The “Long Wall” – the world’s most famous, most myth-engendering bulwark
China’s most distinctive and enduring icon is the Great Wall of China, it is of course also sui generis as the world’s Great Wall. The Wall, Chángchéng長城 – or as sometimes described Wan-li Ch’ang-ch’eng 萬里長城 (10,000-mile Long Wall✱), is incontrovertibly one of the wonders of both the ancient and modern worlds. Starting in the west in Gansu Province at Jiayuguan Pass, the wall(s) meander east over mountains and through passes to they reach the sea in the country’s east (a journey of over 21 thousand km). The oldest sections of the Wall date from the Warring States era (circa 214 BCE).
Laolongtou ⍗ Shanhaiguan and ‘Old Dragon’s Head’ If we follow the extravagating course of the wall east from the Badaling section (near Beijing) for about 300 kilometres, we’ll come to Shanhaiguan (literally “mountain – sea – pass”) in Liaoning Province, one of the Great Wall’s major passes (acclaimed as “the first pass under Heaven”). This section continues to Laolongtou (‘Old Dragon’s Head‘⊟), where the wall enters the sea (Gulf of Bohai) and spectacularly and abruptly terminates! The wall at Shanhaiguan and Laolongtou snaking as it does between mountains on one side and water on the other, has been strategically important to the Chinese Empire eastern defences since the 1600s.
Hushan Great Wall
The setting that greets visitors to Laolongtou Wall end-point (Estuary Stone) looks like a most appropriate setting for the eastern terminus of the Great Wall. The reality is however that the Great Wall/s are not a continuous linear structure, they are actually characterised by numerous gaps in the sections…and where the ‘Old Dragon’s Head’ ceases at the sea is one more break in the line, albeit a dramatically evocative one! Before 1989 the conventional wisdom was that Laolongtou was the most easterly point in the Walls, but in that year Chinese archaeologists excavated 600m of a hitherto undiscovered section of the Great Wall 540km east of Laolongtou. The Hushan Wall (extending over a mountain, Hushan or Tiger Mountain) lies just north of China’s eastern border city, Dandong (which eyeballs North Korea just across the Yalu River). In 2009 the Chinese government, based on Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) research, recognised the wall as the most eastern point of the Great Wall (and ie, the end-point). Beijing’s classifying of the wall (so close to the Korean border) as Chinese contradicted the North Korean view that the wall was originally Korean (the Bakjak Fortress) and provoked a hostile North Korean reaction. [‘Hushan Great Wall’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
PostScript: Dandong discovery reignites the Goguryeo controversy The Dandong wall conflict reignited the controversy over the Goguryeo Kingdom that previously had inflamed tensions between the two countries. Background: the historic Goguryeo Kingdom (1st century BC to 7th century AD) encompassed an area comprising all but the tip of the Korean peninsula and a portion of both Russian and Chinese Manchuria. Both Koreas view the historic Goguryeo Kingdom as having been the ‘proto-Korea’ state. The Chinese perspective (which the Koreas label as revisionism) is that Goguryeo was only ever a vassal state of the ‘Middle Kingdom’, moreover one occupied largely by Tungusic people, an ethnic minority of China. The wall kerfuffle fed into this controversy, stirring up feelings of nationalism on both sides, the fallout being that Sino-Korean relations took a nosedive. Mutual distrust lingers over the matter…fears of irredentist claims on each other’s territory, and for PRC the perennial bogeyman of the spectre of Korean reunification. [‘Goguryeo controversies’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
(Source: Man, ‘The Great Wall)
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✱chéng in Chinese can also mean city or city wall…or more aptly to describe China’s wonder building – walls in the plural, John Man, The Great Wall (2009)
⊟ so-called because the structure’s end part (above the sea) is thought to resemble a dragon (long) resting its head (tou) on the ground
❂ the Chinese media going so far as to tag the kingdom as ‘China’s Goguryeo’ (Zhongguo Gaogouli) [Korea and China’s Clashing Histories’, (Yong Kwon), The Diplomat, 11-Jul-2014, www.thediplomat.com]
The suburbs immediately to the south of the City of Sydney have traditionally housed much of the city’s industrial and commercial activity. But in recent decades land use in suburbs like Alexandria, Zetland and Waterloo has undergone a remarkable transformation…a lot of the old industries and factories have closed down or decentralised to Western Sydney. In their place high-density residential estates have emerged, modern housing complexes on the streets and blocks where light industry once monopolised the urban landscape. The industrial “desert wastelands” have gradually been replaced by new residential ‘precincts’… glossy property ads for these gentrified zones of inner-Sydney suburbia tend to emphasise the modern lifestyle attractions for home-seekers – “green-linked” neighbourhoods, “bike and pedestrian friendly”, “close to the city”, etc.
The suburb of Rosebery, six kilometres from the CBD, is part of the modern makeover of the once dominant industrial landscape of South Sydney. One of the suburb’s newer buildings, known as ‘The Cannery” (a former warehouse and cyclone fencing factory), gives a clue to a very different Rosebery 100 years ago. One of the building’s new tenants is a restaurant called Stanton & Co, the name references the man who was instrumental in developing the suburb in the early 20th century, Richard Stanton.
(Source: Broadsheet)
Market garden, cattle holdings and a midweek racecourse
The area of Rosebery was part of Cooper’s Estate (Daniel Cooper, 19th century property ‘baron’, owner of the Waterloo Estate amongst others), prior to 1912 had developed in a rather spasmodic fashion…’Rosebery’ comprised a “hodge-podge” of different enterprises and activities – “dairymen and gardeners” with their market gardens peopled much of the sand-soaked terrain, the occasional factory was scattered here and there interspersed with some isolated houses. The south side of Rosebery was the venue for a popular racecourse.
Stanton & Son’s slice of Rosebery
In 1912 Sydney estate agent Richard Stanton, fresh from creating his Haberfield garden suburb “model estate”, (see Planning for Suburban Bliss, a Template for the Sydney Garden Suburb: Haberfield, NSW — July 2018 blog), came to Rosebery with big plans. Stanton’s company, the Town Planning Company of Australia (TPCA), acquired for an outlay of £24,000 some 273 acres from within the greater Waterloo (Cooper’s) Estate, which he called the ‘Rosebery Workingman’s Estate’✱. The initial layout of the estate was planned by noted architect John Sulman using the land’s contours as a basis for design (once again reprising the ‘team’ of Stanton and Sulman who had done the ‘spadework’ for the earlier development of Haberfield) [‘Special Precincts’, www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au].
An all-purpose suburb?
Stanton’s scheme envisaged turning Rosebery into a model suburb which harmonised industrial production with space for living. The estate would entail both industrial and factory employment sites with worker housing. The work force for the new industrial enterprises would be situated close by for easy access. The scheme also allowed for the creation of shops and other commercial outlets within the estate, as well as community and recreational facilities. Stanton envisaged that workers could walk to their work place, which was intended to be separated from their homes by parks [‘Sydney City Council’, www.sydneyyoursay.com.au; Craig Vaughan, ‘Obscure 1912 covenant protects pocket of Rosebery from overdevelopment’, Southern Courier, 30-Jul-2014].
⍐ Rosebery: Arts & Crafts/Californian bungalow
Californian bungalow village
After TPCA subdivided the Rosebery Estate in 1914, the early dwellings tended to be Federation style (single-storey, face brick exterior walls, terracotta roof tiles) although there was not many houses constructed until the early Twenties because of the outbreak of the World War. Increasingly though, the domestic building of choice for the “Rosebery Model and Industrial Suburb” was the Californian bungalow (horizontal overreaching roof forms, flat verandah roofs in asymmetrical composition, decorative front gables, roughcast masonry contrasting with dark brickwork). On a visit to the USA Stanton became enamoured with the “Cali-bungalow” and introduced it into his Sydney estates, especially in Haberfield and Rosebery [‘Special Precincts’, loc.cit.].
Stanton’s Rosebery covenant Stanton established a covenant for the estate (cf. Haberfield) which provided a framework for house construction which gave the cottages a distinctive neighbourhood pattern and character…eschewing a rigid homogeneity Stanton allowed for individual differences between houses (no two cottages in Stanton’s estate were exactly the same!) [ibid.]. The covenant bound the buyer of residential lots to its adherence (it was codified into the deed of sale) – all cottages built in the estate had to be one-storey and double-fronted. Houses were to have (back)yards and to be divided by lanes. A 1913 prospectus on the estate released by TPCA heralded the estate as “the ideal of the manufacturer and mechanic alike”, offering the best of both worlds “modern factories and model homes” [Sydney Living Museums, (Caroline Simpson Library and Research Collection), www.collection.hht.net.au].
A bulwark against overdevelopment
The detail of the covenant contains a clause inserted by Stanton which safeguards the core of the estate from being too built-up…the safety clause applies to a 121ha area bounded by Botany Rd in the west to Gardeners Rd in the south, to Dalmeny Ave and Kimberley Grove in the east, to Cressy St in the north, comprising in all some 3,353 homes. The covenant is particularly germane to the present as developers have saturated the areas surrounding the covenant’s jurisdiction with bulky, high-density apartments and units – which the covenant prohibits! [Vaughan, op.cit.].
Stanton’s 1922 ad for the new Rosebery estate – don’t spare the hyperbole! ⍗
Selling Rosebery to the punters
To drum up interest for the Rosebery Estate, the Town Planning Company of Australia launched a street-naming competition, inviting the public to come up with a name for each street planned for the model suburb. Stanton offered a first and second prize (valued at £10 and £5 respectively) for the best names – with himself to be sole arbiter of the entries. The newspaper promo was unrestrained in heralding the ‘unique’ venture in Sydney property: “Rosebery Model and Industrial Suburb – never before attempted in Australia!” Despite being a site dedicated to light industry, the advert interestingly depicted the new estate as “undulating beautiful grasslands and sand dunes” (used for) “pastoral purposes” [‘Rosebery Street-naming Competition. First Prize £10’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13-Jul-1912, www.trove.nla.gov.au].
⍐ Estate cottage in Tweedmouth Ave
(Photo: Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection)
⍐ Sweetacres of Rosebery: “It’s moments like these…you need Minties!”
Under these arrangements the private sector was not slow in establishing plants and factories in the new estate. One of the first to set up (1917-18) was ‘Sweetacres’✱, owned by a confectionary manufacturer, James Stedman-Henderson’s Sweets Ltd (makers of the iconic ‘Minties’, ‘Jaffas’ and ‘Fantales’). The 16-acre Sweetacres complex was generously equipped with a large canteen a social hall, sports and cricket grounds, a library, band and sports clubs, to cater for 1,000-plus mainly female workforce. The factory building was designed by John Burcham Clamp [‘Sweetacres and the iconic Aussie lolly’, City of Sydney Council, www.cityofsydney,nsw.gov.au].
The old Wrigley’s Factory converted in a modern residential complex ⍗
Reviving the Garden City Movement?
Extending the local confectionary theme, Clamp also designed the Wrigley’s Gum factory in Crewe Place Rosebery (1918)…a huge Chicago-style steel-reinforced concrete structure with grid-like facade, rooftop water tower and setback landscaping. The US-owned factory made the popular chewing gum brands ‘Juicy Fruit’, ‘P.K.’ and ‘Spearmint’. With a modern fit-out and de luxe designer-gardens, the heritage protected ‘Wrigley’s building resurfaced recently as state-of-the-art accommodation (‘The Burcham’), with ads connecting it to a revival of the UK Garden City Movement [‘Built to last – an old world soul redesigned’, www.theburcham.com.au]
Other industries within the Rosebery Estate included the Commonwealth Weaving Mills (AKA Dri-Glo Towels), Dunning Ave. The premises were later acquired by Bonds Industries with part of the site becoming a warehouse in the early 1960s for Union Carbide. American multi-national chemicals and polymers giant Union Carbide also had a large plant (cnr of Rothschild St and Harcourt Ave) where it manufactured Eveready brand batteries. Other manufacturing firms operating on the Rosebery turf included the Rosella Canning Factory, Parke Davies & Co (chemicals) and Noyes Bros (makers of ‘Gypboard’) [‘City of Sydney Warehouses and Industrial Buildings. A Heritage Study Report’, www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au].
These days Rosebery remains quite a mixed bag architecturally. There is still light industry in the suburb but most of the old factory buildings with zero aesthetic appeal are either gone or transformed. Much of the landscape is occupied by glistening glass monolithic structures housing telecommunications and IT outlets, modern retail outlets and a seemingly inexhaustible conveyor-belt of new residential projects constantly in the process of erection.
PostScript: Beaconsfield, Rosebery writ tiny minus the green space Beaconsfield, less than one kilometre east of Rosebery, offers an interesting point of comparison. Beaconsfield estate was hived off from Cooper’s Estate in an 1884 subdivision and promoted as a “Working Man’s Model Township”. The suburb’s potential however failed to elicit any interest from Richard Stanton, possibly due to several factors: the tiny size of the suburb (0.1 sq. ml.) which translates into a limited number of residential properties; and its topography was dotted with numerous sand hills✥. Accordingly Beaconsfield has tended to retain its industrial complexion longer – brickworks, noxious materials, soap and candle-making factories, and more recently mechanical and engineering works, a lack of green spaces. Recently though Beaconsfield, being close to Green Square, has been caught up with the process of gentrification and urban renewal affecting most of the South Sydney district [Anne-Marie Whitaker, Pictorial History South Sydney, (2002); ‘Beaconsfield, Sydney’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wiki.org].
Beaconsfield, NSW
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✱ ‘Sweetacres’ was later acquired by Nestlés (via Hoadley’s and Rowntree’s) and the plant was closed and replaced by high-rise housing…however a park nearby in Mentmore Street commemorates Sweetacres’ historic presence in Rosebery
✥ an observer in 1904 described the Beaconsfield estate as “among the dreariest parts of the environments of Sydney since the primitive sandhills remain”. So much sand that Sydneysiders would commute to Beaconsfield to engage in the pursuit of “sand-shifting” (ie, collecting bags of sand for free to take home)[Whitaker, ibid.]
At the tail end of the decade that the Haberfield model suburb (1901) made its appearance, the southern Sydney suburb of Daceyville was on the cusp of undergoing a comparable urban planning experiment. Like Haberfield, Dacey Model Suburb drew inspiration and impetus from the BritishGarden City and Arts and Crafts Movement which advocated new urban centres with an emphasis on better and genuinely innovative planning to create self-contained communities comprising ‘greenbelt’ areas (farming one’s own crops, community beautification programs, aesthetically designed formal gardens and so on)✱.
Whereas the creative and financial impetus driving the Haberfield project [see ‘Planning for Suburban Bliss, a Template for the Sydney Garden Suburb: Haberfield, NSW’] was private enterprise and it was targeted at a market of middle class clients, the Dacey “Model Suburb” was a government-funded program, public planning aimed at improving the lot of the working class. Both though were born out of a desire to provide a social reform model to planners to avoid the trap of overcrowded, slum suburbs which were plaguing Sydney’s inner city at the turn of the 20th century. ⍐ Dacey Model Suburb (Sydney), map circa 1920
JR Dacey MLA, catalyst for change
State Labor MLA (Member for Legislative Assembly) for Botany John Rowland Dacey worked tirelessly for much of his parliamentary term to create a low-cost housing community for the working class in his electorate. Dacey urged that Sydney adopt the British Garden City model introduced in Letchworth in the West Midlands✥. In 1909 there was a Royal Commission “for the improvement of Sydney” which pointed the way, the following year’s election of the first NSW Labor Government clinched it! In 1912 the newly created NSW Housing Board’s⍟ first task was to construct a new, model suburb seven kilometres south of the city. Unfortunately it occurred too late for Dacey to see its completion, the MP died that in April of that year, posthumously the suburb was named Daceyville in recognition of Dacey’s efforts to make it a reality [Sinnayah, Samantha, ‘Daceyville’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2011, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/daceyville, viewed 25 Jul 2018].
⍐ The land allocated for the Garden City prior to the project’s commencement
⍗ Solander Road, DGS (www.records.nsw.gov.au)
Dacey Garden Suburb
Dacey Garden Suburb was Australia’s first (low-cost) public housing scheme, promising to free those on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder from the spectre of exorbitantly high rents and woefully sub-standard accommodation, giving members of the working class a better quality of life. Not everyone in public life approved of the Daceyville project…the conservative forces in state parliament labelled it ‘Audaciousville’, arguing, predictably, that government should not be in the public rental market. Led by Charles Wade, the outgoing premier and leader of the NSW Liberal Reform Party, the dissenters vigorously but unsuccessfully opposed the 1912 Housing Bill that brought the Daceyville estate into being [ibid.].
profusion of blueprints
Three distinct street layouts were drawn up for the Dacey Garden housing experiment. The first was a Public Works plan, the second by John Sulman (who also had a guiding hand in the early planning of Haberfield) in association with John Hennessy. After outside criticism was voiced about the scheme by Charles Reade (from the British Garden Cities and Town Planning Association), government architect William H Foggitt was called in to produce a third, extensively revised street plan. Viewed today, Daceyville bears the distinguishing marks of both architects: the layout of the broadly expansive Cook and Banks Avenues (designed by Sulman) are in sharp contract with the smaller, more curvy lines of the streets to their east (designed by Foggitt)❂ [ibid].
As a new and novel planning project Dacey Garden Suburb (DGS) was ambitious and broad in its scale…intended to occupy 443 acres with a density of seven cottages per acre. It was to be a self-contained residential unit and made provision for shops, schools, churches, amusement halls, police and fire stations and a technical college. A tram line was connected to Daceyville in 1913. Industrial and manufacturing activity was to be excluded from the site [‘Federation-House – Dacey Garden Suburb’, https://federationhouse.wikispaces.com/].
The first task facing the government and its contractors was preparing the land which proved a surmountable task but one that was particularly formidable. Sand dunes and sandy scrub soil had first to be removed before work could commence on shaping the streets into an orderly pattern. Constructing a giant stormwater drain was also a preliminary step. After these obstacles were overcome, things went ahead with some 67 houses finished by June 1913 [‘Daceyville – The Creation of a Garden Suburb’, NSW Anzac Centenary, www.nswanzaccentenary.records.nsw.gov.au
A prescriptive suburb The first families to move in were selected by ballot. The Housing Board, with JD (Jack) Fitzgerald directing the bureaucratic wheels, determined that the Garden Suburb would adhere to certain, strict principles (somewhat analogous to Richard Stanton’s ‘covenant’ for his Haberfield estates): someheterogeneity in cottage designs and room sizes and arrangements but no front fences were permitted (facilitating a merging of private and public green space), residential streets were to be curved to create vistas, no back lanes or pubs – which were “synonymous with slums” [‘Dacey GardenSuburb: a report for Daceyville Heritage Conservation Area within its historical context’, (Susan Jackson-Stepowski, Botany Bay Council – 2002), www.botanybaycouncil.nsw.gov.au]
Financial encumbrances to work
House production in the estate experienced a slowdown after 1915 however due to a lack of funds available for the project. Rising building costs partly accounted for this, but officially the government cited the existence of an “acute financial position” as a result of the national commitment required for the war effort in Europe [‘Daceyville – The Creation of a Garden Suburb’, op.cit.; Sinnayah, op.cit.]
The new ‘deserving’ for Dacey’s low-cost housing The onset of the Great War eventually led to a shift in Dacey Garden Suburb’s raison d’être from workers to war veterans. It started in 1916 when 50 war widows were provided housing in the new estate…three years later resettling returning WWI servicemen became the overriding imperative in housing policy❆, relegating the needs of the working class to a secondary status [Sinnayah, ibid.]. The naming policy for the estate’s streets also reflected this trend – when the project started in 1912 DGS streets were mostly named after famous explorers (or the ships of famous explorers) from the past…there was Wills Crescent, Burke Crescent, Banks Avenue, Solander Road. After the Australian experience in Gallipoli, the street names chosen gave tribute to military figures from the campaign…Captain Jacka Crescent, Sargeant Larkin Crescent, and so on [AnzacCentenary, ibid.].
Banks Ave ⍗
A quantitative shortfall!
The difficulties (production costs, etc) meant that when the Daceyville Estate’s last rental property was finished in June 1920, only 315 out of the planned 1,473 cottages had been built. Construction of the amenities and infrastructure for the Dacey Garden Suburb also fell well short of what had been planned [Sinnayah, op.cit.].
Later Nationalist governments in NSW (forerunner of the Liberal-Country Party) did their best to undermine the Daceyville scheme by introducing private ownership in the model suburb (eg, the southern part of Daceyville, now in Pagewood, was subdivided and offered for sale to the public). Other ongoing threats came from government proposals in the 1960s to bulldoze the estate to make way for the Eastern Suburbs railway route through Kingsford, and from developers seeking to transform the suburb’s character by flooding it with high-rise, high-density buildings [Jackson-Stepowski, op.cit.].
DGS’s legacy
Despite the setbacks and checks placed on it, the Dacey Garden Suburb site has survived substantially in government hands (eg, only a tiny proportion of residents accepted the government’s offer in 1965 to buy their properties). The estate’s future character and use is protected by a strict Development Control Plan (administered by Housing NSW) and its heritage listing safeguards it from the bulldozers [Sinnayah, op.cit.].
⍗ Public housing, Gen. Bridges Cres.
DGS’s achievements were limited and the experiment failed to grow beyond its initial (Daceyville) area size and it failed to become self-sufficient (a British Garden City imperative). As well its early low-density advantages were somewhat undermined by subsequent subdivisions. However the experiment managed to achieve a number of pioneering advances in construction and urban planning…innovative building materials and techniques were employed, especially in the early cottages which incorporated tuck-pointed brick work, roughcast rendered walls, tiles roofs and local federation style joinery details. Over time, as the project’s finances ebbed, the size and quality of the houses diminished♦. Colonel Braund Crescent is one of the more innovative street features of DGS – being Australia’s first planned cul-de-sac [Jackson-Stepowski, op.cit.].
The garden suburb’s centrepiece
The very deliberate planning of DGS from the start resulted in the creation of a large garden park which formed a “central gateway’, a focal point off which the main avenues of the suburb fanned out to form a curved grid triangle. The park and other communal open spaces helped to foster a sense of civic identity among the Daceyvillites. The suburb’s commercial use facilities were grouped together near this hub to clearly separate them from the residential sector. John Sulman’s street layout reflected the architect’s predilection for wide, sweeping boulevards à la Paris. All roads were asphalted and footpaths were concreted and turfed. The public domain reserves and parks were all landscaped to match the street symmetry⊡ [ibid.].
The early residents benefitted tangibly from the delivery of services – such as sewerage connection, water, gas and electricity, curb and guttering of streets – these boons of modernity reached the Daceyville estate well before they got to many other parts of Sydney. Moreover, large verandahs and attractive backyard gardens gave residents access to fresh air and natural sunlight houses.
A win for the working class?
Dacey Garden Suburb was “a test case for state intervention in the real estate market” and it did demonstrate that the government could be “an effective provider of housing” [ibid.]. How much however individual working class families benefitted from the opening-up of DGS, is a matter of conjecture. To be eligible to participate in the ballot that determined the lucky beneficiaries of low-rent and low-density accommodation in the suburb, the sole stipulation was that applicants did not own land with a dwelling on it…being wealthy was not a barrier, the process was sorely lacking a “means test” to satisfy the criteria of financial hardship and genuine need! Moreover, as mentioned earlier, the practice after 1918 changed to one of allocating houses to war veterans and their families in preference to workers.
PostScript 1: Dacey model suburb theatre
Photo (above) (NSW Archives and Records Office) Dacey Garden Suburb had its own theatre, Daceyville ‘Little Tivoli Theatre’, General Bridges Crescent…initially it showed silent films, but later it provided ‘live’ performances of Vaudevillian style (Music Hall) entertainment with a variety of stage acts – including comedy skits, acrobats and jugglers, magic acts, kids and animals acts, musical performances and so on – as the billboard below indicates. The theatre burnt down in 1985.
Top of the bill at the Little Tivoli – tuning up for Broadway!
PostScript 2: Earlier, unsuccessful Sydney attempts at “forward-thinking” estates and subdivisions
In the late 1880s there were several attempts, both within Sydney and outside, to create a garden suburb – including San Souci (1887) (advertised to attract middle class families as “safe from the horrors of city living” (ie, the inner city slums!), Harcourt (1888) (Canterbury, NSW) and Kensington Model Suburb (1889) (which promised to combine the benefits of rural and urban life). All of these ventures came to zilch due to the prevailing conditions of (the 1890s) depression, drought and labour unrest [ibid].
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✱ the Garden City Movement in Britain itself tapped to some extent into the contemporary City Beautiful Movement (CBM), a 1890s North American reform movement in architecture and urban planning. CBM, characterised by urban beautification and monumental grandeur, aimed at boosting quality of life in the cities and promoting a harmonious social order [‘City beautiful movement’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org]
✥ when the green light was eventually given for the Dacey model suburb, the scheme sought to faithfully adopt the Letchworth template – an overabundance of green spaces, a happy mix of town and country
⍟ forerunner of the later Housing Commission of NSW (now called Housing NSW)
❂ having several individual architects taking charge at different periods resulted in considerable variety in dwellings – free-standing cottages, attached, semi-detached, some two-storey houses, etc.
❆ already in 1916 a 40 acre soldier settlement had been established at nearby Matraville
♦ the estate’s houses reflect the range of architectural styles in use at the time – “Arts and Crafts” cottages, Californian bungalows and the adaptation of some local Federation style designs
⊡ all of which no doubt contributed to Sulman’s fulsome assessment of Daceyville as “an exemplar of what a Garden Suburb should be”
In previous blogs I described one architect’s attempt to bring his vision of an ideal garden suburb to fruition – Walter Burley Griffin’s shaping of a suburb and a community (Castlecrag) out of Sydney’s Middle Harbour bushland✱. Griffin’s Castlecrag project was in fact not the first attempt at a model suburb in Sydney. Preceding it by a decade or more were three separate experiments at Daceyville, Haberfield and Rosebery. Each were very different in nature and purpose to Griffin’s “democratic utopian” vision for the remote, leafy North Shore promontory. This post will address the first of these garden suburb concepts to be launched, in the inner-west suburb of Haberfield.
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/image-26.jpg”> Sydney’s inner city slums (Redfern)[/
Background: Slum city In the aftermath of the gold rushes in the 19th century, the larger cities in Australia, especially Sydney, experienced surges in population. This brought with it social problems and dire health and hygiene implications for the inner city urban centre. Around the city terrace buildings were flung up with masses of people corralled together within them. Sanitation issues – a lack of sewerage, dirty alleys with no drainage, poor ventilation, toxic substances, infectious diseases, systemic poverty and low wages, made for slum creation. This mirrored the same problem facing town authorities elsewhere overseas. Almost inevitably, the appalling health conditions around the overcrowded inner city led to an eruption of Bubonic plague in Sydney in 1900◈ – this starkly brought home to city planners the extreme perils of life in Sydney’s slums.
The British Garden City Movement Reformers in Britain around the turn-of-the-century, observed the Dickensian effect industrialisation was having on contemporary British cities and were determined to do something about it…the British Garden City Movement (BCM) was the outcome. As an antidote to the dystopian urban landscape of Victorian Britain, proponents of BCM advocated a new, greener type of community. Spearheading the movement was social reformer Ebenezer Howard whose influential 1898 book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform book⊟ pointed the way.
A synthesis of town and country virtues Howard called for a new approach to urban planning, illustrated by his “Three Magnets” diagram (above) in which the best of town and countryside were combined in the one community. His radical new societal model envisaged “networks of garden cities that would break the stronghold of capitalism and lead to cooperative socialism” [‘Ebenezer Howard’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Two English garden cities based on Howard’s ideas❂ soon materialised, Letchworth Garden City (proclaimed as the world’s first garden city – from 1904) and Welwyn Garden City, both in Herefordshire (English West Midlands). Integral to BCM cities like Letchworth and Welwyn were formal garden plans. Although limited in their success they did inspire similar community projects in cities as geographically disparate as Canberra and Riga [‘Garden city movement’, Wikipedia,http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Haberfield, the Federation Suburb It was John Sulman, an immigrant architect from the UK, who was instrumental in spreading the BCM ideas in Sydney. Sulman pioneered the practice of town planning in Australia and promoted garden city principles as seen in Canberra’s Civic Centre. Real estate agent Richard Stanton sought to apply those principles to the part of the area of the old Dobroyde⌑ ‘Farm’ Estate (about 6km west of Sydney’s CBD) which he purchased from the Ramsey family⍟.
⇧ Early map of the area with Ramsey St located between the two coves, Iron & Long
Stanton’s covenant for Haberfield 1901, the year after the Sydney Plague’s initial outbreak, Stanton launched his plans for a healthy, model residential suburb free of the pernicious squalor infecting the inner city…the property agent laid down a covenant for his new garden estate which future lot-buyers had to accept⌖ – cottages would be of single-storey◘, modest but of good quality (bricks and stone, slate or tiles); allotments would be of generous size; there would be integrated drainage and a sewered system on all lots; streets would have rows of planted trees; gardens would be established before owners occupied their lots; there would be no hotels, factories or corner shops. Stanton’s catch cry for the estate was “slumless, laneless and publess!” As the estate commenced in the year of Australian Federation, 1901, and because pro-Federation Stanton named many of the early streets after contemporary politicians (comprising most of the members of the inaugural Federal (Barton) cabinet), the label Federation suburb stuck to Haberfield[‘Haberfield Heritage Conservation Area’ (Ashfield Municipal Council, Development Control Plan 2007), www.state-heritage.wa.gov.au].
⇩ Stanton & Son , Summer Hill (architect: JSE Ellis)
From a blot on the landscape to middle class dreams Stanton was clearly not trying to create a housing community for the working class, his new garden estate was intended to attract the aspirational middle class home purchaser. Turning “Ramsey’s Bush” into a better lifestyle community, a better class of suburb, made sure that it would not develop the slum-pattern at that time of much of the city to its east. The entire Dobroyd area was still only sparsely settled by 1900 (there were large chunks of bush and scrub being used as a rubbish dump). It was showing signs of becoming a haven for transients with the presence of vagrants (many made unemployed in the 1890s depression), some indigenous people and a “Gypsie camp” in Alt Street…hence Stanton’s haste to alter the landscape [Jackson-Stepowski, Sue, ‘Haberfield’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/haberfield, viewed 19 Jul 2018].
⇧ Classic Haberfield Federation (Tressider St)
To avoid the unsightly rows of tenements most everywhere else in the inner-west, dwellings had to be detached…in the original (200 hectares) estate they were characteristically double-brick and sat on their own block of land with a size minimum 50′ x 150′. Initially, total house cost was set at £40 (raised to £50 the following year). All houses had front verandahs and the roofs were either slate or Marseilles tile [‘Haberfield, New South Wales’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
To create a garden suburb along the lines of the British model, Stanton, working with his associate WH Nichols, meticulously planned estates that would deliver space and fresh air to residents who could connect with nature, the covenant decreed that fences between neighbours were to be low so as to make the effect of a continuous garden. Streets were to be relatively wide (the “no lanes” credo), houses set back from them and there was to be a strict separation between the suburb’s commercial and residential strips [‘Haberfield – The Model Garden Suburb’ (Joshua Favaloro, Haberfield Association), www.haberfield.asn.au].
⇧ Stanton & Son’s real estate reach extended across Sydney – advertisement for land at Maroubra, 1918 (State Library of NSW)
The Estate agent and councillor took a holistic view of the property business…marketing and selling properties was only part of Stanton’s business scope. In his work in developing Haberfield and other estates Stanton took a vertically integrated approach. Going beyond the standard estate agent’s purview, the company in addition provided term finance, building materials, fixtures and fittings and landscape gardeners [Jackson-Stepowski, op.cit.].
Architect on board The many dwellings erected on Stanton’s Haberfield estates were the antithesis of the “kit home”, they were all individually designed (and therefore each one was a little different, but still each was harmonious with the whole)…Stanton and Son had the services of its own company architect, John Spencer-Stansfield [ibid.]. The architectural firm of Spencer-Stansfield and Wormald constructed around 1,500 (Fed/bungalow styles) houses in Haberfield and the adjoining areas.
⇧ Memorial sculpture to RPL Stanton, Haberfield
Stanton’s success in bringing his particular vision of an ideal suburb to life, getting things done, was no doubt made easier by his twice being elected as Mayor of Ashfield (Haberfield’s council area) during this period.
Things didn’t turn out quite so well for Richard Stanton in the end. Despite his success in developing Haberfield as a desirable residential location for homebuyers and in his company’s track record in house sales right across metropolitan Sydney (by 1924 he had eight suburban offices), he took a huge hit in the Depression (like so many in business), his investments stagnated and he died in debt during WWII [Terry Kass, ‘Stanton, Richard Patrick Joseph (1862–1943)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/stanton-richard-patrick-joseph-8626/text15071, published first in hardcopy 1990, accessed online 18 July 2018].
Federation continuities A saunter through the streets of Haberfield today reveals the extent of Richard Stanton’s legacy. The 1900s bungalows – both the Californian and the Arts and Crafts style (such as the Bunyas above, in Rogers Ave) – still survive and in their original form. And unlike the neighbouring suburbs of Summer Hill and Ashfield, Federation Haberfield has avoided the blight of having block-to-block rows of multi-level units and flats dominating its streetscape.
⇧ Ramsey Street (1910s-20s) (Source: State Lib. of NSW)
PostScript: Subdividing Dobroyd Stanton followed the original Haberfield Estate with a second estate south of Ramsey Street (St David’s Estate) in 1902…by 1912 the company had opened up three more estates (including Dobroyd Point) for settlement in the suburb. In 1905 a rival land agent, the Haymarket Land, Building and Investment Company entered the turf, opening up part of its Dobroyde Estate as well as the new Northcote Estate (designed by another Sydney realty luminary of the day, Arthur Rickard, who was also involved in the selling of the Dobroyd Point Estate). Haymarket LBI Co was less prescriptive than Stanton & Son in its earlier subdivisions permitting some narrow weatherboard houses [Ramsey Family History, ‘The Dobroyde Estate’, http://belindacohen.tripod.com/ramsayfamilyhistory/].
✱ see the earlier posts ‘The Wizard of Castlecrag I: Utopia in a Garden Suburb’, ‘The Wizard of Castlecrag II: Keeping Faith with the Landscape’, ‘Dreaming the Ideal Community: the Brilliant Collaboration of Mahony and Griffin’, September 2014
◈ The Rocks and the waterfront areas of the city were the initial eruption points for the plague (Ashfield was also affected)
⊟ revised in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-Morrow
❂ Howard’s own influences were Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 and Henry George’s equalitarian treatise on political economy, Progress and Poverty
⌑ the ‘e‘ was later dropped
⍟ Dr David Ramsey was one of the early land-holders in what became Haberfield, known informally for many years as “Ramsey’s Bush”. Haberfield’s main road, Ramsey Street, which bisects the suburb from east to west, is named for him
⌖ prospective homeowners were given interviews in an office in Ramsey Street where they could propose what design they wanted for their home – which had to conform with the covenant to be approved to go ahead
◘ Stanton breached his own covenant designed to safeguard the single-storeyed character of Haberfield’s homes when he built the disproportionately large, two-storey ‘Bunyas’, [‘The Dobroyde Estate’, op.cit.]
Hushan Great Wall
Beaconsfield, NSW
Dacey Garden Suburb
profusion of blueprints 
A quantitative shortfall!
A win for the working class?
