PLANS have been resurrected for a 1,700-home ‘garden village’ on the edge of York.

The Galtres Garden Village Development Company has applied for a ‘scoping plan’ to City of York Council in relation to a 230-acre site in north York near to the A1237 east of Earswick village.

The developer wants to test out community reaction before formally submitting plans.

If approved, the development would see more than 1,700 new homes, 40 per cent of which (about 700) would be affordable. The developer says a new primary school, sports pitch, village green, communal gardens and recreation and play facilities would also be built.

York Press:

An image of what the proposed new Galtres Garden Village would look like

Not everyone would welcome such a large new development, of course. But it would be far from the first time that major new ‘garden villages’ on this scale have been built in the city.

At the start of the last century, Joseph Rowntree bought bought 150 acres of land, also near Earswick, for his pioneering ‘model village’ of New Earswick. Rowntree believed that working people deserved decent housing - his vision was for a village of mixed housing for workers and managers alike, in a green setting and with gardens for each home.

The first 28 houses were built between 1902 and 1904 - and the development has indeed gone on to become a ‘model’ in many ways.

York Press:

Photographer Tempest Anderson was standing at the bottom of Station Avenue looking up at the Folk Hall when he took this photograph in the 1910s

The principles established at New Earswick helped to influence the development of the new Tang Hall estate by the city council 20 years later, under the ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ project at the end of the First World War.

Work on the new estate began in 1919 on land to the east of York deemed unsuitable for agricultural use. “The houses would (include) two and three bedroom semi-detached houses (and) three and four bedroom houses in blocks of four,” says the Tang Hall Local History group, in a short history of the estate.

York Press:

The Tang Hall estate seen from the air in about 1930. The photo shows the original layout of the estate

In more recent times the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust has sought to draw upon some of the principles of New Earswick when developing Derwenthorpe as a new ‘model village’ for our times.

It remains to be seen whether the Galtres Garden Village will get the go ahead. But in our gallery we take a look back in photographs at some of those earlier pioneering ‘new village’ developments in York...