Fallings Park: Wolverhampton's showpiece garden suburb that failed to bloom
And here it is – the blueprint for Wolverhampton's showpiece garden suburb.
If you can't make head nor tail of it, try turning the map 90 degrees clockwise, so that north is at the top.
Fallings Park Garden Suburb was poised to take its place as a shining example of enlightened town planning alongside the likes of Port Sunlight and Bournville.
Today those places attract admiring visitors. Alas, in Fallings Park only a modest start was made and the grand vision never materialised.
However if you know what to look for, you can imagine what they had in mind, as the pioneering houses still stand and evidence of the planning of the estate and its facilities is still visible.
The idea was that instead of virgin land east of Wolverhampton being developed in higgledy-piggledy fashion as the population expanded in the times of Edwardian England, it would be laid out through order and design, with attractive quality housing for ordinary people.
In 1907 a masterplan was drawn up.
Quite a few tennis courts, you'll notice, together with allotments, smallholdings, parks, and plentiful recreation spaces. Lots of new roads as well, allowing for perhaps 3,000 new houses and therefore a population in the Fallings Park Garden Suburb of around 15,000 – which shows that back then the rule of thumb was five people per house.
In unveiling the proposed layout in May 1907, the Midland Counties Express – a weekly associate paper of the Express & Star – told readers: "A great deal of interest is being taken in this scheme throughout the country, as it will provide an object lesson to local authorities and private landowners in the laying out of suburban estates without the necessity of municipal purchase or risk.
