The nineteenth century was a golden age for public architecture in Britain. Grand edifices such as Paxton’s Crystal Palace and innumerable lesser public buildings helped to engender in their patrons and in the public a sense of glowing civic and national pride. However, it is an irony of the laissez-faire Victorian era that, despite the vast creative energy expended upon such public buildings, so little architectural effort was spent in tackling the single severest problem faced by the municipal authorities — the generally appalling condition of working class housing. Indeed, even when, in response to the growing body of public health and similar legislation, the first urban improvement schemes were enacted, they tended to eschew progressive architectural ideas, being instead strictly sanitary and technical in nature, with often far from satisfactory results. It was not until the turn of century that architects and new architectural ideas began to have a widespread influence on the design of workers’ housing. This influence was demonstrated in such factory villages as Bourneville and Port Sunlight, and by the birth of the Garden City movement, but it was through the work of Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, the first British architects to gain a widespread reputation for the design of workers’ housing, that the housing of the working classes became firmly established as an architectural as well as a social problem.