Detached gardens and the urban fringe of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English provincial towns

•Demonstrates that detached gardens were abundant and largely within two hundred metres of the urban fence.•Shows that the system disintegrated rapidly when many individuals made commercial decisions to sell their plots.•Demonstrates that a large number of landowners with small holdings increased the influence of small-scale builders.•Argues that gardens played a significant role in shaping residential development at the fringe of English provincial towns.

The distribution and extent of detached gardens in a sample of ten English provincial towns were examined for the eighteenth century, through cartographic analysis and the construction of GIS-generated zones parallel to the urban fence. The study revealed that detached gardens formed a distinct and abundant feature in the urban fringe, in particular within two hundred metres of the built-up area. A longitudinal case study of the processes of plot transformation in Shrewsbury, based on maps from 1830 to 1940, indicated that a reduction in provision of detached gardens was linked to booms in the house building cycle, while periods of increased provision in the form of urban allotments were occasioned by national emergencies. The system of provision was largely profit-motivated and it disintegrated as towns expanded in the middle and late nineteenth century. Garden ground provided the prime location for housing and an awareness of its morphological frame is essential for an understanding of expansion from the urban core. It is suggested that urban morphologists have neglected detached gardens in their attempts to develop models of urban land transformation using the concept of the fringe belt.