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Henrietta Barnett founded the Hampstead Garden Suburb in 1907. She and her husband, Canon Barnett, had been responsible for starting a series of charitable and educational institutions of which the best known are the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Toynbee Hall.
When the project for the building of the Hampstead Tube with a station on the west of Hampstead Heath became known, Henrietta Barnett's first thought was of the threatened "ruin of the sylvan restfulness of that portion of the most beautiful open space near London". Her immediate reaction was the organisation of the Hampstead Heath Extension Council to save 80 acres of land from the "rows of ugly villas such as disfigure Willesden and most of the suburbs of London". The idea of the Garden Suburb grew out of the Heath Extension, for which the money was raised and the land handed over to the London County Council to be dedicated to the public as an open space forever. The plans were outlined by Henrietta Barnett in an article in the Contemporary Review of 1905. The intention of the company, which she formed in March, 1906 with the help of influential friends, was not to be an ordinary land-owning company but to make a social experiment by providing for people of all classes a beautiful and healthy place to live in. The broad lines of the scheme were -
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