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).