ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM 1760 TO TELE PRESENT DAY

cipalities of the ipth century. New public buildings cropped up
everywhere* They were as splendid as money could buy them.
Take Manchester Town Hall, Glasgow University, the Law Courts
in Birmingham, London County Hall, or take the series of magni-
ficent but characteristically unrelated monuments along the Ring-
strasse in Vienna: the Gothic Town Hall, the Classical Houses of
Parliament, the Renaissance museums, etc., one cannot say that
Governments and city councils failed in their undeniable duty to
give representational architecture a chance.

Where they failed was in their infinitely greater duty to provide
decent living conditions for their citizens. One may say that this was
an outcome of the philosophy of liberalism, which had taught them
that everybody is happiest if left to look after himself, and that
interference with private life is unnatural and always damaging;
but while this explanation will satisfy the historian, it could not
satisfy the social reformer. He saw that 95 per cent of the new houses
in industrial towns were put up by speculative builders as cheaply
as the scanty regulations would allow, and acted as best he could.
If he was a manlike William Morris, he preached a mediaevalising
socialism and escaped into the happier world of handicraft. If he
was like Prince Albert and Lord Shaftesbury, he founded associations
for improving by private generosity the dwellings of the artisan and
labourer. If however he was an enlightened employer himself, he
went one step further and commissioned an estate to be designed
and built to a more satisfactory standard for his own workers. Thus
Sir Titus Salt founded Saltaire,near Leeds,in 1853. It looks very drab
now, but it was pioneer work. Lever Brothers began Port Sunlight
in 1888 and Cadbury's Bourneville in 1895. These two were the
first factory estates planned as garden suburbs. From them—and
Bedford Park, near London, -which had been designed as early as
1875 by Norman Shaw on the same principle, though for private
tenants of a wealthier class—the garden suburb and the garden city
movement spread, another British contribution to the pre-history
of modern European architecture.

Now in connection with this movement, architects re-entered
the domain of town-planning. The greatest town-planning scheme
between 1830 and 1880 had been die work of an administrative
genius, Baron Haussmann, Napoleon Hi's prefect of the Seine De-
partment. His long, wide and straight roads all through the centre
of Paris were drawn for the sake of civic magnificence and military

212