Henrietta Barnett in Whitechapel Her First Fifty Years by Micky Watkins

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Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936) is best known as the moving spirit behind the creation of London's Hampstead Garden Suburb, from 1907. Much less has been written about the first fifty years of her life. Yet, as Micky Watkins shows, the Suburb was only the final achievement of a long and varied career of social reform, much of it spent among the worst slums of the East End. Octavia Hill, Ruskin, Walter Crane, Beatrice Webb, Arnold Toynbee and Herbert Spencer, as well as innumerable East Enders - often riotously immune to attempts at their 'improvement' - people this lively biography. Drawing on hitherto unpublished sources, Micky Watkins traces Henrietta's role in the founding of the Whitechapel Gallery, Toynbee Hall, and the Children's Country Holiday Fund, in helping girls and single mothers and in leading the movement to abolish the inhuman institutional care of pauper children and replace it with fostering.

Book Price £9
ISBN NO. 0-9459798-0-X
The book is available for purchase at the Suburb Gallery

Micky Watkins was born in London and studied Social History at the London School of Economics. She worked for the Ministry of Town Planning, and then taught Politics and Government at Christ's College Boys School. For the past fifteen years she has worked at the Hampstead Garden Suburb Archive, which holds original letters and other material relating to Henrietta Barnett's life.