Wrexham Queen's Park Estate

'The site plan for the second contract' at Wrexham from Stephenson's On a Human Scale, pp. 124-5

Wrexham is the largest town in North Wales. Here, in 1950, Gordon Stephenson produced design for just under 500 dwellings as economically as possible. In his On a Human Scale: A life in City Design (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle 1992) Stephenson writes:

[F]ollowing the early example of Port Sunlight, we placed service roads (in the case of Wrexham, cul-de-sacs) on the kitchen side of the houses. But, following the Radburn principle, we had a separate and continuous footpath system leading to the front doors, playgrounds and open spaces. The cul-de-sac roads were nineteen feet (six metres) wide, and the footpaths, as suggested by Clarence Stein, eight feet (two and a half metres) wide (p. 123).

Stephenson writes that topography, and a creek near the site, made it impossible to form actual 'superblocks' for his Wrexham scheme. However the houses do face on to car-free open spaces linked by pedestrian ways. Stephenson recalls in his memoir that Lewis Mumford visited the development in 1953 and discussed the scheme with residents.

The images below are of Wrexham on an unseasonably warm day in September. From another image in Stephenson's book, it appears that originally houses fronted onto open space, but that this has since been divided into individual gardens (whether recently or otherwise is hard to say; many of the fences are new).

Radburn, New Jersey, USA 2001

One of the major reasons for the popularity of the internal reserve in the 1920s was the recognition of the potential danger posed by the wider adoption of the automobile. Radburn design - so named for its initial template construction at Radburn, NJ - is a further adaptation of the internal reserve concept to accentuate separation of car and pedestrian (particularly the juvenile pedestrian).

One of the notable and interesting elements of attitudes to radburn and internal reserve design manifests in the common assumption that the intention of designers of internal reserves were that houses would face into them. This, generally speaking, is not the case. More commonly the expectation was that houses would have views into reserves from kitchen or other domestic areas so that the occupants of houses (usually, mother) could see into reserves and monitor playing children. From Clarence Perry's Neighbourhood and Community Planning 1929 p. 63

Radburn when I visited it in 2001.