Garden City Pioneer Sybella Gurney's Contributions

Article
Journal of Planning History

2018, Vol. 17(4) 320-344
ª 2018 The Author(s)
A New Civic Spirit for Garden Article reuse guidelines:
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City-states: On the Lifework DOI: 10.1177/1538513218778246
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of Sybella Gurney
Matthew Wilson1
Abstract
Sybella Gurney (1870–1926) made important and largely unrecognized contributions to British
community design theory and practice. This essay begins with an exploration of her youthful social
reform activities and academic influences including Leonard Hobhouse, John Ruskin, Auguste
Comte, Frederic Le Play, John Stuart Mill, and Ebenezer Howard. These foundational pursuits
inspired her to become an ardent cooperator affiliated with the Garden Cities movement and to
serve as a sociologist seeking to kindle a “new civic spirit” for post -World War I reconstruction.
Gurney, as part of an idealistic circle of thinkers which included Patrick Geddes, considered
sociology as a means to realize complete Garden City-states based upon scientific, ethical, and
participatory principles.
Keywords
new towns/Garden Cities, citizen participation, nineteenth-century planning, Europe, poverty
The name Sybella Catherine Nino Branford, née Gurney (1870–1926; Figure 1),1 has remained on
the periphery of historical scholarship for several decades.2 Those familiar with the leafy garden
suburb of Hampstead, London, may be aware of Gurney Drive, which is named in her memory.
Others may recognize her name from recent works within the fields of gender studies, Victorian
sociology, town planning, and radical and socialist politics.3 We find in these accounts that
Gurney was a collaborator and friend of such social reformers as Henrietta Barnett, Henry Vivian,
Raymond Unwin, and others. Most recently, the sociologists John Scott and Ray Bromley, in their
magnificent study Envisioning Sociology: Victor Branford, Patrick Geddes, and the Quest for
Social Reconstruction (2013), have shed light on Gurney’s life. Here, she is featured in a minor if
tertiary role to her husband Victor Branford, who was the acolyte and business partner of the
Positivist sociologist, Patrick Geddes. Scott and Bromley provide a list of her publications and
details on her physical appearance, personality, and life in America and the UK. Biographical
information on Gurney, they reveal, is fragmentary and anecdotal at best, apart from obituary
material and a short history of her family held at the British Library.4 Scott and Bromley show that
1
College of Architecture and Planning, Ball State University, Muncie, IN, USA
Corresponding Author:
Matthew Wilson, College of Architecture and Planning, Ball State University, AB402, Muncie, IN 47306, USA.
Email: mrwilson@bsu.edu
Wilson 321
Figure 1. Sybella Branford portrait. Courtesy of Keele University, Le Play Collection. KU-LP 12/2/14.
Gurney set off on a brilliant career as a housing reform advocate. After her marriage to Branford
in the 1910s, however, she was hampered with domestic duties associated with the care of
their two adopted children in the suburbs.5 Scott and Bromley demonstrate that associates such
as Lewis Mumford could only really think of her in terms of being an “ample, buttery sort of
woman.”6 And in her later years, Gurney allegedly acted only as little more than a publicist of
Geddes’s sociological vision. Building on recent feminist analyses of Eileen Janes Yeo, we will
see, however, that Gurney’s work was not a detached patriarchal intellectualism associated with
the male Victorian; yet nor was it strictly the act of palliative social reform considered the place of
the public female.7
Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gurney’s name appeared within
various publications, which cite her as a representative and member of high-level administrative
committees that were responsible for organizing cooperative housing and town planning schemes.
She was by the 1910s nationally recognized within the spatial design disciplines by way of giving
international talks on the Garden Cities movement, publishing essays on sociological theory, criti-
quing town planning policies, and making a palpable impact on British domestic life. By the post–
World War I (WWI) period, Gurney had forged, based on her previous experiences, a praxis of
applied sociology for regional reconstruction. It would be a mistake to characterize her work during
this time as a mere derivative of Geddes’s vision as such but in fact a detailed extension and
elaboration of a broader collection of thinkers.
Although a Housing Organisation Society founder, Sociological Society councilwoman, Cities
Committee secretary, Ministry of Reconstruction member, and Le Play House organizer, the name
Sybella Gurney was practically lost to oblivion by the middle of the twentieth century. Rather than
commit to the dull and otherwise nearly impossible act of chronicling her actual daily activities in
the various organizations in which she was involved, the aim of this article is to trace some of the
322 Journal of Planning History 17(4)
broader contours of Gurney’s intellectual path. This essay accordingly gleans information from
various sources that cite her contributions to housing reform developments, town planning, and
sociology. It draws on journals, newspapers, magazine articles, and obituary information and her
manuscripts held at Keele University. With such scarcely used source material, this essay will
employ an intellectual history method to argue that Gurney’s lifework was framed by the ideas of
Leonard Hobhouse, Robert Owen, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Auguste Comte, Frédéric Le Play,
Ebenezer Howard and, thereafter, Patrick Geddes, and Victor Branford, all of whom she referenced
in her work. In this light, we will begin with an analysis of her intellectual curiosities aligned with
the cooperative movement, housing reform groups, Garden City supporters, and then those associ-
ated with the system of thought called Positivism. Such muddled curiosities, I argue, informed her
advocacy to revive the English village as a unit within a larger Garden City-state eutopia. Through
an analysis of Gurney’s work, it will become evident that she considered the Garden City as neither a
mere physical form nor the intellectual property of an elite guard of professional planners. Rather, it
was a system of material and ethical principles rooted in voluntary cooperation. For Gurney, a faith
in self-improvement, guided by the scientific-utopian imagination, was meant to realize true citizens
in tandem with Garden City-states. Her work, I argue, should be thought of as a deft extension of the
Comte-Le Play vision for post-WWI reconstruction, which was based on the Positivist tradition of
applied sociology. As such, this essay seeks to expand on knowledge of Gurney’s nebulous engage-
ment in various social reform circles and contributions to modern British community-planning
theory and practice.
Intellectual Foundations
Gurney held interests in cooperative philosophy and labor politics from early on in life. As we will
see, her academic education framed a belief in the possibility of kindling a “new civic spirit” for
reorganizing society.8 Among other Garden Cities advocates, Gurney’s work impacted the “new
towns” movement.9 By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the high modernist Congrès
Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, which increasingly underpinned the barren, corporate post-
WWII iteration of the International Style, laid out Garden-City-inspired town planning schemes
based on detached, top-down, rationalist principles. This approach was in direct contradistinction to
the empirical regionalist lines that Gurney and her associates espoused based on Positivist princi-
ples. Bearing in mind that Britain was a global empire while Gurney was active, we should consider,
in either case of rationalized versus Positivist-empirical forms of planning, the recent studies of
Konstanze Sylva Domhardt, Eric Paul Mumford, and Edward Soja; together these works suggest that
the Garden City model played an important role in modern Western urbanization. Although she
could not foresee its negative dialectic, Gurney was one of the chief female advocates of Garden
Cities and Suburbs.10 Let us see how her early experiences framed this outlook on regional sociology
and planning.
Sybella was born to the British Embassy chaplain Archer Thompson Gurney and to Eliza Eleanor
Hammet in Paris in 1870, at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War. By the time that one could
hear the “roar of the Prussian guns before the walls of Paris,” the family had fled to Oxford.11
Gurney attended Oxford High School and came under the influence of Matilda Ellen Bishop who in
1887 became the first principal of Thomas Holloway’s College for Women in Egham, now known as
Royal Holloway, University of London. On following Bishop to Egham, Gurney learnt “classical
culture and tradition” under “Great” scholar Thérese Dabis. Gurney thereafter returned to Lady
Margaret Hall, Oxford University, and as an external candidate, she took the classical moderations
examination for a Literae Humaniores, obtaining a second class in 1892.12
Gurney was among the first women to join the classes of L. T. Hobhouse, the Oxford fellow and
tutor who would later become one of the first sociology lecturers in Britain. Their shared interest in
Wilson 323
trade unionism, cooperatives, and workers’ education was uncommon to Oxford culture at the time,
and on this basis their friendship was founded.13 During this time, Hobhouse was preparing a treatise
on economic reform called The Labour Movement (1893). Here, Hobhouse sought to show the
compatibility of trade unionists, cooperators, and state and municipal socialists in achieving the
“better distribution of wealth and duties” for all.14 The study made comment on the liberal thought of
John Stuart Mill and the notion of voluntary cooperation, both of which Gurney referenced in her
later works. Voluntary cooperation, Hobhouse explained, was a state in which “we have the com-
munity of consumers directing production” to eliminate “profit on exchange.” In terms of govern-
ment, Mill maintained that “voluntary cooperation” supported individual liberty, as the “discussion
and management of collective interests is the great school of . . . public spirit.”15 Liberty, as it were,
should extend to the voluntary cooperation of workers, combining to attain higher wages and shorter
working hours. Mill speculated that the future of the laboring classes would consist of a “form of
association” in which laborers themselves operate on “terms of equality, collectively owning the
capital with which they carry on their operations and working under managers elected and remo-
vable by themselves.”16
One additional thing might also be said here about Mill and Gurney’s understanding of the role of
the sociologist. Mill’s celebrated System of Logic (1843) copiously cited Auguste Comte’s Cours de
Philosophie Positive (1830–1842), a six-volume treatise that introduced the modern science of
sociology.17 Mill’s Logic, in reference to Comte’s Cours, championed the establishment of a sci-
entific “sociological system” to “accelerate . . . natural progress”; in Comtist terms, sociologists
would defend trade unions and rely on their mass to help realize a grand social reorganization.18
Gurney would come to the conclusion that cooperation could play a key role in the creation of true
communities; cooperation was a “system which aims at social no less that material rebuilding” and
as such was “the very reverse” of state socialism and laissez-faire capitalism.19 Such terms align
with the view that the Victorian “sociologist” was different from “social scientist”; during the late
nineteenth century, sociologists were sometimes cast as the “makers of society,” the purported
coordinators of community life and, thereafter, the precursors of modern British town planning.20
Apart from her intellectual prowess, Hobhouse was impressed with Gurney’s interest in “redeeming
human beings from misery and squalor.”21
At Oxford, Gurney joined the Kyrle Society for the “Diffusion of Beauty among the People.” This
“missionary aesthete” believed that “gifts of beauty and culture” could “civilize and spiritually
elevate” the poor; they laid out gardens, arranged oratorios, and decorated the public rooms of the
poor with mural paintings, pictures, and flowers.22 The Kyrle Society was inspired by the writings of
John Ruskin, the first professor of Fine Art at Oxford, who made important comments on economic
production and environment in relation to poverty. That “country is the richest which nourishes the
greatest number of noble and happy human beings,” proclaimed Ruskin. True wealth entailed the
“unity of morality and economics.” Ruskin as such rejected political economy, being the “science of
getting rich” and its practices of seeking to create “inequalities or negations” or any other means of
“keeping your neighbour poor.”23
For Ruskin, the “making of civil persons” hinged on creating living and working environments
that were conducive to “civilisation.”24 Foreshadowing the aspirations of the Garden City move-
ment, which Gurney would soon hold dear, Ruskin offered a vision of green-belt communities in
which humanity was no longer enslaved to the structural injustices associated with the machine and
the rampant urbanization of speculative builders.25 Gurney’s colleague, Geddes, considered this
vision as not only vital to ending the “war” between the economic and natural sciences but permit-
ting the “speedy conquest” of sociology over the affairs of public life.26 Ruskin’s urban-regional
vision began with ameliorating the individual. After clothing and feeding the poor and, thereafter,
housing and town improvements came the creation of cities:
walled round, so that there might be no festering and wretched suburb anywhere, but clean and busy
street here, and the open country there, with a belt of beautiful garden and orchard round the walls, so that
from any part of the city perfectly fresh air and grass, and sight of far horizon might be reachable in a few
minutes’ walk.27
From the 1890s, Gurney’s idealism alternated between polemical talks on the urban condition and
advocacy of cooperative principles for its improvement. At Oxford, she entered into the circle of
Charlotte Toynbee, the social worker and widow of Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee introduced Gurney to
the trade unionist and craftsman Henry Vivian and the activist Thomas Blanford.28 Gurney joined
their Labour Co-partnership Association, becoming an executive committee member in 1895. She
served as junior editor of the Association’s journal called Labour Co-partnership under the Liberal
politician Aneurin Williams from 1894 until 1899, when she became its sole editor through to 1904.
It is said that during this time, Gurney introduced to the journal not only a critical eye on modern life
but also the Romantic poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough, William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, and
Matthew Arnold.29 She likewise took the opportunity to present her sociological view of
cooperation.
Along these lines, in 1897, Gurney published on behalf of the Labour Co-partnership Association
Sixty Years of Co-operation. The pamphlet recalled the intention of the Rochdale Pioneers to
“arrange the powers of production, distribution, education, and government” necessary for creating
self-supporting home colonies. It was this spirit that invigorated the early cooperative stores and
gave way to the Wholesale Society, Co-operative Press and Co-operative Union and the Labour
Association. Like the Positivist sociologist Frederic Harrison,30 Gurney criticized such groups,
however, for overemphasizing small-scale consumer success and, effectively, for losing sight of
the bigger picture.31 The cooperative movement, she wrote, could achieve much that state socialists
desired. More specifically, they should seek to establish a “Co-operative Commonwealth of the
future” in the spirit of Robert Owen’s schemes.32
Owen experimented with social theory at his New Lanark mills and was well regarded across
Europe for the improvements he demarcated in New View of Society (1813).33 He had determined
that the formation of character was detached from individual will and maintained, like Comte and
Ruskin, that the environment was key to “mental harmony.” His experiments centered on creating
social environments where people were “trained to be industrious, intelligent, virtuous, and valuable
members of the state.”34 For these reasons, Owen advocated home colonies as a modification of the
Poor Law. In these “quadrangular paradises,” a secular training for life in socialized mills meant
shorter operational hours, higher wages, lower food costs, and family life in private flats.35 Follow-
ing his 1817 Plan outlining new townships and the creation of the Grand National Consolidated
Trades Union in 1834, he introduced himself as the “social father” of the Association of All Classes
of All Nations. Owen’s “terrestrial morality” surfaced as a “Rational Religion” in The Book of the
New Moral World (1836), and during the 1840s he sketched a proposal for transforming Britain into
a network of republics.36 Here, Owen advocated the acquisition of land by the “governing authority”
to make it “public property.” He proposed that “when the numbers increase,” authorities would set
out a new community on a new site until “all the land of the earth shall be covered with . . . federative
townships or republics.”37 Arguably, Owen’s work had been as much of a moralizing “social
science” as Britain had seen.38 Before and during the post-WWI period, as we will see, Gurney
would not only cite Owen as an influence but propose home colonies based on Garden City
principles, as a new life for homecoming soldiers.
More immediately, in reference to such examples as New Lanark and New Harmony, Gurney
explained that, through the cooperative movement, she was not proposing to create a “refuge from
the world” of despair. Gurney indeed thought during this time that cooperative citizens, not the
“governing authority,” should seek to transform the city region in its entirety. The true modern
Wilson 325
community of cooperators “recognises itself to be only part of the larger community outside,” she
wrote, and helps its “neighbours develop that spirit of citizenship towards the larger whole”—toward
the complete “abolition of the slums.”39 Even if Gurney was, according to some accounts, a “staunch
evangelical Christian” for a time,40 she was not the one to await acts of divine providence. She
believed, like Owen, in the power of science to address social evils.
Thanks to both Mill’s Logic and Harriet Martineau’s edited translation of Auguste Comte’s
Cours, the word “sociology” soon took center stage in the minds of Gurney and other such Victor-
ians troubled by national and social questions. Additionally, during the 1860s, the Owenite coop-
erator G. J. Holyoake’s The Reasoner: Journal of Freethought and Positive Philosophy made
extensive reference to Comte’s Cours, which was being discussed at Owenite Halls of Science.
Comte praised the “high moral value” of Owen’s experiments, particularly New Harmony, which
encouraged the community to “Live for Others.” Owen’s followers, it has been noted, were the
“most receptive audience” to Comte’s utopian vision of modern society, which was based on
sociology.41 Like the Comtean Positivists of Britain, Gurney increasingly considered modern sociol-
ogy as the way to coordinate science and industry in the form of small independent communities.
The British Positivist Society was founded in the late 1850s by the ex-Oxford don and first “true
sociologist” in Britain, Richard Congreve (1818–1899). Like Ruskin and Positivist Society mem-
bers, Gurney believed that one of the greatest tragedies of the nineteenth century was the mass
produced, segregated slums of suburbia. The Positivist barrister Vernon Lushington, for instance,
insisted during the 1880s that it was necessary to create Positivist “social institutions” to oversee
“industrial operations”; the building trades in particular “need careful planning,” he proclaimed.
Otherwise, the “systematic fraud” would continue, with speculative builders erecting thousands
more unwanted “homes,” made from toxic and unsound scrap material, on “reeking marshes.” It
was impossible to describe these shanties as anything but “foul abortions, of meanness, ugliness, and
inefficiency . . . They stand, scare-crows of habitations, carcases, rotting away, cumbering the earth,
defiling what a few years ago were the beautiful suburbs of our great towns,” wrote Lushington.42
How, then, did Gurney respond to such a context?
Sybella the Cooperator

One of Gurney’s first notable attempts to apply cooperative principles in the direction of conscien-
tious community making came in 1901. This was two years before the first “Garden City” at
Letchworth came to fruition. Alongside Vivian and others, Gurney founded the Ealing Tenants
Co-partnership, which was the first cooperative tenants’ organization to provide workers’ housing.
Built on open country land, the result was the Brentham Garden Suburb. By 1905, fifty houses were
constructed. Two years later, the rest of the estate was completed by the arts and crafts architects
Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, who gained much esteem for Letchworth. It included sixty-three
acres, with ten houses an acre connected to allotments and twelve acres of recreation ground.43 The
historians Nikolas Pevsner and Bridget Cherry labeled the development unremarkable.44 This may
be true when one is fixed on questions of style. But what was remarkable about the Brentham suburb
was that it offered cooperative-financed public spaces. Gurney emphasized that such spaces were
integral to binding the people together as a cohesive unit. Moreover, these villages were “the latest
outcome of the cooperative movement which in its youth, in the days of Robert Owen, dreamt many
a dream of community making,” she explained. The copartnership tenants movement sought to own
and build property “held in common” thus recreating a sense of community between all.45 Years
later, the Field Secretary of the National Housing Association of America, John Ihlder, described the
pioneer copartnership suburb as an experimental model resulting from a synthesis of the Garden City
and copartnership movements.46
It was during this time that Gurney began to speak out, like Lushington and other Positivists had,
on the alienating nature of urban and suburban life. For the Labour Co-partnership journal, one of
her roles was to promote “Co-operative Housing.” And here she relayed one of the more memorable
indictments of speculative suburban building in 1905:
Housing of the People—what visions it calls up of rows of mean streets in our poor suburbs, of cramped
backyards, of sordid outlooks, of a lack of anything that appeals to the imagination, of little boxes of
houses set up on end, whose inhabitants’ great aim in life at least as far as concerns the women, is to
“keep themselves to themselves,” and thus cut themselves off from all social life and common endea-
vour; or turning to country districts, what visions of picturesque but unsanitary cottages, sadly over-
crowded and so insufficient in numbers that the young people are forced away to the towns for lack of
room to live.47
Gurney called on cooperators to implement policies that “refuse to allow more than a certain
number of houses to the acre.” One of her central aims here was to establish regulatory tenant–
owners’ societies to prevent suburban slums—to “lay out suburbs with more regard to the permanent
welfare of the community by avoiding the evils which too often followed the purely individualistic
administration of estates.”48 In a Ruskinian manner, Gurney pled to secure agricultural belts within
the reach of all, to not only increase the health of towns but to provide the “agricultural population”
with both a “market at its doors” and an interface between different classes. Too often, agricultural
belts were spoiled by urban development, and so she advocated the “mapping out of England by a
central commission” to establish “scientific building areas and agricultural belts” and to anticipate
new railways, tramways, and highways.49 Gurney held, also like such Positivists as Geddes and
Charles Booth, that true citizens could employ the cooperative method to “organize the development
of new districts so that suburban life may do more for those who live in them than town or country
life has done in the recent past.”50 Along these lines, Gurney was among the first to actively seek out
the reorganization of the suburbs into inclusive and idyllic places with social institutes and a clear
distinction between natural and manmade worlds.51
Gurney’s ideas about integrated communities closely approximated those of Ruskin’s followers,
Unwin and Parker. Unwin espoused the creation of small cities as complete zoned wholes, but he
also discussed the making of “local patriotism” via the “scientific-planning” of socially integrated
community districts.52 Such views countered those of the town planners S. D. Adshead and Charles
Robinson, who endorsed the creation of new class-segregated urban districts.53 The “separation of
classes,” Gurney wrote in contradistinction, “is one of the greatest evils of modern life . . . reformers
should aim at drawing them together.”54 Gurney’s interests here indeed aligned with the utopian
machinations of the Positivist sociologist and inventor, Ebenezer Howard. Howard’s famous book
To-Morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898) offered a complete sociological vision of a
sovereign city region.55 Presented as a unique “combination of proposals,” the treatise drew on the
works of Alfred Marshall and Edward Wakefield as well as Henry George, who did much to expose
the relationship between urban poverty, overcrowding, landlordism, and land speculation. Many
such thinkers promoted the taxation of unearned increment and land nationalization to finance state-
organized home colonies. The efforts of private philanthropists who organized model industrial
villages, such as Titus Salt, the Levers, and the Cadburys, also served as a model for Howard; their
projects promised improved housing and working conditions, contact with the “natural” environ-
ment, disease control, temperance groups, and social clubs.
Envisioning an urban-regional network, Howard desired to encircle London with a constellation
of home colonies, linked via rail and roadway and offering “plenty of work” (Figure 2). Seeking to
buoy up public-spirited citizenship, constrain city enlargement with greenbelts, and maintain plan-
ning oversight, Howard outlined collectivist features of Garden City life, including common
Wilson 327
Figure 2. “Plenty of Work.” Courtesy of Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, Ebenezer Howard Papers,
DE/Ho/F1/16.
ownership of property and cooperative industries. At the heart of each city-center, a ring of com-
munity institutions would encompass a verdant five-acre green. Howard imagined these spaces
would reinforce the social core of the community network: a “life-centred civilisation.”56 He
calculated that town and hinterlands united, totaling 6,000 acres, was sufficient to sustain a popu-
lation of 32,000 people. Howard maintained that sociological surveys—economic, agricultural,
industrial, and social—were pivotal to ensure a city was “planned as a whole.” Thus, the city would
have “unity of design and purpose,” and such formulae could “save England,” claimed Howard.57
When in 1905 Gurney became the Honorary Secretary of the Co-partnership Tenants Housing
Council, which was established under the auspices of the Labour Co-partnership Association, she
delivered papers that conveyed a profound appreciation of the inclusive nature of Howard’s Garden
City concept. Gurney’s collaborator, Henry Vivian, remarked that her
outlook was no narrow one, for she saw clearly that a solution of the problem involved in the long run the
handling of the development of our cities and town, on broad comprehensive lines so that architectural
beauty, efficient planning of neighbourhood districts, open spaces, allotments and the preservation of
natural beauty spots should all be regarded.58
It seems here again that Gurney was thus approaching urban-social problems from the socio-
logical plane, from the viewpoint of an inclusive social reorganization via community making. It
should perhaps be no surprise, then, that Gurney also played a role central to the realization of
workers’ housing at the first Garden City. She was in fact the first investor in the Garden City
Tenants Letchworth, which leased 20 acres with the purpose of building 130 cooperative owned
houses with £30,000. Gurney helped set out a six-acre site along Norton Road and Eastholm Green
Figure 3. 8/9 “Tenants of Cottages of Eastholm.” Courtesy of the Garden City Collection Study Centre,
GCCSC 868.85.
and financed the first two of fourteen cottages built around a two-acre common. Located at 8/9
Eastholm Green and nicknamed the “Gurney Cottages,” they placed third prize in the 1905 “Cheap
Cottages” exhibition. The local newspaper published a photograph (Figure 3) of the cottages under
the title “In the Days When We Were Pioneers.” Surrounded by other Co-partnership Tenants’
Society members, Gurney and the Earl of Stamford are pictured sitting in front and center of the
cottages.59 The design, which was the creation of Parker and Unwin, was less well received by the
judges. They commented that the bay window on the front facade was both too costly and unne-
cessary for the living room of such size. The “plan is rather wasteful of space,” they added, while the
roof, which consisted of two gabled pavilions intersecting with a gambrel, was too complicated.60
Gurney’s name was also associated with the creation of the Letchworth “Garden City Tenants’
Institute,” which was a project that included a spacious hall capable of seating 500 people.61 During
this time, she assumed a role on the managerial committee of the Garden City Tenants Letchworth,
which by 1907 had organized the construction of forty houses.62 At this point, Gurney was a
nationally and internationally known figure within the Garden Cities movement. In 1908, she
received a medal from M. Benoit Levy, the secretary of the French Garden City Association, for
her contributions to advancing town planning principles.63 And, alongside Aneurin Williams and W.
H. Lever, she was invited by Garden Cities & Town Planning journal to comment on the Town
Planning Bill of 1908.
Gurney had been part of a 1907 National Housing Reform Council delegation that pressured
Henry Campbell-Bannerman and John Burns to consider drafting this first British town planning
measure.64 Ultimately, she considered the scheme as falling short of the comprehensiveness of the
Small Holdings Bill; it did little in response to overcrowding and the arduous route to filing
complaints about development practices.65 As the Town Planning Act of 1909 was implemented,
Wilson 329
Gurney further elaborated on her dissatisfaction with the legislation. As the honorable secretary of
the Co-partnership Tenants Housing Council,66 Gurney proclaimed that copartnership in housing
was the means for physical and social reconstruction. She railed against the “extent of moral
degradation” involved in “wretched housing conditions” across the country. In 1905 alone, after
all, living conditions in Britain and its colonies costed more life than warfare. For British soldiers,
the battlefield of the South African War ended up being less than half as fatal (21,944 losses) as
living conditions in London (with a death rate of 75,558), Lancashire (86,518), Scotland (77,961),
the English Rural counties (58,425), and Australia (51,600). Repeating the polemics of Alderman
Thompson,67 she wrote that with such statistics, “we get a clear idea of the annual holocaust
accepted by many public men as a normal feature in the national life.”68 After comparing the
anthropometrical data of children and different industrial classes in Glasgow and Edinburgh to
those living in Garden Suburbs at Port Sunlight and Hampstead, she courageously outlined the
rationale for a new Housing and Town Planning Bill.69 Gurney proposed provisions here to improve
existing dwellings by requiring a minimum of light and air and other “health-giving conditions.”
And “all new development,” she demanded, should be on “Garden City and Suburb lines.”70 Her
proposal also aimed to control the number of houses and number of rooms allowed to the acre to
prevent overcrowding by establishing a “universal system of house inspection and registration.”
Above all, it was a human right to live in neighborhoods offering ample recreation grounds; and,
moreover, they should be located within walking distance to agricultural fields as well as tramway
depots that connect existing developments to new Garden Cities and Suburbs. Such provisions
would be blind to rich and poor, and geographical divisions by class would be abolished. The Bill,
in support of the Garden City model on the basis of voluntary cooperation, provided “object-lessons”
in the “practical politics” of soliciting “real community.”71
Throughout the 1900s, Gurney’s name was associated with the creation of the Garden Suburbs at
Brentham, Humberstone, and Hampstead. Each of these locations included a cooperative-financed
“Social Institute” or “Civic Association.” For Gurney, such spaces were vital to establishing a sense
of public life in the suburbs. (As we will see, they would become central to her vision for postwar
reconstruction.) The Brentham Club and Institute, for instance, hosted the weekly meetings of
the Choral and Dramatic Societies as well as history lectures and a French conversation circle
(Figure 4). The institute also offered cricket grounds and a library of 1,100 volumes thanks to a
generous donation from their famous resident, the secularist F. J. Gould.
During this time, Gurney was also invited to speak at the opening of the Asmuns Place Housing
estate at Hampstead. This scheme was designed by Parker and Unwin on behalf of the Hampstead
Tenants Limited. As a committee member and spokesperson for the group, Gurney stressed to
visitors on the opening day of the estate that the advantage gained here was that the “tenant regarded
himself as part of the community and not merely as a unit. They were getting back something of the
old English village life.”72 Thus, while Gurney did not design such institutes and housing schemes
and was not the sole person responsible for establishing the tenants companies which financed them,
she was so invested in their realization that she was invited to speak to their significance at public
ceremonies.
In October 1909, Gurney announced the establishment of a copartnership living block designed
by Parker and Unwin called “The Orchard” at the Hampstead Garden Suburb (Figure 5). As the
organizer and spokesperson for the scheme, she explained that her aim was to create housing
opportunities for “those who have paid their toll of labor to the community,” the old aged as well
as to the weak, feeble, and children. The now-demolished arts and crafts style quadrangle consisted
of fifty-seven flats and was the “first attempt at adequate housing of the aged on a garden suburb.”
Another key innovation here was that, apart from being at the center of life, overlooking allotments,
a tennis court and skating rink, these flats contained a bed recess, living room, and washroom. A
separate scullery and field cupboard was included. The conditions of the “one room tenement of
Figure 4. The Brentham Club and Institute rendering my G. L. Sutcliffe. Courtesy of Brentham Garden Suburb
Archive.
mean streets, that of having to carry water or coal from basement to garret, is totally abolished,”
claimed Gurney.73 Before further delving into Gurney’s work, it would be well to explore the
activities of Geddes and Branford. Altogether this trio of kindred spirits, as we will see, represented
a cogent force for postwar reconstruction. Of them, and although historiography tells us otherwise, I
would argue that Gurney was the most adept at harmonizing theory and practice.
Envisioning Eutopia
During the 1890s, Geddes, Branford, and colleagues such as J. Arthur Thomson began to fill their
sociological institute called the Outlook Tower, in Edinburgh, with the results of their regional
sociological survey. Geddes would refer to the end product as an “Encyclopaedia Civica” where
social facts were arranged according to a “detailed synergy of orderly actions.” The Encyclopaedia
Civica showed the “more systematic correlation of each region with its people, of each people with
its region.” It could provide the evidence for “positively laying down geographical and social laws”
of an ethical community, wrote Geddes.74 Drawing on the utopian scheme called the Occidental
Republic in Comte’s Syste`me de politique positive (1848–1854), Geddes imagined how a network of
scientific, “spiritual institutions,” such as the Outlook Tower, would emerge throughout the
West.75,76 And each would house its own unique Encyclopaedia Civica. With an aim to achieve
the “wholesale organization” of the “productive energies” of regional social life via a “Policy of
Culture,” each institution would serve as the communitary nerve center of neighborhood, district,
city, or metropolitan capitol. This was not simply a means to incite an intensive local renascence but
to achieve an inclusive sociocracy, a government by sociology. In this way, Geddes aimed to quell
the impact of imperial subjugation, nation-state centralization, anarcho-militant unrest, and rural
plunder.77 Geddes reiterated at the Royal Institute of British Architects town planning conference of
1910, and elsewhere, that the Outlook Tower was thus to serve as a model for a global network of
civic societies or “Civicentre(s) for sociologist and citizen.”78 Gurney’s desire to establish
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Figure 5. The Orchard at the Hampstead Garden Suburb, perspective and plan. Anonymous, “Co-partnership
Homes for the Aged at Hampstead Garden Suburb” Garden Cities & Town Planning 4, no. 35 (1901): 248–49.
cooperative social institutes or civic associations and her quest to make idyllic communities, I argue,
should be understood in the context of these sociological ideas.
One important meeting ground for Geddes, Branford, and Gurney was the Sociological Society in
London. The society came to fruition in 1903–1904, thanks to the initiative of Branford who served
as its honorary secretary. Branford aimed to fashion it into a “Civicenter” operating along the lines
of the “applied sociology” of Geddes, who was in competition for one of the first academic posts in
sociology in Britain. The Sociological Society hosted talks by candidates including Geddes, Hob-
house, Beatrice Webb, and Edward Westermarck.79 These University of London School of Eco-
nomics lectureships ultimately went to Hobhouse and Westermarck who, respectively, advanced the
ethical and psychological, and anthropological and juristic, aspects of the discipline.80
There were clear tensions between different parties at the Sociological Society, particularly in
regard to the origins and limits of sociology. Branford, for instance, wrote about an emergent field of
Figure 6. The religions of idealism and formalism diagram. Adapted from Victor V. Branford, “A Sociological
Approach Towards Unity,” in Ideals of Science, ed. James Edward Hand (1904), 155. Redrawn by the author,
2017.
“City Design” led by “Sociological Friars” of a “Religion of Idealism” (Figure 6). These ideas were
an extension of Comte’s utopian scheme, the Occidental Republic, and its Religion of Humanity.81
Applied sociology as such conspicuously clashed with the objective sociology of Beatrice Webb and
Hobhouse, who argued that such notions fell outside the realm of science.82 In 1907, the Socio-
logical Society Cities Committee was founded by Geddes and Branford. Their intention was to
advance applied sociology and the practice of regional surveys as a preparatory for town planning.
During this time, we see in Gurney’s work a continued critique of housing conditions and the
organization of cooperative housing schemes and, advocacy of the Garden Cities movement. But
one can also see an emphatic shift toward theorizing in relation to the Positivist view of sociology
and its potential to generate a new civic spirit for the reorganization of the life of citizen and society.
The turn to such rhetoric was likely a result of the influence of Branford, whom she married in 1910.
While Gurney once believed, as a member of the Kyrle Society, in the power of aesthetic gifts to
ameliorate the poor, she announced in 1909 that the “recreating of the citizen” was the only true
“cure for the slum.” Yet “the slum-dweller himself is not the only citizen to be recreated,” she
maintained, but also “society which allows him to grow up under such conditions”—the Local
Authorities, the private voters—“all of us are in the same condemnation.”83 “Citizenship,” Gurney
protested, had become little more than voting at parliamentary elections, alongside the “politics of
the parish pump.”84 A true community of citizens would not remain satisfied with “material well-
being amid pleasant surroundings.” They would, in her words, “transcend the material by just so
much as Plato’s Republic in its final form transcends Glaucon’s City of Pigs.”85 People should ask
more of life than bread alone, with meager wages and house on a dull street. True citizens “demand
for recognition of the common life in all its aspects, material and immaterial,” and they “attempt to
do voluntarily what our modern state and local government has failed to do,” she wrote.86
Gurney’s invectives soon extended to church institutions. Writing on the theme of “Theology and
Sociology,” she observed that in such “dark and troublous times we do not receive any definite
Wilson 333
statement from the Church,” which offered too much of an individualist and “abstract treatment” of
human relations.87 Such sentiments are not unlike those of Henri de Saint Simon, the French
philosopher who from the 1800s outlined the basis of the “Positive philosophy” and the speculative
science of “social physiology,” which served as the foundation for Comte’s “sociology.”88 More-
over, Saint Simon’s Nouveau Christianisme (1825) accused the Vatican of heresy, of “giving bad
education,” monopolizing cultivation, spoiling arable land, and neglecting “the moral and physical
welfare of the indigent class.”89 Protestants, meanwhile, had “adopted an inferior morality,” a “bad
form of worship,” and a “bad dogma.” Saint Simon proclaimed that it was necessary to create “a
social state in which science will again assume a religious character” and to pursue “the great end”
of the amelioration of humankind.90 Indeed, Gurney claimed in her examination of “Theology and
Sociology” that “modern science” was seeking to study “human societies” and was most suited to
uniting the people and creating communities based on a concrete politics of self-help.91 (A central
element here, as we will see below, was Comte’s utopian ideas of citizenship, where different “civic
types” or social groupings rule in turn in relation to the spaces of the city-region.) Along this vein, in
1910, Gurney wrote that true citizens aimed at “health and health-giving surroundings” and the
“fullness of life for all”; such a community would be founded in “something higher than enlightened
self-interest.” “Its root is the consciousness of unity and its aim the common good.” This was what
Gurney referred to as “the new civic spirit,” which was something akin to a religious duty to
realizing a “eutopia” or “the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.” The “new civic spirit” springs up and
“protests in horror against the conditions which selfish individualism has created . . . it is the new
civic spirit which is expressing itself in the determination to change the old order of things,” she
wrote.92 Gurney’s “idea of citizenship,” one commentator remarked, was “essentially religious,” but
her motivations about the new moral authority of the sociologist rested between idealism and
pragmatism.93
Gurney was speaking to the housing crisis sweeping the country and the potentials it lent to
transforming notions of British citizenship and society in a regional sequence, from the rural to the
urban. The revival of the village was a “matter of national importance,” she proclaimed.94 Deter-
mined to carry out this agenda, in 1911, Gurney founded the Rural Co-partnership Housing Asso-
ciation and served as its president. Over the next few years, the collective changed names four
times;95 by 1913, it was simply known as the Housing Organisation Society. This group was
described as a “propagandist association” that aimed to establish and guide local cooperative
societies in the creation of housing and social institutes along Garden City lines.96 Thus for Gurney,
copartnership in housing was a means for generating both a rural revival and a social ideal: “self-
help and mutual help” to achieve the “adaptation to modern life of the mediaeval village
community.”97 Rural Co-partnership Housing Association pamphlets state that the society offered
meticulous site planning based on a medieval plan in which properties radiate from a central hamlet;
this was likely the design work of the association’s sole architect Cecil Hignett who was the former
assistant of Parker and Unwin. The intention here was not to enforce a bureaucratic masterplan but to
stymie overcrowding. The Rural Co-partnership Housing Association also offered advice and help
with establishing society rules, resources, permits, and financial guidelines. It would offer great
flexibility by allowing one to own between one and fifty acres, self-maintained or rented out, with
gardens, orchards, livestock, or combinations thereof.98 Like Howard, Gurney explained here that
through collective pressure, the people could attain this “diffusion of private property,” the “exercise
of common rights,” and the revival of village handicrafts.99 Property held in common created
common interests shared by all, thus tempering not only individualistic sentiments and selfish old
habits but class conflict and slum life. Here, one could enjoy seasonal work punctuated by seasonal
exhibitions and festivals expressed in song, story, and dance as well as literary and theatrical
productions drawing on the rich social wealth of the region. Gurney firmly believed, like Owen,
that cooperation would not only spread village-by-village but that it would reshape the modern spirit.
The Architectural Record described Gurney’s efforts as a “natural development” of the Garden
Cities and Garden Suburbs movement and as a highly relevant model for the “improvement of
country life” in America.100
By 1913, Gurney’s Housing Organisation Society was overseeing the activities of ten cooperative
groups, which held 264 acres of land and 156 houses, with 17 external investment members. Over
the next few years, the society guided the construction of over 1,100 houses across the country,
including places such as Dachet, Sevenoaks, Somersham, and St. Mawes. The Housing Organisation
Society also initiated an effort to create county committees to implement village and housing
reconstruction schemes, such as, for example, the Co-partnership Housing Colony realized in
Tilmore, in association with the social reformer Montague Fordham.101 While WWI stifled many
building initiatives, it has been said that Gurney’s society somehow carried on and build over 200
houses on a cooperative basis during the conflict.102 But how did such rural efforts harmonize with
her theoretical interests about urban life?
Through her references to the new civic spirit, it seems Gurney thought that the reconstruction of
the rural housing, in conjunction with social institutes, could help internalize in children a new
modern morality. With the migration of these rural adolescents into urban centers, their mass social
psychology would react against, and help to gradually transform, city life across the country. Such
suggestions, it is clear, later appeared in Geddes and Branford’s The Coming Polity (1917) and Our
Social Inheritance (1919). These treatises were part of their “Making of the Future” book series,
which addressed the complexities of post-WWI reconstruction. In these works, Geddes and Branford
presented Comte-Le Play sociology as focusing on the creation of a network of regional Garden
City-state units consisting of separate but interlinked civic and rustic realms.103 In their interpreta-
tion, Comte had traced the evolution of ancient settlements into cities via a historical survey focusing
on the “progress” made by the urban “civic types” of Intellectuals and Emotionals (as spiritual
powers; i.e., science and art) and Chiefs and People (as temporal powers; i.e., industrialists and
guilds) who rule in turn in relation to their respective institutional spaces of the city region. Le Play,
in their interpretation, had conducted rural-geographical social surveys for observing the “order” of
virtuous, self-sufficient “rural types,” or “guardians of custom” such as miners, woodsmen, hunters,
shepherds, peasants, farmers, and fishermen (Figure 7).104 Branford portrayed rustic types as the
“connecting links between Nature and man” and civic types as the “carriers of that social heritage of
civilisation which puts man above and beyond Nature.”105 Thus, Comte studied the morphology of
the mother city of the regional republic. And Le Play inspected its adjoining landscape of villages,
workshops, and agrarian fields. The two halves thus formed the working practice of applied Comte-
Le Play sociology. In what might be considered a feminist interpretation of Comte’s system of civic
types, Gurney wrote that these
four categories are not separate and static . . . each individual can act in each capacity just in so far he is
developing a complete human personality; while yet we must admit that in many, perhaps in most, cases
he will tend to settle mainly into one or other division, and that in our modern world society represses and
divides them all.106
A necessary requisite to realizing Comte’s utopia was the unification of “the People” in the form
of trade unions or guilds, and here too Gurney had something to say.
During the British industrial crises of the early 1910s, Gurney promoted, as Hobhouse had years
beforehand, a coalition between guild socialists, trade unionists, and the labor copartnership move-
ment. Meanwhile, Branford suggested that the efforts of such a proletarian collective should be
guided by university sociologists, as a spiritual power, and a moralized proletarian dictator, as a
temporal power; this idea was drawn from Comte’s Occidental Republic utopa.107 Perhaps as a
constructive criticism of such speculations, Gurney wrote that labor united could bring us
Wilson 335
Figure 7. “The Association of the Valley Plan with the Valley Section.” Adapted from Sociological Society
Cities Committee, Papers for the Present, No. 8. A Rustic View of War and Peace (1917–1919), 5. Redrawn by the
author, 2016.
“appreciably nearer the Utopia of our dreams which is a state of things which by Cooperation we try
to realise and not merely to dream over, or secure by some remote political method.”108 Protesting
against the Hegelian tendency to think in terms of either capitalism and its “unrestricted
individualism” versus the bureaucracy of state socialism, she claimed that “in reality man is a social
animal . . . and if allowed will spontaneously develop many kinds of association”; as these activities
are regularized into institutions, the power of the people they represent will be increased.109 Above
all, craft guilds were the “special organ of the people,” she maintained. If revived as a collective and
lifestyle of training and craftsmanship, in association with philanthropists, architects, and building
groups as a national guild, then something similar to William Morris’ arts and crafts vision could
come into fruition.110 Expressing sympathy for those oppressed by “class struggle” at the 1916 Arts
and Crafts exhibition, Gurney proclaimed that a union of workers could break up predatory “rings of
capitalists” and implement a scheme of Social Finance or the scientific coordination of “collective
energies towards national well-being.”111 But what was the bigger picture of the Gurney–Geddes–
Branford vision?
During the years of WWI and its aftermath, they seemed to faithfully believe in the Positivist
utopia as the basis for postwar reconstruction. This scheme would entail the transformation of the
British empire into a global network of Garden City-states. Here, the university and sociologist
represented an intellectual “spiritual power” for coordinating the reconstruction effort. A govern-
ment of women, meanwhile, would reign over moral and cultural life in each region. In terms of
social finance, the Bank of England would set out on consolidating cooperative societies and
establish a once a generation “tithe” to realize such a “moral equivalent of war.” Each region would
create a Policy of Culture, based on the Encyclopaedia Civica and regional survey organized by the
local Social Institute, and it might entail the construction of new universities, schools, and cultural
institutions; urban and rural working-class houses alongside shops, entertainment venues, and work-
places; lighting infrastructure, parks, railways, canals, harbors, docks, and warehouses as well as
forestation, drainage, and land reclamation. Each region would also create its own architectural
language, currency, and festivals and thus enhance individual and social life suited to each locale.112
A system of regional guilds, led by moralized industrialists, would construct the vision of each
regional utopia.113
Meanwhile, the intrawar years shaped Gurney’s pragmatic optimism, and it appears that her
efforts were taken seriously by the British government. She in fact contributed to the Ministry of
Reconstruction’s postwar efforts. By 1918, the Ministry’s delegates, which included Beatrice Webb,
Tudor Walters, Raymond Unwin, Seebohm Rowntree, Henry Aldridge, and Henry Vivian, were
publishing materials as national planning recommendations. Gurney was responsible for the work of
the “Women’s Subcommittee,” which conducted local investigations to help determine housing
needs. Her planning guidance supported cooperative methods and Garden City principles. This
subcommittee advised on public housing and model home plans from the mother’s point of view,
critiquing everything from fittings and function to garden and playground design.114 Such findings
appeared in the Ministry of Reconstruction’s Tudor Walters Report (1918), which aimed to address
the national deficit: 8,00,000 to 1 million homes.115
Despite her efforts with the Ministry of Reconstruction, Gurney did not favor government
bureaucracies implementing top-down sociospatial planning schemes. She desired to see citizens
empowered, with a passion for creating idyllic places. Postwar life, she held alongside Geddes and
Branford, should operate on the basis of the spirit of decentralized self-reliance and civic duty.
Leadership and education was central to this agenda. Along these lines, the Sociological Society
Cities Committee members, Patrick Abercrombie, H. V. Lanchester, Branford, and Gurney, orga-
nized conferences with a network of local “Civic Societies” during the late 1910s. The chief purpose
of these societies, Abercrombie explained, was to help “coordinate the whole field” of historical,
geographical, and civic survey work in town and country. These volunteer citizen groups would
“increase civic consciousness and help forward the progress of decentralization which is the foun-
dation of local advancement” and “local patriotism.” They would “carry on a campaign of recon-
struction propaganda” and offer “constructive criticism” on local planning affairs and help to
establish a “comprehensive plan of development” for their city region. Moreover, such spaces were
intended to host discussion of everything that concerned civic life.116 Gurney as such announced that
even in rural areas, the local civic association was a space for coordinating “opportunities for the
practice, study, and enjoyment of the arts and the sciences,” in the direction of creating a “self-
supporting rural community.”117
One substantial response to the dizzying complexities of postwar life—the bad housing, conges-
tion, low wages, extensive unemployment, unprocurable land, failing schools, and minimal contact
with nature—was the 1919 “Housing, Town Planning, &c. Act.” Some historians attribute the
rationale for the Act to the comprehensive vision of reconstruction explained in the Making of the
Future series organized by Geddes and Branford. Herein, they acknowledged that they considered
Comte’s System of Positive Polity their model—being a “practical treatise” for reconstruction. And
some years later, Gurney also publicly acknowledged the enduring relevance of Comte’s princi-
ples.118 More importantly, to bolster reconstruction activities, Gurney and Branford established the
Le Play House in 1920 as an institute of pure and applied sociology. It appears as if it was not only
Wilson 337
her finances but also her work which established the rationale for the name and activities of the
institute—work on the lines of regional reconstruction beginning with the rural domain. Branford as
such announced at its opening ceremonies that the “doctrine” of the Le Play House was the Comte-
Le Play method of sociology, which aimed to make “Every man his own Sociologist.”119
Along these lines, into the 1920s, Gurney and Branford wrote on the theme of social finance.
Collaborating with the economist John Ross and the ecologist Marcel Hardy, Gurney argued that it
was essential in their postwar times to outlay an Aristotelian infrastructure of living “the good life”
for each region as a cohesive unit. Gurney’s contribution addressed the psychological perspective of
finance. She proclaimed that if district banks were “socialized in their outlook and have to meet the
demands of a democratic local community, they will consider the field of investment” from the point
of view of the “happiness, wealth, and life of the whole community” and “provide an environment
that makes a full life possible to all.” She encouraged “all forms of cooperative activity” for housing,
small holdings, credit for guilds, inventors, and explorers.120
Gurney and the sociologist Alexander Farquharson soon produced An Introduction to Regional
Surveys (1924) on behalf of the Leplay House. It was intended as a manual of self-help toward self-
determination. Like Ruskin and the British Positivists, they explained that Britain’s “degraded
material surroundings” were the result of a “prevailing spirit of individualism” and an almost
“complete forgetfulness of what community life at its best can and ought to be.” Following the
Comte-Le Play method of the regional survey, they described the implications of the full and
complete documentation of the “three great fields” of place, work, and folk. Gurney and Farquhar-
son as such discussed geographical, economical, and anthropological surveys alongside other Le
Play House representatives during the postwar period. The three-part anthropological survey (demo-
graphic, sociographical, and psychological) reflected the Positivist tradition. Here, the sociographi-
cal survey was used to investigate “Spiritual Associations,” “Temporal Associations,”
“Undifferentiated Associations,” and “Integrated Associations of Communities.” Above all, for
Gurney and Farquharson, through the regional survey, volunteer sociologists could gain an appre-
ciation of the “conditions governing the whole development of each region.” The survey would
create “informed public spirit” and deal “successfully with current evils” by stimulating a “more
vivid imagination . . . directed to the realisation of ideals.” It would inform the creation of social
reform programs, regional plans, and culture policies, which would serve as the foundation for
“action taken during the next few years.”121 Perhaps most importantly, the act of the regional survey,
they wrote, offered a generalist education in citizenship and “would give concreteness and
definiteness” to “religious ideals”—the “ardent life of the realization of a local ‘Eutopia.’”122
Conclusion
For Gurney, eutopia was not an intangible no place but a shared critical vision based on scientific
processes and a faith in the cooperation of social groups. Her experimental attempts to reformulate
the suburban slums into garden villages framed her outlook on postwar reconstruction. Here, we see
that Gurney could not be pigeonholed in Victorian gender stereotypes of male as detached thinker
and female as subordinate reformer of male thought. She was capable of drawing on and synthesiz-
ing a broad range of intellectual ideas while administering the realization of numerous community-
minded projects. As we have seen, the crux of her ideas about citizenship were rooted in the local
social institute or civic association where citizen-sociologists would conduct regional surveys to
document resources and diagnose the qualities of town and country life. On this basis, a policy of
culture and urban-regional plan would come to fruition. A movement of social finance, energized by
workers’ groups and social clubs, would generate revenue and initiate the policy and plans to realize
a unit within a larger Garden City-state: an idyllic region of city, country, villages, towns, and
suburbs. This system of ideas was part and parcel of the vision of reconstruction she idealized and
sought to implement in association with Geddes and Branford. Alongside other Positivist thinkers,
they imagined a government of women leading science and industry and operating on the basis of
realizing decentralized, resilient cities full of socially responsible citizens.123 The reality of postwar
life would fall severely short of this ideal. Notwithstanding, on Gurney’s legacy, E. B. Betham, the
housing reformer, noted “there are many families throughout the country now living in healthy and
pleasant cottages, the building of which was the outcome of her original action.”124 On such a
commendable basis, Gurney deserves to be remembered for making a significant contribution to
modern British community design theory and practice.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
1. Aspects of this essay were originally presented at the International Conference of the Utopian Studies
Society at the University of Gdańsk, Poland, July 5–8, 2017. I would like to thank both those who
commented on the presentation and the editors and peer reviewers of the Journal of Planning History for
their patience and insightful remarks.
2. Because the work of her partner, Victor Branford, is also referred to in this essay, I will use the name
Sybella Gurney for the sake of clarity. Citations will nonetheless list Sybella’s last name as it appears on the
publication at hand. This essay employs the following abbreviations for archival sources: BL-Add.MS,
British Library Additional Manuscripts; BLPES-LPS, British Library of Political and Economic Science,
London Positivist Society; DT-LP, Vernon Lushington manuscripts, in the possession of David Taylor;
GCCSC, The Garden City Collection Study Centre; KU-LP, Keele University, Le Play Collection; and
NLS, National Library of Scotland.
3. See, for instance, Duncan Bowie, The Radical and Socialist Tradition in British Planning (London, UK:
Routledge, 2016), 174; Eileen Janes Yeo, The Contest for Social Science (London, UK: Rivers Oram Press,
1996).
4. BL-Add.MS 81597.
5. John Scott and Ray Bromley, Envisioning Sociology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013),
2–3; see also 25, 37–41.
6. Ibid., 28.
7. Eileen Janes Yeo, “Feminizing the Citizen,” in Engendering the Social, ed. Barbara L. Marshall and Anne
M. Witz (Berkshire, UK: Open University Press, 2004), 98–113.
8. The significance of the Garden City movement to modern design, which is derived from the idea of creating
small communities with a highly socialized character, is well known. Recent studies have shown how this
urban social form was employed by the Congre`s internationaux d’architecture moderne in association with
the New Towns movement. (None of these works makes reference to Gurney.) See, for instance, Ewart G.
Culpin, The Garden City Movement Up-to-date (London, UK: Garden Cities & Town Planning Associa-
tion, 1913); Frederic Harrison, “An Old Garden City,” Cornhill Magazine CIX, April 1914, 460–65; F. J.
Osborn, Green-belt Cities (London, UK: Faber and Faber, 1946); New Townsmen, New Towns after the
War (London, UK: Dent & Sons, 1918); Peter Batchelor, “The Origin of the Garden City Concept of Urban
Form,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 28, no. 3 (1969): 184–200; Robert Fishman,
Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow
(Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Stanley Buder, Visionaries and Planners (Oxford, UK: Oxford
Wilson 339
University Press, 1990); Dennis Hardy, From Garden Cities to New Towns (London, UK: Spon, 1991);
Stephen Victor Ward, The Garden City: Past, Present, and Future (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1992);
Robert K. Home, Of Planting and Planning (London, UK: Spon, 1997); Mark Clapson, Invincible Green
Suburbs (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998); Robert Beevers, The Garden City Utopia
(Abingdon, UK: Olivia Press, 2002).
9. In the historiography of new towns planning (1945–1975), it has been suggested that the connection
between prehistoric settlements; ancient Mesopotamian, Greek, and Roman colonialism; the Garden City
movement; and the “New Towns movement” is that they relay an “unmistakable sign of hegemony” and
“territorial domination.” Such language suggests a kind of external “despotism”—which to Montesquieu
connoted a remote, monstrous rule by caprice—as opposed to the democratic ruling in turn that was
seemingly possible within the scale of the small democratic state. Along these lines, the political historian
Gregory Claeys has recently shown that a key, ardent antiimperialist group in nineteenth-century Britain
was the Positivist Society, the members of which included Richard Congreve, Frederic Harrison, Charles
Booth, Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard, Victor Branford, and, by proxy, Gurney. (T. R. Wright’s
Religion of Humanity [1986] covers the relationships between these figures.) Pointing to the failings of
the British Empire to benefit humanity, such Positivists, inspired by the social laws expounded by the
French philosopher Auguste Comte, considered sociology and, later, town planning and city design as a
means for self-determination. This was a humanitarian alternative to the despotism of Britain’s structural
injustices at home and abroad. See also, however, the works of Naylor Simon and Barbara Hooper, which
suggest that Geddes, Branford, and Gurney were of an imperialist rather than interventionist bent when it
came to their international ventures. At home, however, by the 1880s and 1890s, “General” William Booth,
Katharine St John Conway, Robert Blatchford, and Henry Solly were, like the Positivists, promoting the
creation of “home colonies” to redress questions of unemployment, urban overcrowding, poverty, starva-
tion, and the oppressive alternative of life in the workhouse. One could argue that such conditions are more
so the result of a lack of planning and an inhumane territorial domination over urbanized populations. Such
particularized conditions should be put in context when compared to the “modernization regime” associ-
ated with the 1960s new towns movement. The intellectual historian Rosemary Wakeman provides an
excellent account of the rich diversity and complexity of modernism, but this essay puts emphasis on a case
of participatory democratic urbanism. Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 3, 102–17, 273–84; Rosemary Wakeman, Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual
History of the New Town Movement (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 1, 11–12, 31,
35–37; Simon Naylor, “That Very Garden of South America,” Singapore Journal 21, no. 1 (2002): 48–
62; Barbara Hooper, “Split at the Roots: A Critique of the Philosophical and Political Sources of Modern
Planning Doctrine,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 13, no. 1 (1992): 45–80; T. R. Wright, The
Religion of Humanity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Richard Congreve, Essays,
Political Social Religious, 3 vols., III, (London, UK: Longmans, 1900), 107–18; General Booth, Darkest
England and the Way Out (London, UK: Salvation Army, 1890); Henry Solly, Home Colonisation (Lon-
don, UK: Swan Sonnenschein, 1884); Katherine St. John Conway, “Home Colonisation,” Seed-Time 1, no.
16 (1893): 8–10; Robert Blatchford, Merrie England (London, UK: Clarion, 1895); John Brown, “Charles
Booth and Labour Colonies, 1889–1905,” Economic History Review 21, no. 2 (1968): 349–60; Charles de
Secondat Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 152;
P. J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns 1700–1800 (Oxfordshire, UK: Oxford University Press, 1982);
Miles Glendinning, “The New Town ‘Tradition’: Past, Present—and Future?,” in Back from Utopia: The
Challenge of the Modern Movement, ed. Hubert-Jan Henket and Hilde Heynen (Rotterdam, the Nether-
lands: 010, 2002), 206–15.
10. Konstanze Sylva Domhardt, “The Garden City Idea in the CIAM discourse on Urbanism,” Planning
Perspectives 27, no. 2 (2012): 173–97; Eric Paul Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism,
1928–1960 (London, UK: MIT Press, 2000); Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis (Milton Keynes,
UK: Blackwell, 2000).
11. Anonymous, “War Notes,” Morning Post, September 27, 1870; Diana Maltz, British Aestheticism and the
Urban Working Classes, 1870–1900 (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1–18; Ian Flecther, “Some
Aspects of Aestheticism,” in Twilight of the Dawn, ed. O. M. Brack (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1987): 1–33.
12. KU-LP/12/2/15, f. 140.
13. Ibid.
14. L. T. Hobhouse, The Labour Movement (London, UK: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), 1–55.
15. Peter P. Nicholson, The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 279–80.
16. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 2 vols., I (London, UK: J. A. Hill, 1904).
17. Auguste Comte. Cours de philsophie positive. 6 vols. 1830–42. Paris: Bachelier.
18. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (London, UK: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1873), 60–61,
163–66; John Stuart Mill, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (London, UK: H. Holt, 1873),
3–5; John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, 2 vols., I (London: Parker, 1843), 611
19. KU-LP/12/2/15, f. 140.
20. National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Transactions, 1878 (London, UK: Longmans,
Green, 1879), 127–31; Victor Branford, Interpretations and Forecasts (London, UK: Kennerley, 1914),
373. H. V. Lanchester, Town Planning in Madras (London, UK: Constable & Company, 1918), 18. On the
phrase “makers of society,” see the proceedings of the Social Science Association. As Branford would
explain, however, unlike true sociologists the Association’s work remained “unilluminated by reference to
the constructive and directive formulae of the main founders of sociology . . . they put to sea without a
compass.” Increasingly, “town planners” such as H. V. Lanchester stated that “we have been gradually
reaching the conclusion that sociology is the principal basis for Town Planning.” Sociology was necessary
for “analysing all the influences that dictate the city’s structure and govern its development.”
21. KU-LP/12/2/15, f. 140.
22. Anoymous, “The first meeting of the Kyrle Society,” The Spectator, January 29, 1881.
23. John Ruskin, The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols., XVII (London, UK: Allen,
1903–12): 44, 105.
24. Ibid., XVIII, 485.
25. For the links between Ruskin, Comte, Positivism, and the Garden Cities movement, see Gill G. Cockram,
Ruskin and Social Reform (London, UK: Tauris, 2007); Michael H. Lang, Designing Utopia (Montréal:
Black Rose, 1999); Buder, Visionaries and Planners, 30, 170.
26. Patrick Geddes, John Ruskin (London, UK: William Brown, 1884), 14, 26–27.
27. Ruskin, The Library Edition, vol. XVIII, 183–84.
28. Scott and Bromley, Envisioning Sociology, 38.
29. KU-LP/12/2/15 f. 4.
30. Matthew Wilson, “Labour, Utopia and Modern Design Theory: the Positivist Sociology of Frederic
Harrison,” Intellectual History Review (2017): 1–23. Harrison played a key in vindicating trade unionism
on various fronts by conducting sociological surveys of industry during the 1860s.
31. Frederic Harrison, “Industrial Co-operation,” Fortnightly Review 3, no. 16 (1866): 477–504.
32. Sybella Gurney, Sixty Years of Co-operation (London, UK: The Labour Association, 1898), 2–12.
33. Robert Owen. 1813. A New View of Society. London: Richard Taylor.
34. Sybella Gurney, Sixty Years of Co-operation (London, UK: The Labour Association, 1898), 2–12.
35. Owen, New View of Society, vii–xxi; Owen, The Life of Robert Owen, 2 vols., I (London, UK: Wilson,
1858), 60–116, General appendix 92; Ian L. Donnachie and George R. Hewitt, Historic New Lanark
(Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 72, 85; Beatrice Webb, The Co-operative Movement
in Great Britain (London, UK: Swan Sonnenschein, 1904), 15–16; Frank Podmore, Robert Owen, 2 vols., I
(New York: Appleton, 1907), 276; Anoymous, “Mr. Owen of Lanark, Scotland,” Leeds Mercury, August
23, 1817.
Wilson 341
36. Robert Owen. 1836. The Book of the New Moral World. Glasgow: H. Robinson.
37. Robert Owen, A New View of Society and Other Writings (London, UK: Penguin, 1991), vii–xxi; Robert
Owen, The Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race (London, UK: Wilson, 1849), 121–22.
38. Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 16, 76.
39. KU-LP/12/2/2 f. 5, 11.
40. Scott and Bromley, Envisioning Sociology, 49.
41. Auguste Comte, Correspondance ine´dite d’Auguste Comte, 4 vols., III (Paris: Société Positiviste, 1904);
Royden Harrison, Before the Socialists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965); George Jacob Holyoake,
The History of Co-operation in England, 2 vols., II (London: Trübner, 1879). Alongside his former Oxford
student J. H. Bridges, Congreve became the first “true sociologists” in the eyes of Comte, who set the bar at
physician. See Susan Liveing, Nineteenth Century Teacher, John Henry Bridges (London, UK: Paul,
Trench, Trubner, 1926).
42. DT-LP, “Industry,” ff. 1–50.
43. Aileen Reid, Brentham: A History of the Pioneer Garden Suburb 1901–2001 (London, UK: Brentham
Heritage Society, 2000).
44. Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England, London 3: North West (London, UK: Yale
University Press, 1991), 49, 178.
45. KU-LP/12/2/2 f. 5.
46. John Ihlder, “Financing English Housing,” The American City 13, no. 4 (1915): 298.
47. Sybella Gurney, “Co-operative Housing,” Labour Co-partnership 11, no. 7 (1905, July): 104–7.
48. Ibid.
49. Alderman Thompson, Housing Up-to-date (London, UK: Thompson, 1907), 199.
50. Sybella Gurney, “Civic Reconstruction and the Garden City Movement,” The Sociological Review A3, no.
1 (1910): 35–43; Patrick Geddes, “Co-operation versus Socialism,” in The Co-operative Wholesale Society
Limited Annual, ed. Cooperative Wholesale Society (Manchester, UK: Co-operative Printing Society,
1888), 285–307.
51. Gurney, “Co-operative Housing,” 104–7; Anoymous, “Labour Co-partnership. Coming of Age Conference
at Derby,” Evening Express, April 17, 1905.
52. Raymond Unwin and M. H. Baillie Scott, Town Planning and Modern Architecture at the Hampstead
Garden Suburb (London, UK: Fisher Unwin, 1909), 29, 87, 95; Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in
Practice (London, UK: Fisher Unwin, 1909), 140–1.
53. S. D. Adshead, “Town Planning,” British Architect 73, no. 1 (1910): 15–17; Charles Mulford Robinson,
The Width and Arrangement of Streets (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1911), 26–27; Royal Institute of British
Architects, Transactions (London, UK: RIBA, 1911), 195, 233–65, 620–21; George L. Pepler, “Town and
Country Planning,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 32, no. 10 (1939): 59–64.
54. KU-LP/12/2/2 f. 8.
55. Ebenezer Howard. 1898. To-Morrow: a peaceful path to real reform. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.
56. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (London, UK: Faber and Faber, 1970), 20–30, 51–54.
57. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (London, UK: Sawn Sonnenschein, 1902), 51–52, 138–40.
58. KU-LP/12/2/15, f. 143.
59. GCCSC LBM3004.7; GCCSC 868.85.
60. Anonymous, “Supplement of the Cheap Cottages Exhibition,” The County Gentleman and Land and Water
Illustrated, September 16, 1905.
61. Anonymous, “Record of Progress at Letchworth,” Garden Cities and Town Planning 3, no. 27 (1908):
59–60.
62. KU-LP/12/2/15 f. 5; Garden City Association, Housing in Town and Country (London, UK: GCA,
1906), 30.
63. KU-LP/12/2/15 f. 5.
64. Bowie, The Radical and Socialist Tradition, 174.
65. Aneurin Williams, W. H. Lever, Sybella Gurney, Thomas Adams, J. S. Nettleford, Raymond Unwin, and
George Haw. “Some Criticisms of the Bill,” Garden Cities and Town Planning 3, no. 27 (1908): 47–48.
66. By 1909, the Co-partnership Tenants Housing Council Executive Board included Henry Aldridge, George
and Edward Cadbury, Ebenezer Howard, W. H. Lever, C. S. Loch, and Raymond Unwin.
67. Alderman W. Thompson, “The Housing Problem. Preliminary, Nos. 1 to 7,” in Pan-Anglican Congress:
the Church and Human Society, ed. T. C. Fry and J. Carter (London, UK: Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge, 1908): 45–52.
68. KU-LP/12/2/2 f. 2.
69. House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Report of the Inter-departmental Committee on Physical Dete-
rioration 3 vols., I (London, UK: Wyman & Sons, 1904), v–37; H. Gordon Jones, “The Eugenic Value of
the Environment,” Positivist Review no. 248 (1913): 182–89; Sociological Society, Sociological Papers 3
vols., II (London, UK: Macmillan, 1906), 58; F. J. Gould, “Patrick Geddes’ Eutopia,” Positivist Review no.
276 (1915): 279–81; Sociological Society, Sociological Papers 3 vols., I (London, UK: Macmillan, 1905),
104–21; Garden City Association, Housing in Town, 21. Similar arguments had been made by the 1904
Inter-departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, the Garden Cities Association, and Sociological
Society. At the latter, Geddes’s euthenics of applied sociology was offered as a rebuttal to Francis Galton
and his applied biology of eugenics.
70. KU-LP/12/2/2 f. 4.
71. Anonymous, “The Sociological Society,” The Times, October 28, 1909.
72. Anonymous, “Progress at Hampstead,” Garden Cities and Town Planning 3, no. 28 (London, UK: 1908):
80–82.
73. Anonymous, “Co-Partnership Homes for the Aged at Hampstead Garden Suburb,” Garden Cities and Town
Planning 4, no. 35 (1909): 248–49.
74. Patrick Geddes, “The Influence of Geographical Conditions on Social Development,” Geographical Jour-
nal 12, no. 6 (1898): 580–86.
75. Auguste Comte. 1848–54. System of Positive Polity. trans by J.H. Bridges, Frederic Harrison, E.S. Beesly,
and Richard Congreve, 1875–7. 4 vols. London: Longmans, Green.
76. Comte imagined in the 1840s that with the fall of the British Empire, the world could be transformed into a
global network of 500 city-states. See Matthew Wilson, Moralising Space: the Utopian Urbanism of the
British Positivists, 1855–1920 (London, UK: Routledge, 2018).
77. Patrick Geddes, Education for Economics (Manchester, UK: Co-operative Printing Society, 1895), 1–28,
47; Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), 233; Auguste Comte,
System of Positive Polity, 4 vols., II (London, UK: Longmans, Green, 1875), 302–6; Comte, System of
Positive Polity, 4 vols., IV (London, UK: Longmans, Green, 1877), 257–95.
78. Patrick Geddes, The Civic Survey of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, UK: Outlook Tower, 1911), 537–57; Socio-
logical Society, Sociological Papers, 3 vols., II, 92–3; Patrick Geddes, “Two Steps in Civics,” Town
Planning Review 4 (1913, July): 78–94.
79. Victor V. Branford, “On the Origin and Use of the Word ‘Sociology,’” American Journal of Sociology 9,
no. 2 (1903): 145–62; Victor Branford, “The Founders of Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 10,
no. 1 (1904): 94–126; KU-LP/1/1/3/1, ff. 1–3; NLS, MS.10556, f. 39.
80. KU-LP/11/4/25 f. 223.
81. Victor V. Branford, “A Sociological Approach towards Unity,” In Ideals of Science and Faith, ed. James
Edward Hand (London, UK: Allen, 1904): 103–56; Branford, “The Founders of Sociology,” 94–126;
Victor V. Branford, “Science and Citizenship,” in Science in Public Affairs, ed., Rev. J. E. Hand (London,
UK: Allen, 1906): 222–86; NLS, MS.10612, f. 25; Sociological Society, Sociological Papers, 122.
82. L. T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction (London, UK: Unwin, 1904), 5, 55, 78–79; Sociological Society,
Sociological Papers, 3 vols., III (London, UK: Macmillan, 1907), 345–52; Sociological Society, Socio-
logical Papers I, 1–43; Branford, “On the Origin,” 145–62.
83. KU-LP/12/2/2 f. 11.
Wilson 343
84. Sybella Branford, “Citizenship and the Civic Association,” The Sociological Review a13, no. 4 (1921):
228–34.
85. Gurney, “Civic Reconstruction,” 35–43.
86. Ibid.
87. KU-LP/12/2/15 f. 223–24.
88. Emile Durkheim, Socialism (New York: Collier, 1962), 134.
89. Claude Henri de Saint-Simon. 1825. Nouveau Christianisme. Paris: Bossange père.
90. Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, New Christianity (London, UK: Wilson, 1834), 7, 9–48.
91. KU-LP/12/2/15 f. 223–24. Similarly Margaret Mead would claim in 1972 the aim of the new towns
movement was to “make life more human.” Margaret Mead, “New Towns to Set New Life Styles,” in New
Towns: Why—and for Whom? ed. Harvey S. Perloff and Neil C. Sandberg (New York: Praeger, 1972),
120. Cited in Wakeman, Practicing Utopia, 309.
92. Gurney, “Civic Reconstruction,” 35–43.
93. KU-LP/12/2/15, f. 147.
94. Sybella Branford, “The Revival of the Village,” Sociological Review a6, no. 1 (1913): 43–46.
95. The name changes included The Rural Co-partnership Housing Association; Rural Co-partnership Hous-
ing and Land Council; Rural Housing Organisation Society; and, finally, Housing Organisation Society.
96. KU-LP/12/2/15, f. 145.
97. KU-LP/12/2/1, ff. 1–6.
98. Ibid.
99. Branford, “The Revival of the Village,” 43–46.
100. Anonymous, “Co-operative Rural Housing,” Architectural Record 31, no. 2 (1912): 198.
101. KU-LP/12/2/15, f. 145.
102. Anonymous, “Mrs. Victor Branford,” The Times, June 15, 1926.
103. S. H. Swinny, “Comte and Le Play,” Positivist Review no. 298 (1917): 223–31; BLPES-LPS 1/2, f. 17.
104. Victor Branford and Patrick Geddes, The Coming Polity (London, UK: Williams and Norgate, 1917),
xv–53.
105. Frédéric Le Play, Les ouvriers Europe´ens, 6 vols., I (Tours: Mame, 1877), 84–131; Victor V. Branford,
“The Regional Survey as a Method of Social Study,” The Geographical Teacher 42, no. 8 (1915):
97–102.
106. Sybella Branford, “What Is a Group?” Sociological Review A13, no. 2 (1921): 109–18.
107. Victor Branford, Interpretations & Forecasts (London, UK: Kennerley, 1914), 248–49; Victor Branford,
“Survivals and Tendencies in the University,” Sociological Review 7, no. 1 (1914): 1–8.
108. KU-LP/12/2/36, ff. 1–2.
109. KU-LP/12/2/1, f. 4.
110. Ibid.
111. Sybella Braford and C. R. Ashbee “The Arts and Crafts Exhibition,” Sociological Review a9, no. 1 (1916):
49–52; Sybella Braford, “An Industrial Symposium,” New Age, December 7, 1916.
112. A clear separation between such Positivists as Gurney, Branford, and Geddes was that they were not
seeking to uphold the “state spaces” of the status quo, as Scott suggests, as was the case with the “new
towns” movement. Yet as Wakeman suggests, they “promised happiness, self-determination, and a full
civic life,” but it is not made clear as to how. Wakeman, Practicing Utopia, 8; James C. Scott, Like a
State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1998), 187; Victor Branford, Whitherward? Hell or Eutopia (London, UK: Williams
and Norgate, 1921), 45–49, 85–91; Sybella Branford, Education in the Factory after the War (Birming-
ham, UK: Birmingham Printers, 1916); “An Industrial Symposium,” 1916; Victor V. Branford, “Ora
Labora,” The Times, August 11, 1920; W. Anderson, “Regionalism and an Educational Guild,” New Age,
October 12, 1916, 575; Victor Branford and Patrick Geddes, Our Social Inheritance (London, UK:
Williams & Norgate, 1919), 11–13, 85, 368.
113. Sociological Societies Cities Committee, Papers for the Present, no. 2 (London, UK: Headley Bros.,
1917–1919), 1–17.
114. KU-LP/12/4/2, f. 21; KU-LP/12/2/27, ff. 1–7; KU-LP/12/2/22, ff. 1–7; KU-LP/12/2/1, ff. 1–3; Sybella
Branford, “In Defence of the English Cottage,” Town Planning Review 9, no. 1 (1921): 41–46; Branford,
“The Revival of the Village,” 43–46; Anonymous, “The Rural Housing Problem,” The Times, April 17,
1913; Anonymous, “Better Working-class Homes,” The Times, March 4, 1918.
115. House of Commons Parliamentary Papers. 1918. [The Tudor Walters Report] The Report of the Com-
mittee Appointed by the President of the Local Government Board and the Secretary for Scotland to
Consider Question of Building Construction in Connection with the Provision of Dwellings for the
Working Classes in England and Wales, and Scotland and Report upon Methods of Securing Economy
and Despatch in the Provision of Such Dwellings. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
116. Patrick Abercrombie, “A Civic Society,” Town Planning Review 8, no. 2 (1920): 79–92.
117. Branford, “Citizenship and the Civic Association,” 228–34.
118. Branford and Geddes, The Coming Polity, 52; Branford, “What Is a Group?” 109–18.
119. KU-LP/11/3/38 f. 1.
120. Sybella Branford, Marcel Hardy, and John Ross, “Suggestions towards a National Policy in Agriculture,”
Sociological Review XII, no. 1 (1920): 82–101.
121. Sybella Branford and Alexander Farquharson, An Introduction to Regional Surveys (London, UK: The Le
Play House Press, 1924), 1–17, 32–46.
122. Sybella Branford, “Communal Control of Credit,” Sociological Review a17, no. 2 (1925): 141–43; KU-
LP/12/2/15, f. 147; Branford and Farquharson, An Introduction to Regional Surveys, 3–4; “The Socio-
logical Society,” 1909.
123. Frederick J. Gould, Auguste Comte and Positivism (London, UK: Watts, 1916), 9; Branford, Whither-
ward? 1–59; Sociological Society Cities Committee, Papers for the Present, no. 9 (London, UK: Headley
Bros., 1917–1919), 42.
124. KU-LP/12/2/15, f. 147.
Author Biography
Matthew Wilson, PhD, is an intellectual historian who teaches architecture, urbanism, and critical cultural
theory. His research focuses on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century political, philosophical, and epistemo-
logical motivations of spatial design. He is the author of Moralising Space: The Utopian Urbanism of the
British Positivists, 1855–1920.

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