Co‐partnership housing and the garden city movement

Abstract

Tenant co‐partnership was a social movement which developed alongside the garden city movement in Britain during the period 1900 to 1914, and which financed and built most of the garden 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. This article argues that forms of housing tenure have important long‐term consequences for the built environment, and that co‐partnership was an attempt to find a form which expressed Howard's holistic vision. In particular, co‐partnership was an attempt to harmonize the interests of the individual and the community, and of landlord and tenant. That it did not succeed is due to the failure of the co‐operative movement to back it, then to the effects of the First World War, the predominance of council housing and the inner tensions which led to the deformation of co‐partnership. The article ends with some insights gained from those estates which are still, after nearly 90 years, under collective tenant control, and speculates about the relationship between such control and the quality of the environment.

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