Gardens of Stone in Liverpool. Extra-long residential infrastructures as examples of communal vitality ahead of their time

Abstract

In the 1930s, the Housing Department of Liverpool led by Lancelot Keay will eradicate unsanitary housing in the city replacing them with a set of collective housing that are able to accommodate large communities in linear blocks with streets in the air. Some of their common characteristics are territorial dimensions, streets in the air, a central courtyard as a playground, and complementary services to the residential programme, these are the reasons why we will define them as extra-long residential infrastructures. Among the called Gardens of Stone, we find cases such as St Andrews Gardens; Gerard Gardens; Myrtle Gardens; or Caryl Gardens. Despite the testimonies of good cohabitation and neighborhood generation, they will demolish almost all the cases due to their lack of maintenance, reason why they will be forgotten. We rescue and analyze them in this writing understanding them as materialized utopias of theoretical models raised in the interwar period that, with few exceptions, they will not proliferate until after the Second World War, as was the case of well-known examples such as Park Hill Estate or the Robin Hood Gardens.