Housing co-partnership was a

social movement A social movement is a loosely organized effort by a large group of people to achieve a particular goal, typically a social or political one. This may be to carry out a social change, or to resist or undo one. It is a type of group action and ma ...

that developed alongside the

garden city movement The garden city movement was a 20th century urban planning movement promoting satellite communities surrounding the central city and separated with greenbelts. These Garden Cities would contain proportionate areas of residences, industry, and ...

in Britain between 1900 and 1914 and which financed and built most of the suburbs and villages associated with that movement. It was also a unique form of tenure combining features of a tenant co-operative and a limited dividend company. The idea of

co-operative housing A housing cooperative, or housing co-op, is a legal entity, usually a cooperative or a corporation, which owns real estate, consisting of one or more residential buildings; it is one type of housing tenure. Housing cooperatives are a distin ...

can be traced back to early 19th Century figures, notably

Robert Owen Robert Owen (; 14 May 1771 – 17 November 1858) was a Welsh people, Welsh textile manufacturer, philanthropist and social reformer, and a founder of utopian socialism and the cooperative movement. He strove to improve factory working conditio ...

and

Charles Fourier François Marie Charles Fourier (;; 7 April 1772 – 10 October 1837) was a French philosopher, an influential early socialist thinker and one of the founders of utopian socialism. Some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical ...

. Providing housing was one of the key objectives of the

Rochdale Pioneers The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, founded in 1844, was an early consumers' co-operative, and one of the first to pay a patronage dividend, forming the basis for the modern co-operative movement. Although other co-operatives preceded it, ...

, an early British co-op whose principles were associated with the rapid growth of the

co-operative movement The history of the cooperative movement concerns the origins and history of cooperatives across the world. Although cooperative arrangements, such as mutual insurance, and principles of cooperation existed long before, the cooperative movement bega ...

in the second half of the 19th century. However, it was not until 1901 that the first successful wave of co-partnerships was set up at Brentham in

Ealing Ealing () is a district in West London, England, west of Charing Cross in the London Borough of Ealing. Ealing is the administrative centre of the borough and is identified as a major metropolitan centre in the London Plan. Ealing was his ...

in west London. Its leading figure was Henry Harvey Vivian. The connections between the garden city and co-operative movements go back to the 1870s and 1880s when

Ebenezer Howard Sir Ebenezer Howard (29 January 1850 – 1 May 1928) was an English urban planner and founder of the garden city movement, known for his publication ''To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform'' (1898), the description of a utopian city in whic ...

was moving in radical circles which included utopian community builders and land reformers. But the practical link came in 1901 when London lawyer and chairman of the Labour Association, Ralph Neville, was persuaded by Howard to become chair of the Garden City Association (GCA). Neville introduced Howard to a group of wealthy and influential people who had already invested in the Ealing project. By 1903, this group was ready to invest in the Letchworth project. Two years later the link was sealed when Vivian brought in GCA architects Unwin and Parker to work on the Ealing project.

References

* Birchall, Johnston, ''Co-partnership and the Garden City Movement'', Planning Perspectives, 10: 4, 1995, p329 – 358. , Online . {{doi, 10.1080/02665439508725828 Cooperative movement Co-operatives in the United Kingdom History of social movements Mutualism (movement) Planned cities Urban planning

Garden suburbs A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the cultivation, display, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature. The single feature identifying even the wildest wild garden is ''control''. The garden can incorporate both ...

Political movements in the United Kingdom