Bedford Park: London’s first garden suburb

Bedford Park is a distinct estate in Acton, so I have given it its own category. Basically, Bedford Park takes in all the streets between Bath, Blenheim, Esmond, and Abinger Roads. It gets its name from Bedford House which was a large house and gardens built in Georgian times. The reason why Bedford Park is quite distinct from the rest of Acton is down to a Victorian cloth merchant called Jonathan Carr, who bought Bedford House in the 1870s. He had the idea of creating a garden suburb - a village where middle-class office workers could live and easily commute to London. This was a totally original idea - and he came up with it long before Hampstead Garden Suburb was thought of. He based it on the fact that the new development of trains meant that people could work in central London but, instead of living in slums around the rich enclaves, they could travel back to new residential areas, which had previously been considered right out in the country. Work began in 1875 and the Bedford Park estate was largely completed by 1881. It was the first garden suburb in London. The whole idea was fairly revolutionary. No one normally worried about the standard of living of the workers in those days. Not having dysentery was a life-style choice for  Victorians, like not wearing fur today. But people like Carr had plans to ensure that ordinary people had good living conditions.

The original houses in Bedford Park were built in the late Victorian style known as Dutch or Queen Anne Revival style (a rebellion against the Gothic style fashionable in earlier decades). The Dutch style involved gabled roofs, often with dormer windows, and the buildings were constructed in good-quality red brick. (Bedford Park has the same architectural style as much of the Cadogan Estate in Chelsea.) The overseeing architects were Norman Shaw and his pupil Maurice Adams, but individual houses had their own architects. Bedford Park as a whole is a conservation area, and most of the houses are quite deservedly listed buildings as well.