An article in the Evening Standard is headed ‘Pimlico is obviously London’s best place to live’. This bears out Ian Nairn the great heritage campaigner’s commendation of the area, when he was trying to save Britain older buildings and spaces from being bulldozed with post war building optimism. He approvingly described Pimlico, where he made his home in Warwick Square, as ‘a garden village’ . 📚Read more: The Making of Pimlico – Garden Village
A village, by the way has been defined in the The Oxford Languages dictionary as ’a group of houses and associated buildings, larger than a hamlet and smaller than a town, situated in a rural area’. But what is the origin of the garden village?
Pimlico’s Enduring Appeal as a ‘Garden Village’
The term is very much connected with another ‘Rus in Urbe’, meaning the countryside in the city. Thomas Cubitt, the 19th century spec builder who developed Pimlico with the Grosvenor family, when he signed the lease to develop it in 1828, declared that he was bringing a bit of the countryside to the city and there are of course other examples in London, such as Bedford Park in Chiswick or Bloomsbury, where Cubitt himself worked before moving on to work with the Grosvenor family on areas such as Belgravia and Pimlico.
Green Urban Planning in London
The key aspect of these areas is the presence of an expanse of communal green area, often within a grid framework and in the case of Pimlico, this comprised 3 large squares, Eccleston, Warwick and St George’s Square, which essentially hold the neighbourhood together and give it form and focus. A mixture of green expanses with shrubs and garden features is the norm.
The Romans were the first civilisation that we know of to truly take seriously the idea of recognising benefits of rural features within the city. They even coined the phrase rus in urbe to describe it.
Historical Origins of the Garden Village and ‘Rus in Urbe’
In 29BC Campus Martius was transformed into lovely common access parkland including lakes and space for recreation of certain of the public by Emperor Augustus and ‘horti’ which were urban villas within parks, were built for wealthy Romans of which Nero’s Domus Aurea was the grandest.
Nero’s Domus Aurea encompasses untamed wild animals and green open space and woods side by side with the more domesticated and forma. One only has to think of the architect John Nash’s villas in Regents Park to see that these villa ideas were seen as a ‘good idea’ and successfully copied with enduring appeal!
Then you have the London Square starting with the 1619 Commission which established the development of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, leading to later developments as we see in Bloomsbury and the Grosvenor estates in West London such as Pimlico and Belgravia.
Unlike the Royal Parks or the Victorian protection of common land in cities, which were of course green, these squares carried on the principle of placing housing side by side with expanses of green areas. However, because of the very location squares and public parks in the midst of cities, they did have a similar ‘rus in urbe ‘effect, helping create a London which is one of the greenest cities in the world.
Class Considerations in Urban Design
Pimlico and Belgravia however were built within the slightly simplistic Georgian approach to town planning which was that it is necessary for the developer to build a church for the community and provide for the servants of the wealthy who lived in these developments, building mews to keep the horses and carriages, with meagre slightly dark lodgings upstairs and public houses for them to wait around for their masters and mistresses in. Or there were rows of shops with a public house included, even built before the rest of the development, to give Cubitt’s building workers somewhere to rest and shelter. The remainder of the lower classes however were not considered. 📚Read more: A Toast to Belgravia’s Mews Pubs
It took the coming of the Garden City movement with Ebenezer Howard, in 1898, after Thomas Cubitt had died, for the lower classes to be properly considered in places such as Letchworth, Welwyn Garden suburb or Brentham Garden suburb in Ealing.
Howard was a bit more ambitious than Cubitt in building his neighbourhood, as it had become a city of ideally 32,000 people with neighbourhoods, in a concentric pattern with open spaces, public parks and six radial boulevards. This was no doubt borrowed from the Cubitt grid system idea which you can see in Pimlico with a hierarchy of roads in a grid, Lupus Street Pimlico being a good example of a major grid road. Pimlico itself would probably equate to one of Howard’s neighbourhoods within the new town concentric grid system.
Evolution Through the 20th Century
By the end of the 19th century, Pimlico was starting to feel the strain of change, brought on partly by the development of Victoria station in the 1860’s. The smaller terraces from the Squares was being let out in rooms or converted to hotels. Public housing was built on Ebury Bridge Road Street near Chelsea Bridge and then after World War I new architecturally iconic public housing was built at Churchill Gardens and Lillington Gardens. All these schemes included communal facilities and shops.
These changes have not spoilt, perhaps only enhances the garden village feel of Pimlico as is articulated in the Evening Standard article so why not take a look? Join me on The Garden Village of Pimlico Walk and experience Pimlico yourself!
