People of Note
Raymond Unwin
Isaac Unwin was born in Sheffield in 1796, he married at Sheffield in 1817 to Hannah SWINDEN (b.1796 Sheffield). They had four children all born in Rotherham:
- Elizabeth born 1822
- Joseph born 1824
- William born 1832 who married Elizabeth Sully
- Ellen born 1835.
William Unwin (b.1832) married at Rotherham to Elizabeth Sully. They had 2 children,William born in 1862 at Rotherham and Raymond born in 1863 in Whiston.
Sir Raymond Unwin (1863-1940), engineer,
architect, and town planner, the younger son of William and Elizabeth Unwin. Elizabeth was from Bridgwater in Somerset,
her family had shipping interests in the Welsh coal trade. His father had inherited a tannery at
Rotherham, Yorkshire, and it was at Whiston, near Rotherham, that Raymond was born on 2 November 1863.
Unwin considered entering the Church of England, as his elder brother William did. But he was diverted,to his father's disappointment, into a life of social activism, reputedly on the advice of Samuel Barnett. Another influence may have been his friendship with the Edward Carpenter, who had left the church and after some years as a university lecturer and settled in the Chesterfield area from 1878. Unwin's son Edward was named after Carpenter, who was also his godfather. In his autobiography Carpenter described Unwin ' a young man of cultuted antecedents, of first rate ability and good sense, healthy, democratic, vegetarian ...'
After declining a scholarship at Magdalen College, Unwin in 1881 took up an engineering apprenticeship with the Staveley Coal and Iron Company at Chesterfield. He may have been involved in the model housing built by the Staveley Company at Barrow Hill. He designed St. Andrews Church in 1895.
Staveley was the home town of a brother-in-law of his father, Robert Parker (1828–1901), branch manager of the Sheffield Banking Company. Among Parker's children Unwin became friendly with his two cousins Ethel (1865–1949), his future wife, and (Richard) Barry Parker (1867-1947), his future partner. A formal engagement with Ethel was forbidden until 1891, because of Unwin's risqué friends and socialist ideals; they were eventually married by civil ceremony, in 1893. By her he had a son, Edward, who predeceased him, and a daughter.
Unwin spent much time in the 1880s at the community founded at Millthorpe near Chesterfield by Carpenter. For two years from early 1885 he worked as an engineering draughtsman in Manchester. Here he threw himself into political agitation. He became branch secretary of William Morris's newly founded Socialist League, met Morris himself and Ford Madox Brown (then completing his paintings for Manchester town hall), contributed to the league's magazine, Commonwealth, and made other political friends, notably Bruce Glasier (1859–1920), who stimulated his interest in architecture
He began to
practice in 1896 at Buxton, in partnership with Richard Barry Parker, his half cousin from Chesterfield.
The partners designed a number of houses in the vicinity including College Road dating from 1897-1898. Parker's father helped the couple financially.
In this association he first came into prominence by their planning in 1904 the New Earswick model village, near York, for the Joseph Rowntree Village Trust (1836–1925)]; and afterwards, on a larger scale, the partners designed the first Garden City at Letchworth and the Hampstead Garden Suburb, which was opened in 1907. After 1910, when he organized the Town Planning Conference of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the architectural side of Unwin's life was almost wholly devoted to town planning. From 1911 he was lecturer in town planning at the university of Birmingham until in 1914 he became chief town planning inspector under the Local Government Board. The partnership with Parker ended in 1914. The war of 1914–1918 gave him fresh opportunities, for under the Ministry of Munitions he designed the towns growing round such munition factories as Gretna Green, and thereafter he returned to the Ministry of Health as chief architect and later chief technical officer for building and town planning. His most widely influential contributions to planning may be considered to be in the report drawn up by the Committee on Housing of which Sir (John) Tudor Walters was chairman (1918) and in the Ministry of Health's Housing Manual (1918), and these led to his serving on a great number of planning committees such as the Building Research Board of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.
He retired from the civil service in 1928, and from 1929 to 1933 he served as technical adviser to the Greater London Regional Town Planning Committee; from 1931 to 1933 as president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the gold medal of which he was awarded in 1937. In 1936 he was appointed visiting professor of town planning at Columbia University, a post he still held when he died at Lyme, Connecticut, 29 June 1940.
Unwin received many honours: he was knighted in 1932, and the universities of Prague, Toronto, Manchester, Trondhjem, and Harvard conferred honorary degrees upon him. His work on Town Planning in Practice (1909), is a classic in its subject, and has been translated into French, German, and Russian.
Source:Oxford DNB,
Town Planning in Practice: An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs
