Raphael had practised as a lawyer for a few years after studying at Cambridge before throwing himself into full-time public service.[14] He was one of the first members of the London County Council at its establishment in 1889, and he made several attempts to enter parliament as a member of the advanced wing of the Liberal Party. At the general election of 1892 and again at a by-election in 1897, he contested the Romford division of Essex, which stretched from East Ham to Upminster. In the hope of persuading voters, in the words of his campaign slogan, to Return Raphael as Romford's Radical and Resident Representative, he rented a small country house at Havering-atte-Bower, on the rising ground to the north of the market town. Although defeated in both campaigns, he lost in 1897 by just 125 votes (0.8 percent of the poll) and may well have aimed to try his luck locally again.[15] In the event, he was eventually elected for South Derbyshire in 1906.[16] There is every reason to believe that Raphael was sincere in his claim that a property-owner like himself should share his good fortune with the community that sustained his wealth, but it remained the basic fact that he was a Liberal MP – as had been Jabez Balfour at the time of his disgrace. If he planned to use the Gidea Hall estate for property development, he needed to demonstrate that he acted with wholly different and disinterested motives.
Herbert Raphael was a member of a wealthy Jewish family who sought to become Liberal MP for Romford in 1895 and 1897. Just as Conservatives were called "Tories", so Liberals were nicknamed "Radicals". Raphael campaigned as the Radical and Resident candidate, making the point that he lived locally and was part of the community. The Romford division of Essex stretched from East Ham to Upminster: Raphael was popular in the town of Romford, but there may have been some anti-Semitic prejudice among the wider electorate that perhaps explains his narrow defeat in the 1897 by-election. As owner of the Gidea Hall estate after the swindler Jabez Balfour, he was careful to emphasise the philanthropic aspect of his property development plans.
In the decade that followed the collapse of the Liberator group, the options for developing the Gidea Hall estate were literally narrowed, as its two ends were sliced off for different purposes. In 1894, a golf course was established on eighty acres of land from the hamlet of Hare Street towards Gallows Corner. "Much trouble and expense has been gone to in making bunkers, hazards, &c., and the links are nearly perfect." The new club hired a Scottish professional, and there was a clubhouse with bedrooms which offered a "good cuisine and cellar".[17] Much of the eastern end of the Gidea Hall estate was thus no longer available for house building. A founder member and undoubted mastermind of the golf club, Herbert Raphael would also be responsible for the second development, the creation of Romford's first public park, hived off from the western end of the estate. In 1901, he informed the Urban District Council that "for a considerable time past it had been his intention to offer the lake at Gidea-hall Park to the council as the nucleus of a public park". He now proposed to add fourteen acres of land which, thanks to a further gift and some low-cost civic purchase, eventually created a 41-acre amenity. Fittingly named Raphael Park, it was formally opened in 1904.[18]
No doubt there was a genuine element of altruism in Herbert Raphael's gesture. As he explained in 1901, "he had always considered it a monstrous thing when the value of property was largely increased by the expenditure of the community, that the whole of the increased value should go into the pockets of the landowner without any contribution from him". But the gift was also motivated by more self-interested motives. Although it was an attractive sheet of water, Black's Canal was anything but an asset to the estate.[19] It had been formed by a dam at the main road, beneath an elegant three-arch bridge designed by the architect James Wyatt as part of the late-eighteenth century improvements. By the early eighteen-eighties, bars had been fitted below road level "to prevent boys and men getting under the bridge and damaging the weir, which they used to do repeatedly". These had to be kept clear of debris which sometimes blocked the outlet, causing flooding that affected both the highway and properties upstream.[20] A more distressing problem resulted from the occasional suicides, whose bodies had to be recovered from the water.[21] There were good reasons to hand these responsibilities to the local authority: Romford people already used the lake for recreation – it would have been difficult and expensive to prevent them – and future residents of Gidea Hall and any houses built in its shadow would be still be able to enjoy the amenity. As a lawyer, Herbert Raphael may also have been troubled by questions of liability. The lake froze in winter and was popular with local skaters. Two young men had fallen through the ice in the winter of 1868, and were lucky to be rescued by a passing carter. There was a particularly controversial episode in 1871 when a group of boys from the town's elementary school dashed across the frozen surface, not realising how thin was the ice in the middle of the lake. Twelve-year-old William Dawkins fell through and became trapped in weeds and mud. The woman who kept the gate lodge refused to lend a rope to would-be rescuers, unfeelingly commenting that "the boy got in and he must get out". Young Dawkins drowned, and the local coroner commented that "it would be a very great question whether she was not criminally liable". The jury recommended that "a life buoy and rope be kept in readiness at the gates of Gidea Hall", and that "gentlemen using the canal for skating and recreation" should be asked to meet the cost.[22] There was another near-tragedy in 1886, when the ice gave way, plunging a young woman into five feet of water. Four men who went to her assistance also fell through. They were lucky to be rescued by a police constable who was on duty nearby, and conveniently equipped with a pole and a rope.[23] By the eighteen-nineties, the Gidea Hall estate was charging skaters a fee, presumably to control numbers and keep out undesirable elements, but this arguably made the proprietors liable for accidents. It is noteworthy that, at a late stage in the negotiations to establish the public park, Herbert Raphael added four acres to the north of the mansion that contained a smaller sheet of water that was also particularly popular with skaters. Henry Hollebone's daughter had broken her leg in a collision on the ice there in 1893. Two years later, another young woman suffered concussion in a fall.[24] Sooner or later, the estate was likely to face an action for damages, while a major accident would generate bad publicity for an aspiring politician.[25] Handing over Black's Canal – which soon became known as Raphael Park Lake[26] – to the local community was a generous act, but it was not without real and potential benefits to the donor.
Attributed to the architect James Wyatt, the eighteenth-century bridge carried the main road over the lake in the grounds of Gidea Hall. The names Black's Bridge and Black's Canal, which recalled an early nineteenth-century owner, were gradually forgotten following the 1904 gift of of Raphael Park to the town of Romford. Raphael's initiative was generous but it also made sense: it was impossible to prevent local people from treating the lake as a public amenity, and simpler to transfer responsibility to the Urban District Council.
Trams for Romford, 1901-8? Another problem that inhibited the development of the Gidea Hall estate helps explain the timing of Herbert Raphael's offer of a public park. The construction of houses would presumably be largely aimed at prosperous families whose breadwinners were employed in London: Romford simply did not have a sufficiently large haute bourgeoisie to sustain such a project. Efficient means of travelling to the city were thus a vital precondition for bricks and mortar. The Gidea Hall mansion was about a mile from Romford's railway station, and the area of the estate likely to be built on was even further to the north-east. One possible answer would be a tramway: a horse-drawn service from Manor Park had been proposed as early as 1885, but the scheme was abandoned two years later.[27] However, until the end of the nineteenth century, tram services were confined to the inner urban area. Then, between 1901 and 1903, the burgeoning suburbs of East Ham, Barking and Ilford opened local networks, served by much more reliable electric streetcars. In March 1903, Ilford's system reached the urban district boundary at Chadwell Heath, just over two miles from Romford.[28] Although the market town was a less dynamic community than its fast-growing neighbour, its civic leaders began to plan a link to the evolving metropolitan network as early as 1901. It was at this point that Herbert Raphael decided to convert his vague intention to offload Black's Canal into a formal proposal to endow a municipal park. "Having been informed that the council had under consideration the construction of an electric tramway, his views had become somewhat enlarged. An electric tramway would, of course, enhance the value of his property".[29] More to the point, a public park established almost three-quarters of a mile east of the town centre was likely to be included in any tram service. The townsfolk might well have settled for a shuttle service from the centre of Romford to Chadwell Heath; Raphael needed the line to come through the Market Place and as far as Hare Street, the likely jumping-off point for a building project. Hence, for Herbert Raphael, his gift of the park was inextricably linked to his intention to build houses. As he assured the people of Romford at the opening ceremony in 1904, "the park would always be for the unlimited use of the public, no matter how much built over the surrounding land might become".[30]
Unfortunately, problems soon appeared. In November 1901, Romford Urban District Council announced that it intended to apply for a private act of parliament authorising it to construct a tramway system. The principal line would run along the main road from Chadwell Heath to Hare Street, with a spur down South Street as far as Oldchurch Road.[31] The scheme was strongly criticised at a public meeting of local ratepayers as "a very risky experiment with the public money". The Council planned to spend around £130,000 constructing the system, but its own forecasts suggested only a relatively small profit margin. Doubters were hardly persuaded by appeals to the example of East Ham, with eight times the population, while the estimate that a town of 12,000 people would generate 6,000 passenger journeys a day was dismissed as "absurd". Nor were the objectors mollified by a tactless municipal official who told them that "all the incidental expenses of the Bill were already incurred.... all the Council wanted the meeting to sanction was that they should be allowed not to lose the money they had spent". "You should have called this meeting before you spent this money," one of them replied. The argument for the trams, that they would help the town to grow, prompted opponents to dismiss the kind of community that would emerge. As one of them put it, "the only possibility of this scheme paying was by all the land being cut up into pieces as large as a table and a house being built on each. Was that the sort of town they wanted Romford to become?" "No," chorused the critics, who won a show of hands' vote against the proposal by 109 votes to 91.[32]
In a more participatory era of local government, controversial proposals could be submitted to a poll of ratepayers, and the Council appealed to the wider electorate to save its project. In what may seem an unduly trusting procedure, 2,252 ballot papers were delivered to the homes of local voters, 1,966 of which were collected. There was a two-to-one majority against the project.[33]
A satirical squib from 1901 peered into an imagined future: it is 1905, Romford's trams are running (with a through service to Ilford) but the town remains angrily divided over the issue. (The cartoonist, Harry Willsmer, emigrated to Canada in 1902.) The bowler-hatted figure in the lower right corner is Herbert Raphael. His property development plans made him an interested onlooker, but he does not seem to have been actively involved in the project. The comment attributed to him, "Capital arrangement", is, of course, ambiguous. Image kindly supplied by Havering Libraries Local Studies.
Within hours of this defeat, the chairman of the Urban District Council began negotiations with private companies to take over the scheme. In November 1902, the Empire Electric Light and Power Company gave notice that it would seek the private act of parliament that the Council was no longer empowered to pursue. Its representative supplied more detailed information when the bill was considered by a parliamentary committee in May of the following year. The company planned to use eight tramcars to operate services every eight minutes over four miles of track. Romford's tramways would essentially provide a local service. The trams would also allow residents "to get to Ilford and take advantage of the better train service", since twice as many trains stopped there as at Romford.[34] However, the major focus of local criticism was now directed at the proposal to run trams along the notoriously narrow High Street, and it was also claimed that the Market end of South Street lacked the requisite width. There were particular concerns about trams making a right-angled turn at the town's central point: "In Romford it was said that the North-street corner was the most dangerous corner in Essex." The "frontagers", as they were called, included many of the town's prominent businessmen and shopkeepers. They insisted that if the Empire Electric Light and Power Company wished to operate trams through the town, it should first widen the streets.[35]
The company tried to counter their objections, claiming that "it had always been a question whether tramways did not rather relieve congestion of traffic than increase it". This was almost entirely beside the point: much of the traffic on the main road consisted of farm waggons heading for London markets loaded with produce that was never going to be transferred to a tramcar. (Waggons slowed down trams on Ilford's High Road.) The Romford scheme identified no fewer than eleven pinch-points, stretches where the roadway would be less than the regulation nine-feet-six-inches wide on either side of the tramlines: one of these was at "Blacks Bridge", by Raphael Park. It was ingeniously claimed that traffic congestion in South Street would be relieved by the completion of a parallel route at Junction Road, a prediction that would perhaps have startled the residents of that leafy avenue. In the circumstances, the announcement that "[t]here were many places where the tramways were laid in narrower streets" probably sounded less like a reassurance than a threat. In reference to Romford's key bottleneck, the company simply disclaimed responsibility: "as to High-street it would be in the power of the road authority to say that before tramcars were run by the company the roadway must be widened".[36] The Romford Tramways Act duly passed into law, but the final decision was firmly knocked back to the Urban District Council. Given the intensity of local opposition, the project remained in limbo.
There were no doubt further intense negotiations before the Empire Electric Light and Power Company put forward put forward a considerably revised scheme in November 1903. The proposed tram network would be considerably extended, with one new line along Victoria Road into the growing suburb of Heath Park, and another down the continuation of South Street and on to Hornchurch. There would still be narrow stretches of road, but powers were sought to widen specific stretches of High Street and South Street. The Urban District Council had now taken to meeting in secret session, but it was rumoured that "there is not a single Councillor who does not desire to see electric tramways in Romford" and that "strenuous efforts" were being made "to secure most advantageous terms for the townspeople". As one journalist optimistically concluded "there does seem to be some possibility of the present generation enjoying trips to Raphael Park by electric car".[37] However, the prediction did not come to fruition. No doubt, potential passenger numbers in the small town of Romford and the village of Hornchurch could hardly support the planned enlargement of the network, while acquiring legal powers to undertake road-widening schemes was not the same as possessing the resources to tackle the work. There was a further attempt in 1905 to deal with the road-widening issues, but the project was wound up three years later.[38] It is worth noting that there was a considerable difference between running trams to Romford and operating trams through Romford. The projected 1885 horse-drawn tramway project would have stopped on the west side of the river Rom, avoiding the need to invade the sinuous High Street. By gifting his lake to the community, Raphael had practically ensured that the network would have to extend to the gates of the new public park. And that more or less ensured that the trams would never run.
South Street, Romford, looking south towards the railway station. This photograph was taken in the 1920s, before the street was widened. Motor buses first appeared locally soon after the start of the Gidea Park project. With care, they could navigate the narrow stretch, but trams on fixed rails would have been a hazard. The town's central crossroads is behind the camera. In 1911, George Tasker's local guidebook warned that, as a result of "the general increase in vehicular traffic",the four-way junction was "not sufficient to carry the continuous stream without congestion or danger". Photograph kindly supplied by Havering Libraries Local Studies.
Herbert Raphael disengages from Romford, 1899-1903 What of Herbert Raphael and his plans for Gidea Hall during these frustrating years? We need here to focus on the wider political scene and go back to the fraught times of the eighteen-nineties. The Liberal Party, of which he was an active member, was badly divided after the retirement of its titanic leader, Mr Gladstone, in 1894, and it was no surprise that the Liberals lost the general elections of 1895 and 1900. On what may be loosely described as its right wing were a group of younger politicians called the Liberal Imperialists. The name did not suggest, as it would today, that they planned to dominate and enslave the planet. Rather, they recognised that Britain's position in the world was threatened by the rise of Germany (a united country since 1871), the explosive growth of the United States and the haphazard modernisation of Russia. To maintain its status as a great power, Britain needed the support of its Empire and, in particular, control over India (a serious and indeed inescapable responsibility, since there did not seem to be much alternative to the Raj). This, in turn, required the security of the two sea-routes to the sub-continent, one though the Suez Canal, which explained British involvement in the affairs of Egypt, and the other around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern end of Africa. The Liberal Imperialists aimed to reassure moderate voters that their party could be trusted to form a responsible government, one that would not be dominated by the party's left wing, which traditionally denounced an assertive position in the world as 'jingoism'. The radicals dismissed their rivals as the Lib Imps (a nickname further telescoped by the contemptuous into the Limps). Nonetheless, the Lib Imps included some of the party's rising stars, such as H.H. Asquith, who became Prime Minister in 1908, and Sir Edward Grey who, as Foreign Secretary in 1914, reluctantly took Britain into the First World War. It should be stressed that, although Herbert Raphael was not a member of parliament, he took part in some of the innermost Lib Imp discussions of strategy.[39]
The Lib Imps also sought to find formulae that might get their party off the hook of its awkward commitment to Irish Home Rule. In 1886, Gladstone had attempted to establish a subordinate parliament that would govern Ireland but would still operate within the United Kingdom. Like all devolution projects, his Home Rule bill involved constitutional conjuring tricks and his attempts to square circles did not inspire universal confidence. Many of his former followers left the party to become Liberal Unionists and, by 1895, they were indistinguishable from the Conservatives. The seceders included some of its wealthiest members, an exodus that helps to explain how Herbert Raphael came to be the Liberal candidate for the Romford division of Essex in the eighteen-nineties. In those days, candidates were expected to pay their own campaign costs. With the mushroom growth of suburban development, the Romford constituency had the largest electorate in the United Kingdom.[40] Only a wealthy man could afford to fight the seat and – thanks to the family bank – Herbert Raphael was very rich indeed.
The Lib Imps adopted two strategies to evade their party's inconvenient attachment to Irish Home Rule. Lord Rosebery, briefly Gladstone's successor as Prime Minister in 1894-5, argued that a local legislature in Dublin was not just an Irish question but an issue for the whole of the United Kingdom. This meant that the project needed the approval of the "predominant partner", England, and it was clear that no such endorsement was forthcoming. The implication of Rosebery's formula was that Irish Nationalists should behave themselves in order to gain English confidence, a strategy that would in fact allow the English to forget their inconvenient neighbours altogether. (It did not appeal to the boisterous Home Rulers, who needed to make a noise in order to show their voters that they were fighting for Ireland.) A second line of Lib Imp argument took the view that the mighty Gladstone had, of course, been right in principle to contend for Home Rule (Gladstone made a habit of being right about everything), but that he had been mistaken in his tactics. Instead of unveiling a full-scale Irish parliament with all its bells and whistles, it would be better to move gradually towards self-government in the sister island. In 1898, the Unionist (Conservative) government established elected county councils – ten years after they had been introduced in England, Scotland and Wales – and the Lib Imps argued that these should be regarded as nursery schools for the development of political responsibility. The devolved government structure might eventually be crowned by the establishment of an Irish parliament, but that might well be somebody else's problem in another generation. As it happened, the Home Rule party had been angrily divided since the downfall and death of its own great leader, Parnell, in 1890-1, and its leaders spent a good deal of time abusing each other, a situation that did not inspire British confidence in Irish capacity.
In the eighteen-nineties, Herbert Raphael had been regarded as "a strong Home Ruler" who had "made Home Rule for Ireland a plank in his platform" at the 1897 Romford by-election. He had also supported the claims of Catholic schools for State funding. In defiance of Cardinal Vaughan, head of the Church of Rome in England, who had enjoined his flock to vote Conservative, ninety percent of the Catholic vote in the Romford constituency was reported to have gone to Raphael.[41] However, war in South Africa, which broke out in 1899, dramatically changed his attitude to Ireland. Most British politicians would have been willing to ignore the two small Boer republics in the landlocked interior of South Africa: in the Transvaal, a quarter of a million white settlers ruled over two-thirds of a million Africans, and numbers were even smaller in the Orange Free State. The complication was the discovery in 1886 of massive gold deposits around Johannesburg, which rapidly created a new deep-mining industry. Radicals claimed that sinister interests were manipulating an aggressive British Empire to grab control of the goldfields, a ploy that was hardly necessary since the mines were largely controlled by British investors anyway. More alarming to Imperial policy-makers were the truculent policies of the Transvaal's grim President, Paul Kruger, who used his bonanza revenues to buy German armaments which could only make sense if he planned to go on to the offensive against the British colonies of the Cape and Natal. Indeed, fighting actually broke out in 1899 when the Boers invaded the Empire territory of the Cape Colony: regarding war as inevitable, Kruger decided to attack before British reinforcements could make the three-week voyage from their northern hemisphere bases. The opening months of the Boer War were a deeply worrying time for patriots like Herbert Raphael. Thanks to poor British generalship, there seemed a real threat that the Boers would capture Cape Town, the naval base that was the pivot of British dominance in the southern oceans – the key to the route to India.
The Liberal party split, with the Lib Imps supporting the war. At Westminster, John Dillon, the leader of the largest faction of Irish Nationalist MPs, criticised the government for the confrontational diplomacy which he alleged had caused the war. However unpopular in time of national crisis, his campaign was a legitimate function of parliamentary opposition. But some of his more extreme supporters went further and openly expressed their hope that the Boers would win. A month into the war, Herbert Raphael exploded with anger, in the very British gesture of a letter to The Times. Raphael complained that Dillon had failed to condemn "the treasonable and disloyal speeches recently made in Ireland by his followers", and his silence could only mean that he endorsed their anti-British views. "I have been for ten years a persistent advocate of Home Rule for Ireland ... honestly believing that the loyal co-operation of the Liberal party in satisfaction of the real and sentimental wrongs towards Ireland would heal all sores of the past and produce a generation of men loyal to their Queen and country, as has been the case in Canada, Australia, and other parts of our Empire." He now realised that he had been "entirely wrong, and that apparently nothing can eradicate the hatred of England by the Irish. I am profoundly impressed with the danger to this country of handing over the government of Ireland to a set of men who have openly expressed their sympathy with our enemies, and their desire for our conquest by a country with which we are at war.... in future I shall be as strenuous in my resistance to any measure of Home Rule for Ireland as I have been in its advocacy in the past".[42]
Raphael's public outburst evidently reflected a deep sense of hurt patriotism, but it is also possible that he was acting as a proxy for more prominent Lib Imps, like Asquith and Edward Grey, signalling a warning to the Irish that they too might take the opportunity to dump their unenthusiastic commitment to Home Rule altogether. Certainly, when the Liberal party won a landslide majority in 1906, its leaders felt able to ignore their promises to Ireland: only when that majority ebbed away at two general elections in 1910 did dependence upon the Nationalists produce a new project for a parliament in Dublin.
However, at this point we may turn away from the larger political picture to review the impact of Herbert Raphael's 1900 denunciation of Irish Nationalism on his position in the Romford constituency. His apostasy was censured by party activists in East Ham, especially a clique at Beckton, a working-class district and the location of a major gasworks. This was a radical area in politics: nearby West Ham South had elected Keir Hardie as Britain's first Labour MP in 1892. It was also a district with a sizeable Irish Catholic population.[43] The local party committee announced that they would oppose Raphael's re-adoption as the Liberal candidate for the Romford division. To Raphael's fury, they sent a deputation to party headquarters demanding a replacement, "ignoring my past services to the party in the constituency" – by which he presumably the cash that he had injected into local Liberal funds. Meanwhile, in the early months of 1900, the arthritic Imperial juggernaut was mobilised and gradually turned the tide of the war in South Africa, rolling back the Boers to their own territory. In June, British troops marched into the Transvaal's two principal towns, Johannesburg and Pretoria, and thousands of demoralised enemy laid down their arms. In fact, the conflict would continue through a further two years of grisly guerrilla warfare, but the apparent victory prompted Lord Salisbury's Conservative government to call a general election, a cynical but undoubtedly effective move to profit from the wave of patriotic enthusiasm. The divided Liberals obviously faced (and duly received) a hammering in the 'Khaki election', and there was no prospect of the party gaining Romford.
Following his narrow defeat at the 1897 by-election, Herbert Raphael had pledged himself to fight and win the seat at the next general election although – to underline his commitment – he hinted that he had turned down other opportunities to enter parliament. However, as Britain entered the 1900 general election campaign, he sprang a surprise. Although he had – so it seemed – beaten off his critics, he dramatically announced that their "gross ingratitude" made it impossible for him to contest the seat again. He placed the blame firmly upon his accusers. "This is another and glaring example of the methods which have wrecked the Liberal party, if a man agrees with the party on 99 points and does not see eye to eye with a section of the party on the 100th, that section will revenge itself, by handing over the constituency to the Tories." The argument sounded plausible, so long as it was assumed that Ireland was just one among a broad range of issues in the political arena. But for the party's radical wing, faithful to the memory of Mr Gladstone, as well as to their Irish allies, it was no more possible to be a Liberal candidate without backing Home Rule than it would be to become a bishop without believing in God. "I think I could have won the seat", Raphael insisted, "and to East Ham and Beckton must be awarded the proud claim of having handed over the constituency to the Tories".[44]
With this parting short, Herbert Raphael decamped to South Derbyshire, where – despite his late arrival – he achieved a slight 'swing' against the government, and lost by only 366 votes. South Derbyshire was obviously a winnable seat, if only because the local Irish Catholic population was small. In October 1902, the local Liberals unanimously adopted Herbert Raphael as their prospective candidate, and he decided to move to the constituency. Four months later, Romford's Golf Club gave him a farewell dinner, and it is clear that he departed a popular figure.[45] However, his relocation subtly changed his relationship with Romford and opened new possibilities for the Gidea Hall estate, for he no longer needed to balance his commercial interests against the need for to win political support or community popularity. Throughout the tramways saga, he kept a low profile, relying upon his goodwill gesture of endowing the local park to shape the design of the planned network. (Investment for the project apparently came from the Paxmans, a family of Colchester industrialists, and he was probably not involved.) His relations with the Golf Club remained positive since, on becoming its landlord through the purchase of the Gidea Hall estate, he and his wife had pledged that the course would remain undisturbed during their lifetimes. Thus he could move ahead with an experiment in suburban development without the golfers fearing that they would be evicted to make way for some later phase in the project.
Squirrels Heath City?[46] Herbert Raphael's comment about future house-building at the town park's opening ceremony in 1904 confirms that the development of the Gidea Hall estate remained his ultimate aim, but uncertainty about the local tramways project delayed any practical move. However, the years between 1901, when he offered Romford the gift of the lake, and 1909, when he began planning Gidea Park, were not entirely wasted. The new element was the Garden City movement, a vision first put forward by the pioneer town-planner Ebenezer Howard in 1898, and popularised in his 1902 book, Garden Cities of To-Morrow. Inspired by William Blake's call to build Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land, Howard drew on the desire of the idealistic artist John Ruskin to replace the "festering and wretched suburb" with beautiful houses in clean streets, configured "so that from any part of the city perfectly fresh air and grass and sight of far horizon might be reachable in a few minutes' walk". His "Town-Country" project envisaged a city of 30,000 people built on a thousand-acre site that would be located at the core of a 6,000-acre estate, most of which would become peripheral parkland and sports grounds.[47] Herbert Raphael's project, of course, could only be on a much smaller scale: there was no room for Howard's broad boulevards on the 480 acres of Gidea Hall that he had purchased in 1898. However, if building options were severely constrained, the available site was Howardian in miniature conception, since it did have a public park on one side and a golf course on the other. The "Town-Country" sleight-of-hand called for large-scale tree planting, and Gidea Hall's park, landscaped in the eighteenth century, was well supplied with decorative clumps. (Gidea Park used earth-moving equipment to shift those that were inconveniently located.) In 1903, work began on Letchworth Garden City. Three years later, Hampstead Garden Suburb was launched. Herbert Raphael was one of the investors. By 1909, both projects were becoming a reality on the ground, and imitative schemes abounded. That year, Raphael formed the Gidea Park Development Company, incidentally coining a new English place-name.[48] Raphael's Hampstead contacts were mobilised to help launch the scheme. More generally, the Garden City movement provided a useful context for the presentation of a building scheme in a romantic and idealistic light. For instance, in 1910, Raphael sponsored competitions, complete with gold medals and cash prizes, ostensibly to encourage innovation by architects and builders, but which helpfully attracted design talent to the project. The following year, he emulated Letchworth in staging an Exhibition, inviting visitors to the estate to inspect its new approaches to domesticity. Officially, this event was run not by the company but by a committee, whose members (all of whom were declared to be Vice-Presidents) included the Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster, the Anglican diocesan bishop, as well as politicians from both parties: Raphael even managed to recruit the Conservative grandee and former Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, who happened to be his constituent in South Derbyshire. Other big names included the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin (famouslfor being utterly forgettable), the Nobel Prize winning scientist, Lord Rayleigh, and the founder of the Boy Scout movement, Sir Robert Baden-Powell. From the world of architecture came Sir Aston Webb, who was completing the national memorial to Queen Victoria in front of Buckingham Palace at the time, while Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells represented literature: there was even an economist, Alfred Marshall. An elaborate Exhibition guide stressed "the infinite variety that will be possible in House building when skilful architects are employed to build the new Town-planned Suburbs of London".[49] In keeping with the general attitude of high-mindedness, any profits from the sale of the catalogue would go to a hospital fund. Nevertheless, for all its affectation of idealism, the Romford Garden Suburb Exhibition was a sales fair.
A solution had also been found to the problem of access. As the Romford projects had demonstrated, the south-west Essex suburbs had been swept by something like tramway mania in the opening years of the twentieth century – but it is possible that, by 1909, the ardour had cooled a little. Trams were reliable, reasonably comfortable and safe (unless you crossed the tracks in front of them), but they were slow. In 1903, the ten-mile journey from Chadwell Heath to Aldgate took one hour and forty minutes, which included time needed to change services at local authority boundaries. Hence, middle-distance tram travel "cannot be recommended to those in a hurry".[50] Had Romford's tramway system come into being, commuters would probably have been able to cover the three-quarters of a mile from Hare Street to the Market Place in something like five to eight minutes. Unless there was an immediate connection on the Oldchurch branch, it would then have been simplest to stroll the five hundred yards along South Street to Romford station. The promoters' argument that local people would use the network to take advantage of the superior train service at Ilford sounded plausible, but this would have involved a journey of thirty to forty minutes, hardly an appealing addition to daily morning and evening travel.
The Romford area on the eve of the Garden Suburb project. The eastern end of the Gidea Hall estate had become a golf course; the western side was now Raphael Park. Romford's railway station was inconveniently far from the planned housing development, but Raphael persuaded the Great Eastern Railway company to open a new station at Squirrels Heath.
By 1909, Raphael had decided that his Gidea Hall development needed its own railway station. Ebenezer Howard had emphasised the need for a peripheral railway line as part of his ideal Garden City although, of course, he envisaged an integrated community with its own industrial zone. One of the advantages of Letchworth was that it straddled the Cambridge-to-King's Cross line, and the new 'city' soon acquired its own station.[51] The Gidea Hall project had to make do with less convenient access. A leafy byway called Balgores Lane headed south from Hare Street and crossed the Great Eastern Railway main line about half a mile south of the hamlet, in the thinly peopled district of Squirrels Heath. A short distance to the east, a large engine repair works had been erected in the early eighteen-forties, one of the earliest railway engineering buildings in the world. The works had been moved to Stratford in 1847, but the Romford Railway Factory, as it was known, was adapted to manufacture tarpaulins to cover goods wagons. Its big advantage was that it was equipped with sidings, which could provide off-track parking (the technical term is 'stabling') for suburban trains as they waited to return to Liverpool Street, making the new station a suitable terminus for short-range services.[52] The other incentive for railway bosses was that Raphael was prepared to meet the costs of building a new station.
Squirrels Heath was about half way between the existing stations at Romford and Harold Wood, an important consideration in the era of steam power, when engines needed adequate time to pick up speed and to slow down and stop. The major construction challenge was that the new station had to be sited in a deep cutting, which required a good deal of earth-moving. Permission was secured from Romford Urban District Council in August 1909 to construct a footbridge and, the following month, Raphael handed over £500 to the Great Eastern Railway Company, apparently as the first instalment to cover building costs. The foundations were in place by November 1909, and the station opened for traffic a year later, in December 1910. One grudging admirer conceded that it looked "quite picturesque with its setting of steep banks of velvety greensward". Another observer more enthusiastically praised its miniature ticket hall. "The new station gives such promise of structural beauty that it is already evident it will make its near neighbours of Harold Wood and Romford look small and dingy by contrast."[53] The fastest services could reach Liverpool Street in twenty-five minutes, but most trains took about twice that time.[54]
The 1911 Gidea Park Exhibition guide showed how the new station had been squeezed into a railway cutting. Already, Herbert Raphael was attempting to shoulder aside the historic name of Squirrels Heath. In the middle distance the Great Eastern Railway's tarpaulin factory can just be seen. Its sidings made the station a convenient terminus for Liverpool Street suburban services.
However, the claim that the new station was within 25 minutes of the City was exaggerated. Two morning commuter services took just over half an hour. Most trains were slower – and Liverpool Street was not the most conveniently located of London termini. This suggests one reason why the development of Gidea Park was slower than its promoters had hoped.
The problem of travel to London was thus resolved by the establishment of the new station. However, there remained the question of access from the new subdivision to Squirrels Heath. The shady thoroughfare of Balgores Lane was nostalgically recalled by a local rambling enthusiast as "a very popular rural walk when the trees were in leaf and the birds sang the livelong day". It would have been less attractive as a year-round approach to a suburban train service: a photograph from 1910 shows it to have been narrow, with no pavements, and it almost certainly carried a good deal of local traffic.[55] Fortunately, a solution appeared at just the right moment. At the northern (Hare Street) end of the lane stood a Victorian gentleman's residence, Balgores House, which unexpectedly came on the market in 1909. Attached to it were 63 acres of land, which conveniently stretched to the railway line. The estate was sold privately in November 1909, and there can be little doubt that either Raphael or his Gidea Park company were the purchasers. Parallel to the existing lane, a broad suburban thoroughfare, Squirrels Heath Avenue, was laid out in the fields to the south of the hamlet of Hare Street, and both here and in Balgores Lane, modern architect-designed houses were erected, although they did not officially form part of the Garden Suburb. Commuters could thus stroll to the station without being forced into dripping hedgerows by passing farm waggons. Squirrels Heath Avenue was planned to open out into Balgores Square, a huge station forecourt designed as a shopping piazza, colonnaded on three sides, only a forlorn fragment of which was ever erected. During the 1911 Exhibition, Balgores House was used as tea rooms.[56]
Balgores Lane, looking south from the hamlet of Hare Street towards Squirrels Heath. This 1910 photograph gives a glimpse of a charming country lane – but with no footpaths and plenty of traffic. It did not provide ideal access to the new railway station.
Squirrels Heath Avenue was so named for the obvious reason that it led to the new station at Squirrels Heath. But Herbert Raphael was obviously determined that the newly invented designation of his Garden Suburb should be included. This led to a very small station acquiring a very long name: "Squirrels Heath and Gidea Park". The project quickly laid claim to the identity of the wayside halt. As the Exhibition catalogue put it: "The building of the Exhibition Station at Gidea Park by the Great Eastern Railway opens up an almost forgotten corner of Essex, rich in historic traditions and natural beauty."[57] The claim in 1910 that the new station would be "within five minutes' walk" of the new suburb was exaggerated; by 1913, the company's advertisements contained the staccato inaccuracy: "station on estate", which represented a slight bending of the truth.[58] In October of that year, the names were reversed. "The Great Eastern Railway Company have gone to considerable expense in making a change in the name of one of their stations – a change so slight that at first sight it seems no change at all. When the new station near Romford was built a year or two ago it was called Squirrels Heath and Gidea Park, the former being the old name of the district, and the latter being the name given to the new garden city. Evidently somebody was not pleased, for the railway powers have decided that it shall in future be called Gidea Park and Squirrels Heath, pride of place being taken by the garden city." It is not difficult to identify that "somebody" as Herbert Raphael, and it is likely that he paid for the costs of rebranding. Some long-established local residents criticised the change, "pointing out that the name Squirrels Heath is older, and that it was actually the name of the very spot on which the station stands." An Essex journalist neutrally concluded that the Great Eastern Railway Company had perhaps been influenced by the fact "that probably more people live the Gidea Park side of the line". The new name caught on with remarkable speed. Early in 1915, ten people were killed in a train crash at Ilford when an express ran into a local service. Newspaper reports comfortably referred to "the Gidea Park train" without feeling the need to explain.[59] During the First World War, the district's other mansion was taken over by the Army, and became known as Hare Hall Camp, Gidea Park. As bricks and mortar surged over the fields beyond Romford in the nineteen-twenties and -thirties, so the streets that rose around Gidea Park station naturally adopted the address, both for convenience and for cachet. Indeed, Hare Street and Squirrels Heath, places-names of medieval pedigree, were virtually obliterated by a name coined in 1909 – and the specific identity of Herbert Raphael's Garden Suburb became half-forgotten too.
Gidea Park takes shape In 1909, plans for the layout of Gidea Park were published. Essentially, the area available for development was a relatively narrow south-to-north rectangle, hemmed in by Raphael Park to the west and the golf course to the east. For all the grandiose talk of a suburb that would eventually house 20,000 people, the project would be better described by the modern North American term, 'subdivision'.[60] (Although a grandiose mall was contemplated at Squirrels Heath station, there was no provision for a church, school or shops in the Garden Suburb itself: Kelly's Directory of 1908 lists two shopkeepers in the nearby hamlet of Hare Street who, no doubt, blessed the name of Herbert Raphael.) There was some more Gidea Hall land to the east of the golf course, and the competitions for the Exhibition included prizes for the two best town-planning designs that would eventually incorporate this area.[61] It is impossible to say whether an eastward extension was seriously intended but failed to materialise because of the First World War.
A handsome shopping piazza was planned alongside Squirrels Heath station. Only one forlorn corner was ever built.
Necessarily, the layout of the initial subdivision had to be ladder-shaped, essentially based on two uprights and a series of linking cross streets. One of the mistakes made at Letchworth had been the use of grid-iron patterns. At Hampstead, the streets were laid out in curves, but there the site was undulating and it was possible to exploit the contours. The Gidea Hall site "had only slight variations in level", so that one of the main determinants of the plan was "the utilisation of the existing lines of fine hedge-row elms". The central stretch of Parkway, on the west side, ran in a straight line along the boundary with Raphael Park, but its regimentation was disguised by limiting construction to one side. Heath Drive, to the east, followed the sinuous edge of the golf course, and houses also faced open ground. A visitor from New Zealand was impressed by the layout. "The new streets at Gidea Park are not the hacked-out traffic ways of ordinary estate development. They have charming turns and sweeps among the trees, more in the character of country lanes than of regular roadways. The estate was not cleared of trees just because a town was to be built. Houses came, but the avenues and belts of stately elms remain. The fascinating shades of the houses brought new tints to the landscape, but its natural colours have not departed."[62]
Shaving off the golf course and Raphael Park from the Gidea Hall estate left only a narrow south-to-north corridor in which to build the Garden Suburb. Its southern extension to the new railway station further elongated the site.
Raphael used his political connections to persuade the President of the Local Government Board, John Burns, to set the estate's foundation stone in July 1910. Britain was in the grip of a divisive political confrontation over the powers of the House of Lords, and the minister "motored down after an all-night sitting of the House of Commons". Burns had ministerial responsibility for housing questions, but there was some paradox in recruiting the first working man to achieve cabinet rank (he had left school at the age of ten) to launch a very middle-class residential project. Nonetheless, the minister made the right noises, stressing that 15,000 people (other accounts said 'families') were moving every year from crowded inner London to new suburbs on the fringes of the metropolitan area. He wanted them to live in "something more tolerable, more decent, more beautiful, and more human than many of the collections of houses of all sorts that had been dumped in and around London during the past 100 years." Gidea Park, he insisted, "was something more than a new environment for a privileged section of the community", although he does seem to have explained how this would be the case.[63]
Then, on 24 August 1910, came the dramatic announcement that Herbert Raphael was providing one thousand guineas (£1,050) to fund competitions in connection with the planning and building of the estate, focusing upon four-bedroom houses to cost no more than £500 to erect, and three-bedroom "cottages" within a £375 budget. Gold medals would be awarded to the best builder and the two best architects, along with other cash prizes. The emphasis was upon the provision of quality homes within mid-range middle-class budgets, intended for professional families with moderate Incomes.[64] Once again, Raphael seems to have been using his cheque-book to kick-start the project. It is likely that only a small number of houses were already under construction. The Exhibition catalogue would state that one, priced at £850 (outside the specified price range), had been in progress in June 1910: a year later, twelve properties were excluded from the Exhibition, probably because they had been commenced independently. The timing of the announcement, when many professionals were on their summer holidays, suggests that Raphael felt that the project was flagging and needed to be rescued. Architects entering the competition were expected to work with builders to turn their designs into bricks and mortar. The Exhibition catalogue also claimed that many of the homes had been sold to the architects and builders, a clear sign that they recognised value for money. However, construction costs were probably guaranteed by the Gidea Park company (or by Herbert Raphael personally) for, without such a safety net, it seems unlikely that so much interest could have been generated in such a short time. Although the closing date for submissions was 31 October – a mere ten weeks – there were around one hundred entrants, individual architects as well as partnerships and practices. A prominent architect, Guy Dawber, was recruited as one of the judges (along with the editors of The Builder and the Architectural Review). He had contributed to Hampstead, and Gidea Park would to some extent reflect his belief that the Cotswold cottage was the ideal English home.[65]
Given the short time-frame, it is likely that most of the contestants submitted plans from their existing portfolios. Indeed, many had contributed to Hampstead, and no doubt welcomed the further opportunity to turn their ideas into reality and, hence, appeal to other clients. Two of the most notable architects who had taken part in that project, Edwin Lutyens and C.F.A. Voysey, did not compete at Gidea Park, presumably because they needed neither exposure nor medals. On the other hand, Raphael's project gave an early opportunity to a young Welsh architect, Clough Williams-Ellis, who would go to build Portmeirion, the fantasy Italianate village on the coast of Merioneth. By the time of the 1911 Exhibition, 140 houses had been completed. At least one visitor was enchanted. "The suburb looked like a village out of a child's picture-book. Houses along the same road differed riotously in shape; nothing more different from the monotonous outlines of villadom could be conceived."[66] By contrast, one modern critic has regretted the lack of "any overall architectural consistency, with picturesque English vernacular and its Neo-Georgian sibling existing in slightly uneasy harmony".[67] But Gidea Park did provide opportunities for innovation. More than twenty years old, the Arts and Crafts movement was in danger of becoming mainstream and clichéd. Some architects were tempted to tweak and exaggerate its motifs, so that the suburb's relatively small houses were burdened with elephantine chimneys and pouting porches. Reed Pond Walk, perhaps Gidea Park's most quintessential street, is indeed at first sight a fairyland agglomeration of magic buildings – but somehow it also teeters on the verge of a bewildering nightmare.
A cottage-style house at Gidea Park. Here the architect Arthur H. Moore presented a conventional 3-bedroom house within a rustic format. Other designs were more fantastical, and may also have been less liveable. See also "The idealised homes of Gidea Park: some images from the 1911 Exhibition": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/419-gidea-images.
The establishment of Gidea Park coincided with the first stirrings of two important developments, the decline of domestic service and the rise of the internal combustion engine. The planning of the suburb took some account of the first but none at all of the second. Victorians had long grumbled about the shortcomings of their maids and cooks but, by the early twentieth century, the core of the 'servant problem' was not so much about finding efficient staff but lay rather in persuading young working-class women to undertake such drudgery at all. One of the larger Gidea Park houses was "designed to suit the needs of the typical suburban family keeping one servant", but most were planned – usually without comment – to meet the requirements of a household "where domestic servants are not of necessity employed". One architect, Cecil Hignett, who also practised at Letchworth, made the point explicit. "The conditions of this competition suggested the possibility of dispensing with the servant problem, and much consideration has been given to the saving of labour throughout, so that a resident maid should not be essential".[68] There was a mains gas supply throughout the Garden Suburb for cooking and supplementary heating, but only a few houses were wired for electricity, which was evidently not expected to be provided in the near future.
But Gidea Park was planned just too soon to confront the advent of the motor car: between 1908 and 1914, the number of private vehicles more than trebled.[69] However, the automobile was still the toy of the very rich, whereas Gidea Park was aimed at the comfortably prosperous who were not yet behind the wheel. In fact, the Garden Suburb was launched at almost the last point in time when planners could ignore the private motorist. Even a few years later, some at least of the larger homes would have been provided with garages, an arrangement that would have had implications for the overall building density. The internal combustion engine was about to open up travel options in another way too. In September 1912, a long-distance motor-bus service began between Gidea Park and Bow Road in the East End, where passengers could connect with London's underground railway network. The fare, sixpence each way, was cheaper than a third-class return train ticket to Liverpool Street (one shilling and ninepence), and the bus was almost certainly faster than any tram and probably made fewer stops. It cost a mere halfpenny to ride by bus from Hare Street to the Market Place, effectively solving the problem of access to Romford station.[70] Had Raphael waited four years, the Squirrels Heath station might not have proved necessary.
Through the summer and autumn of 1911, the public was invited to venture down the Liverpool Street line and experience a "Genuine Exhibition of Town Planning and Improved House Building": the ambiguous adjective "genuine" was soon dropped.[71] Visitors were urged to sample an "Unfamiliar Essex", very different from the flat marshland of popular imagination. Beyond Romford, "the landscape changes altogether.... The air blows in one direction from the forest land of Essex, and in the other from the North Sea. No possibility remains of a similar discovery of real country being repeated within the half-hour radius of the Mansion House." This was truly rural England: three hunts and a pack of harriers met nearby.[72] There is no doubt Gidea Park attracted wide interest: a delegation of sixty town-planners from Germany explored the Garden Suburb, while an Australian visitor waxed lyrical about the contrast with metropolitan sprawl. "After a short train journey through a region of semi-detached abominations, you arrive at a point where London imperceptibly begins to merge into the country. In a few years the speculative builder would have defaced the fields with rows of jerry built 'desirable residences', and straightened out the lanes into long monotonous lines." By contrast, "Gidea Park will always remain beautiful and healthy".[73]
The bird's-eye view of Gidea Park from the 1911 Exhibition catalogue. Houses erected along the access routes south of the main road to Squirrels Heath station were not part of the formal display. The hamlet of Hare Street is marked (but not named) at the bottom right corner of the map. Raphael Park and the golf course frame the Garden Suburb.
Of course, the Exhibition was a sales fair: Herbert Raphael was entitled to recoup his investment. But Gidea Park retained a patina of paternalist social reform. Houses were sold freehold, unlike the anonymous estates of Ilford where developers offered leaseholds in order to retain an income from ground rents.[74] Generous mortgage terms were on offer: "It will cost less to purchase a well-built, comfortable house by instalments than to pay rent for an ordinary suburban house." Building plots were also available, and the Exhibition set out to lure impulse buyers with special pay-later terms which could be secured with a £5 deposit. The Gidea Park Company was even prepared to give each customer a choice of architects' designs, after which it "will arrange to lend the purchaser the entire cost of building a house for himself, repayable by instalments extending over 10, 15 or 20 years".[75] As part of his aim to build a community, in October 1912 Raphael handed over one half of Gidea Hall to become a clubhouse for estate residents, complete with two billiard tables, a gymnasium and a children's room full of toys.[76]
Despite all the effort and promotion, sales were hardly brisk. In 1912, the Company issued a new catalogue, A Home in the Country, and booked display space at an Exhibition in London's White City – a slightly incongruous venue, as the event featured the cities of Spain and Italy. At that point, it was claimed that "some 130 houses had been disposed of, in addition to many plots of land upon which homeseekers are carrying out their own ideas of what suits their convenience and taste in the way of a house". A year later, Gidea Park was still advertising an "[u]nrivalled choice of building sites, bungalows and week-end cottages built to order. Houses of any size to suit purchases will be built on instalment system under which repayments do not exceed rents."[77]
The blunt truth was that many people did not wish to live in a social experiment on top of a golf course.[78] In 1916, Sidney Farnes, an accountant at an East End brewery, moved his family to Gidea Park from the crowded streets of Leytonstone. His five-year-old son Kenneth was so disoriented by his new surroundings that he pleaded to be allowed to move back to England. Fortunately, he soon discovered that the green spaces of the Garden Suburb were ideal for playing scratch games of cricket with other urchins, and he took the first steps towards becoming a legendary Essex and England fast bowler.[79] In 1912, the Company insisted that it was confident "that the Gidea Park Garden City will attain a strength in the matter of population which will place it at the head of such places within 13 miles of London".[80] In the event, the original subdivision barely expanded.
To accommodate the motor vehicle and relieve unemployment, Lloyd George's postwar government began construction of a new highway, Eastern Avenue, that skirted the northern side of Romford and cut off the Garden Suburb from any possible expansion to the north. Raphael died in 1924. The Gidea Hall mansion fell into disrepair and was demolished in 1930.[81] Four years later, The Gidea Park Ltd company held a 'Modern Homes' Exhibition to promote flat roofs and concrete construction: perhaps mercifully, it made much less impact than its forerunner in 1911.[82]
In fact, the miniature subdivision became half-forgotten in the onrush of suburban bricks and mortar. Most notably, when Nikolaus Pevsner undertook his energetic research for the initial Essex volume of The Buildings of England in 1953-4, he evidently did not know that an attempt had been made to emulate Hampstead in Romford's green and pleasant fields – and none of the local experts whom he consulted thought it worth mentioning the isolated gem that was Gidea Park. Omission from the original Pevsner – and, even more remarkably, from its first revised version in 1965 – marked a low point for the Garden Suburb.
By the nineteen-fifties, although Herbert Raphael's Garden Suburb was still cushioned by Raphael Park and the golf course to west and east, it became surrounded by the bricks and mortar of interwar suburban development. In particular, the dual carriageway Eastern Avenue, constructed in the early 'twenties, had cut off any prospect of expansion to the north.
Nonetheless, Gidea Park was ripe for rediscovery. The Gidea Park and District Civic Society, formed in 1967, scored an early success in securing the recognition of the area as a Conservation Area and has continued to campaign in defence of the original project and its environs.[83] In the post-Pevsner revision of The Buildings of England series, Bridget Cherry and Charles O'Brien did full justice to the Gidea Park project in the London East volume, published in 2005,[84] while the commitment of the Borough of Havering was underlined by the publication, soon afterwards, of its detailed survey, Gidea Park Conservation Area: Character Appraisal and Management Proposals.[85] As Pevsner's continuators observed, Gidea Park was "neither as large, as well-known nor as well-regarded as the other artistically-minded garden suburbs in London". It is tempting to wonder how Herbert Raphael's project might have developed but for the First World War and the piecemeal suburban development that followed. The story of its fragile survival needs to be placed in the longer perspective of the obstacles that had delayed house-building in the park of the former Gidea Hall. And, insignificant though it might seem in comparison with Hampstead and Letchworth, it did at least generate a pronunciation puzzle, whether 'Gidea' should be treated as two syllables or three. That story will form a companion piece to this study.
ENDNOTES I owe thanks to Bernard Cope, Simon Donoghue and Andrew Jones for comments and information. House designs for the Garden Suburb are further discussed in "The idealised homes of Gidea Park: some images from the 1911 Exhibition": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/419-gidea-images. For a full list of Essex material on this website, see "Essex history on www.gedmartin.net":
https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/411-essex-history-on-www-gedmartin-net
[1] Ged Martin, "Gidea (Hall /Park): two syllables or three": [to follow]
[2] Chelmsford Chronicle, 21 July 1893.
[3] Information about Gidea Hall comes from Victoria County History of Essex, vii: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/essex/vol7/pp64-72.
[4] "The eastern side of the house was occupied by Mr. Hollebone, at a rental of £241 6s. 8d., and the western side by Mrs Sulman, at a rental of £192." Chelmsford Chronicle, 21 July 1893. Mrs Sulman had succeeded Herbert Tibbits, a physician in Wimpole Street who specialised in "electro-therapeutics", the use of galvanic batteries in the treatment of various afflictions. His decision to base himself at Gidea Hall suggests a grandiose personality, In 1891, he promoted an event at the Albert Hall that celebrated a futuristic novel by Bulwer-Lytton. The project bankrupted him, and his fortunes were not improved when he was struck off the medical register three years later for unprofessional conduct, which apparently involved acceptance of sponsorship by a company that manufactured batteries. Tibbits settled with his creditors in 1899, paying off his debts at one penny and three-farthings in the £, i.e. less than one percent of the total. "Clifford Frederick Hollebone, Gidea Hall, Romford, Essex, gentleman of no occupation" was also in the bankruptcy court in 1902: he was evidently related to Henry. Some of the tenants of Gidea Hall seem to have operated on the margins of respectability. London Gazette, 30 June 1899, 4124, 3 June 1902, 3648; https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/electro-therapeutic-cures-in-the-victorian-age/.
[5] Essex Newsman, 22 September 1917; Morning Post, 28 May 1888.
[6] Chelmsford Chronicle, 21 July 1893.
[7] Information about Romford comes from Victoria County History of Essex, vii: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/essex/vol7/pp56-64, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/essex/vol7/pp72-76 and https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/essex/vol7/pp76-82. Additional detail from Kelly's Directory of Essex, 1886.
[8] The main road close to the mansion was probably intrusive. A 1787 print described Gidea Hall as "a well-known object from the turnpike road; from whence, however, some judicious plantations now begin to conceal it". Stagecoach traffic disappeared with the coming of the railway in the 1840s, but Romford remained a major cattle market, with herds of beasts driven along the highway. At night, waggons carried fruit and vegetables to London markets.
[9] I have taken the details from the South Wales Daily Post, 29 October 1895. The online newspaper collection of the National Library of Wales is very user-friendly, and the Welsh dailies mostly took their news reports from agencies. This makes them a useful source. D. Bythell, "Balfour, Jabez Spencer", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He was not related to the Conservative politician and Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour.
[10] Chelmsford Chronicle, 12 June 1885.
[11] Essex Newsman, 24 September 1889.
[12] Chelmsford Chronicle, 3 October 1890.
[13] Chelmsford Chronicle, 21 July 1893, 8 October 1897.
[14] Herbert Raphael's father left £1.53 million at his death in 1899. Raphael's career as a private soldier was brief: he was commissioned, given Staff jobs and used his wealth to raise two battalions of riflemen. Raphael has no entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but S. D. Chapman, "Raphael, Henry Lewis (1832–1899)" is useful. His obituary appeared in The Times, 26 September 1924.
[15] Both national and local press pointedly refrained from describing Herbert Raphael as Jewish. However, it is possible that anti-Semitism contributed to his narrow defeat in the 1897 Romford by-election. The determined portrayal of the Gidea Park project as a philanthropic venture may also have been designed to counter pejorative stereotypes.
[16] During his 12 years in the House of Commons, Raphael does not seem to have delivered a formal maiden speech. However, he frequently asked questions on issues ranging from the powers of the House of Lords (in 1906, he argued that bills passed in consecutive sessions by the House of Commons should become law even if vetoed by the peers. A solution adopted – with safeguards – in 1911) to the problem of gooseberry mildew, which affected some Derbyshire fruit growers. His parliamentary career was remembered for "a trivial but amusing incident", During Lloyd George's 1909 budget speech, which piled taxes on the rich, Raphael received an urgent message that caused him to leave the chamber. "The whole House burst into delighted laughter, for it looked exactly as if the hon. member, who was known to be extremely rich, was too disgusted to hear any more about the burdens which Mr Lloyd George was piling on property." He was made a baronet in 1911.
[17] Chelmsford Chronicle, 2 February, 18 May 1894, 25 October 1895. The course, 2 miles and 1,167 yards in length, was soon recognised as one of the best in the London area.
[18] The Times, 6 November 1901; Chelmsford Chronicle, 3 June 1904.
[19] An attempt was made in the 1890s to cultivate bulrushes: £20 was spent on planting them. They were primarily intended for ornamentation and to attract wild ducks, although there may have been some commercial value, e.g. if sold to the railway factory at nearby Squirrels Heath which manufactured sacking. The potential income could hardly have been very great: in 1897, two labourers were prosecuted for stealing 200 bulrushes, valued at just five shillings. The accused were lucky to escape prison, first because they had threatened the police officer who apprehended them with a knife and, second, because they failed to appear in court. Chelmsford Chronicle, 23 July 1897.
[20] Chelmsford Chronicle, 10 June 1881, 5 January 1883.
[21] There were suicides in 1883 and 1894, the latter particularly distressing as the body was badly decomposed. Chelmsford Chronicle, 23 March 1883, 21 December 1894. A 24 year-old woman, unmarried and "far advanced in pregnancy", drowned herself in 1868. Earlier, in 1839 and 1840, the bodies of abandoned babies had been recovered from the lake. Chelmsford Chronicle, 18 December 1868, 12 July 1839; Essex Standard, 18 December 1840. There was another suicide in 1906: Glamorgan Gazette, 8 June 1906.
[22] Essex Newsman, 16 December 1871.
[23] Chelmsford Chronicle, 12 February 1886.
[24] Chelmsford Chronicle, 6 January 1893, 15 February 1895. A donation of £10, "part proceeds" of the skating fees, was made to the local cottage hospital in 1895: 1 March 1895.
[25] In 1867, 200 skaters had fallen into the lake in London's Regents Park when the ice gave way: there were 40 fatalities caused by drowning and hypothermia.
[26] It was called Raphael Park Lake as early as 1905, when a woman drowned in unexplained circumstances. Cardiff Evening Express, 16 May 1905.
[27] London Gazette, 27 November 1885, 5725-7; 25 November 1887, 6404.
[28] B. Evans, Romford, Collier Row & Gidea Park (Chichester, 1994), sec. 56; Victoria County History of Essex, v, 28; Ged Martin, "Whatever happened to Chadwell Street? Notes on the history of an Ilford high road settlement": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/323-whatever-happened-to-chadwell-street.
[29] The Times, 6 November 1901. In round figures, the population of Ilford grew from 11,000 in 1891 to 41,000 ten years later, before accelerating to 78,000 in 1911. Victoria County History of Essex, v, 28. In May 1903, an Ilford official stated that the "phenomenally successful" tram service was carrying 12,000 passengers a week. Chelmsford Chronicle, 15 May 1903.
[30] Chelmsford Chronicle, 3 June 1904 (italics added).
[31] London Gazette, 22 November 1901, 7836-9.
[32] Chelmsford Chronicle, 6, 13 December 1901.
[33] Essex Newsman, 18 January 1902. The vote was 1265 against and 642 for. The total against was considerably increased by the inclusion of 471 blank ballots, which were deemed to have rejected the scheme.
[34] London Gazette, 21 November 1902, 7746-9; Chelmsford Chronicle, 15, 22 May 1903. There were four tracks between Liverpool Street and Ilford, but only two to Romford and beyond. Hence Ilford was the terminus for most suburban services.
[35] Chelmsford Chronicle, 16 January, 22 May 1903.
[36] Chelmsford Chronicle, 15 May 1903.
[37] London Gazette, 24 November 1903, 7577-81; Chelmsford Chronicle, 5 February 1904.
[38] London Gazette, 21 November 1905, 8079-80; 8 May 1908, 3415.
[39] H.C.G. Matthew, The Liberal Imperialists... (Oxford, 1973), esp. 50n, 87.
[40] By 1906, Romford contained 45,579 voters. At the other extreme, Kilkenny City had 1,533. Thus a vote in Kilkenny was 'worth' 29.7 times more than a vote in Romford.
[41] Freeman's Journal (Sydney), 3 April 1897.
[42] The Times, 20 October 1900. Raphael seems to have used "sentimental" to refer to Irish grievances that were based on emotion rather than rational argument. He did not imply the modern usage of "silly" or "embarrassing". His use of "conquest" was exaggerated: extreme Irish nationalists wanted the Boers to defeat British troops but did not dream of them storming London.
[43] A large Catholic church had been built at nearby Silvertown between 1887 and 1892 to serve the local population. A Catholic school that opened in 1889 was enlarged in 1895 and replaced by new premises in 1902. It could accommodate 300 children. Victoria County History of Essex, vi, 32, 39; Kelly's Directory of Essex, 1908, 246.
[44] The Times, 11 August 1900; H. Pelling, The Social Geography of British Elections (London, 1967), 207.
[45] The Times, 21 October 1902; Essex Newsman, 7 February 1903. He revisited for the inauguration of Raphael Park in 1904.
[46] Headline in the Chelmsford Chronicle, 9 September 1910. The name did not catch on.
[47] E. Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow (London, 1902), esp. 20-7.
[48] There were several changes in the company structure that owned the project, which are outlined by L.J. Leicester on https://gpadcs.org/?page_id=132. These were probably intended to allow Raphael to transfer ownership of the Gidea Hall estate while protecting himself from suspicions that he was copying Jabez Balfour's corrupt practices.
[49] The Book of the Exhibition of Houses and Cottages: Romford Garden Suburb Gidea Park (London, 1911), 13-14. The Vice-Presidents were listed at 8-9. Many of the Vice-Presidents seem to have been lured in by responding to a brief questionnaire: "What has struck you as the worst point about the average house?" and "What is the greatest improvement you have met with in building or fitting?" Thus the Honourable and Reverend Edward Lyttelton, Headmaster of Eton, could not resist the opportunity to boast about the sliding glass panels that provided ventilation in his holiday home on the Norfolk coast. Their comments were duly reproduced, with facsimiles of their hand-writing and even their signatures, the sign of an innocent age that did not worry about identity theft. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, leader of the movement for women's suffrage, urged that living rooms should be south-facing, and sensibly added: "Water supply should be arranged so that it can be easily entirely cut off during frost to prevent damage by burst pipes". She did not become a Vice-President: the Countess of Warwick, former mistress of Edward VII, was the sole woman so honoured.
[50] Chelmsford Chronicle, 24 July 1903.
[51] In fact Letchworth station was inconveniently close to Hitchin and Baldock, and can hardly have been welcomed by the Great Northern Railway.
[52] B. Cherry, C. O'Brien and N. Pevsner, London 5 East: The Buildings of England (New Haven Ct and London, 2005), 196.
[53] B. Evans, A Century of Romford (Stroud, 1999), 14; Chelmsford Chronicle, 19 November 1909; 9 September 1910; G.E. Tasker, Country Rambles around Romford... (Ilford, [1911]), 63. Some information about the construction of the new station at Squirrels Heath is calendared in Essex Archives Online (https://www.essexarchivesonline.co.uk/). Harold Wood and Romford stations were rebuilt when the railway was widened in the early 1930s..
[54] Train timetables were given in The Book of the Exhibition of Houses and Cottages: Romford Garden Suburb Gidea Park, 147-8, and see the prediction (xii) that "when the suburban Great Eastern is electrified", the train service "will be even quicker and more convenient than it is to-day". Electrification came about in 1949. During the Exhibition, a non-stop train left Liverpool Street at 11.30 and took 23 minutes to Squirrels Heath. Romford and Harold Wood stations were rebuilt in the 1930s; in recent decades, Gidea Park's Edwardian ticket-hall became very shabby but appears to have been smartened for the Elizabeth Line.
[55] Tasker, Country Rambles around Romford, 63-4.
[56] Chelmsford Chronicle, 18 November 1909. Balgores House later became a private school.
[57] The Book of the Exhibition of Houses and Cottages: Romford Garden Suburb Gidea Park, 12.
[58] Chelmsford Chronicle, 29 July 1910; Times, 7 July 1913.
[59] The National Library of Wales provides convenient online examples of "the Gidea Park train", e.g. (Swansea) Cambria Daily Leader, 2, 22 January 1915.
[60] My account draws on Cherry, O'Brien and Pevsner, London 5 East: The Buildings of England, 202-5, which suggests that the street-plan was the work of Parker and Unwin, architects who had designed Hampstead Garden Suburb. The 20,000 target was widely quoted, e.g. Chelmsford Chronicle, 29 July 1910.
[61] The winning entry, by two young architects, W. Garnett Gibson and Reginald Dann, used the additional space to base their design on the radial boulevards favoured by Ebenezer Howard, one of which was intended to provide a view of Gidea Hall. Both prize-winning plans emphasised the central role of the golf course, but left the two segments of the proposed Romford Garden Suburb awkwardly hyphenated at the historic (and humdrum) main-road hamlet of Hare Street. The Book of the Exhibition of Houses and Cottages: Romford Garden Suburb Gidea Park, 54-5. Eventually (I do not know when) the golf course was enlarged and swallowed the land earmarked for a later phase of the Garden Suburb.
[62] The Builder, quoted The Book of the Exhibition of Houses and Cottages: Romford Garden Suburb Gidea Park, 55; Nelson Evening Mail, 12 February 1912. Australian and New Zealand newspapers frequently cribbed overseas reports, but this account was specifically written for the local newspaper in the South Island town of Nelson. It is taken via the National Library of New Zealand's Papers Past online newspaper archive: https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers. The Essex Review, a county chronicle, noted that "Gidea Park Garden City" had been "laid out ... with praiseworthy care to preserve all the natural features of the place. Its fine timber, lake and undulating slopes, add largely to the attractions of a site that should be viewed with favour by all persons desirous of removing from busy frequented streets." Essex Review, xxii (1913), 38.
[63] Chelmsford Chronicle; Times, 29 July 1910. The constitutional crisis centred on the rights of the Conservative-dominated hereditary House of Lords to veto reformist legislation passed by the Liberal government in the House of Commons. For the first time in decades, the Crown was drawn into the political arena, since the government intended to advise the creation of several hundred new peers to swamp the upper house. Edward VII had died in May, and some extreme Tories claimed that his death was caused by stress. During the foundation stone ceremony, Burns was heckled by a protester who alleged: "You killed King Edward, and you are going to kill King George." The Liberals had lost their overall majority at the general election of January 1910, and were now dependent on the Irish Nationalists to remain in office. The objector was also a Protestant activist, who somewhat simplified the government's Irish alliance by shouting: "No Popery!" He was removed. (Cardiff) Evening Express, 29 July 1910.
[64] As a correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald (23 March 1912) put it, Gidea Park was "designed to suit the needs of the typical suburban family keeping one servant". As will be seen, some attempts were made to eliminate servants (or, at least, live-in servants) altogether.
[65] In 1904, Dawber had designed a spacious rectory at nearby Great Warley.
[66] Poverty Bay Herald, 12 August 1911, via the National Library of New Zealand's Papers Past online newspaper archive. This is almost certainly an example of a New Zealand newspaper quoting, without attribution, a report from Britain.
[67] The Book of the Exhibition of Houses and Cottages: Romford Garden Suburb Gidea Park, 204.
[68] The Book of the Exhibition of Houses and Cottages: Romford Garden Suburb Gidea Park, 118, 86, 80. In May 1911, Lloyd George introduced legislation to establish National Insurance, which required employers – even householders with employing just one maid – to pay threepence a week towards their protection against ill health or unemployment.
[69] Private cars increased from 41,000 in 1908 to 132,000 in 1914: B.R. Mitchell with P. Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1962), 230. Visiting London in 1909, the South African politician was struck by "[t]he numbers of motors": he was told "there was scarcely one a year ago". P. Lewsen, ed., Selections from the Correspondence of John X. Merriman 1905-1924 (Cape Town, 1969), 141 (23 July 1909).
[70] Chelmsford Chronicle, 13 September 1912. "It is served from town by motor bus," the Essex Review noted in 1913, "... and has a new station, Squirrels Heath, on the Great Eastern Railway, in its midst." Essex Review, xxii (1913), 38.
[71] E.g Times, 31 May 1911. The Exhibition is usefully described by L.J. Leicester in https://gpadcs.org/?page_id=132.
[72] The Book of the Exhibition of Houses and Cottages: Romford Garden Suburb Gidea Park, 156.
[73] Sydney Morning Herald, 23 March 1912.
[74] This was the practice of A. Cameron Corbett, Glasgow Liberal Unionist MP and large-scale developer. His creation of Seven Kings in the late eighteen-nineties was a memorable example of how-not-to. Building costs were pared by what was effectively mass-production, with long straight streets of identical terraced houses. A railway station followed construction, in 1899, but during the two preceding years the estate became known as "Klondyke". "Its roads were unsurpassable in wet weather by reason of the thick mud and in summer travellers were blinded by the clouds of dust which rose from the unmade roads." Victoria County History of Essex, v, 251; G.E. Tasker, Ilford Past and Present ... (Ilford, [1901]), 105-6.
[75] The Book of the Exhibition of Houses and Cottages: Romford Garden Suburb Gidea Park, 155. The historian L.J. Leicester examined a sample of 32 houses from 4 streets in the Romford rate books for 1912. He reported that only 4 were occupied by owners, and concluded that the remaining 28 were rented from the Gidea Park Ltd company. It is also possible that these were properties that were being purchased on an instalment plan, and that Council staff were unfamiliar with mortgage finance and treated them as rentals: https://gpadcs.org/?page_id=132.
[76] Chelmsford Chronicle, 18 October 1912.
[77] Chelmsford Chronicle, 19 July 1912; Times, 7 July 1913.
[78] The Gidea Park slogan, "Golf without Selfishness", recognised the strain that enthusiasm for the fairways could place upon family life. It is not entirely clear what was meant by the claim that the golfer (assumed to be male) has "means of recreation ... at his very door [while] his wife suffers from none of the inconveniences familiar to households which are ordinarily set up to be within easy reach of a golf course". The Book of the Exhibition of Houses and Cottages: Romford Garden Suburb Gidea Park, 156.
[79] D. Thurlow, Ken Farnes… (Manchester, 2000), 21-2. His death at the age of 30 in 1941, serving in the RAF, underlined his status as a sporting hero.
[80] Chelmsford Chronicle, 19 July 1912.
[81] The builder who undertook the demolition work paid £1,400 for the mansion, but recouped only £800 from selling the materials, which forced him into bankruptcy: information from Simon Donoghue, Havering Local Studies, Havering Libraries. The bell from the stables was rescued by a master at the recently established Royal Liberty School, put into storage and eventually installed (in 1954) as the school bell.
[82] For the 1934 Exhibition, see the Note by L.J. Leicester: https://gpadcs.org/?page_id=138.
[83] https://gpadcs.org/?page_id=25.
[84] Cherry, O'Brien and Pevsner, London 5 East: The Buildings of England, 202-8.
[85] The Havering Council document is at https://www.havering.gov.uk/downloads/file/5488/gidea_park_conservation_area_appraisal.pdf. Curiously, it does not seem to be dated, although it was evidently prepared soon after 2006.