Mary Crowley: Beginnings of the Career of a Pioneering Modern Movement Architect in Britain before 1945

Abstract

MoMoWo 291 MoMoWo Utopian Beginnings Mary Crowley was born in Bradford in 1907 1 into a Quaker family rooted in the idealism and utopian experimentation of Quaker industrialists, Joseph and Seebohm Rowntree and Ebanezer Howard, and their concept for garden cities. These ideas initially shaped the 150 acre site model village at New Earswick near York and then the Garden Cities in Letchworth and Welwyn where Mary grew up and lived. 2 Parker and Unwin were commissioned to design New Earswick and two years later they started work in 1903 on the first Garden City at Letchworth. 3 Ebanezer Howard's Garden City 4 movement was a reaction to the overcrowding and industrial pollution of Victorian cities. He drew on Quaker precedents at Port Sunlight, Bournville and Robert Owen's 'Vision for a new society', which envisioned 'a happy home for many generations of children where they will be brought up amid surroundings that will benefit them spiritually, mentally and physically'. 5 Mary's father, Ralph Crowley 'became one of the pioneers of the Garden City Movement and at the heart of this utopian idealism was the education and social welfare of children. Ralph Crowley believed that, as he wrote, 'a doctor cannot fulfil his more specific function of treating bodily diseases, if he is indifferent to the patient's environmental conditions and his mental and moral welfare.' 6 Following Ralph's recruitment to the Board of Education in London in 1908, the family