One year before the outbreak of the First World War, Mary Gabrielle Collins penned a poetic tribute to her home: the Hampstead Garden Suburb. Situated at London's north-western limit, Hampstead Garden Suburb had been conceived by Henrietta Barnett, who had founded the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust in 1906 after negotiating the purchase of 243 acres of land from Eton College. Before this, Henrietta and her husband, the Revd (later Canon) Samuel Barnett, had made important and influential contributions to the settlement movement, which involved establishing residential buildings in impoverished districts that would, according to Samuel Barnett, ‘enable the rich and poor to understand each other’. For this purpose, the Barnetts founded Toynbee Hall in 1884, which was the earliest university-affiliated settlement, and certainly among the most influential. Toynbee Hall, named as a memorial to the reformer and historian Arthur Toynbee, was significant for its programme of social work directed largely by students from Balliol College, Oxford, but also because its prominence stimulated the development of a range of settlements throughout London. The Barnetts had lived at Toynbee Hall after its establishment, but towards the end of the century they moved to a property in Hampstead and became increasingly interested in the garden cities movement as laid out by Ebenezer Howard in To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898) (republished under its more popular title, Garden Cities of To-Morrow in 1902). Howard's vision was a plan that combined the convenience and financial opportunity of the city with the peaceful and salutary nature of the country, an organised system of urban infrastructure but with an organic design that responded to rather than dominated the natural world. While the concise but comprehensive plan for urban reform set out in To-Morrow would prove one of the most influential for suburban development in Britain and North America, its central idea was not eccentric but rather a response to decades of writing and public debate about the improvements needed in urban spaces.

In Practicable Socialism (1888), Henrietta Barnett explained that her work in the East End had made apparent how greatly districts would benefit from town planning, but at that time comprehensive plans of how cities or city districts could be improved ‘elicited only little interest, local or otherwise’.