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Octavia Hill: Social reformer and founder of the National Trust

By Gillian Darley

Normal price £14.99

Paperback 362 pages
ISBN 978 1903427 53 8

’Octavia Hill was one of Britain’s pioneering social reformers. From housing to civil society, welfare to open spaces, she blazed a trail for us to follow.’
Tristram Hunt

About the book

By the age of 50, Octavia Hill was one of the most influential women of the Victorian era, but she began life without formal education, as the eighth daughter of eleven children in a family of little rank and no money.

Today, she is chiefly remembered as one of the founders of the National Trust. But her work started in the grim slums of Mayhew’s London, where she was a champion of housing reform, managing small groups of dwellings, the first of which were bought by John Ruskin, and trying to improve the quality of life, as well as the living conditions, of the working-class poor.

Before long her experience and opinions were being sought by legislators, Select Committees and Royal Commissions, by colleagues in Europe and the USA. She was offered a position as Government Inspector, which would have made her the first woman civil servant, but turned it down in order to continue her work. Her most lasting legacy was the succession of fellow-workers who made their careers as the first women in local government and housing management.

Octavia fought to keep developers at bay and preserve open spaces for the the use of the poor. Her achievements include securing Parliament Hill Fields in London, the first purchases of the National Trust in the Lake District, and parts of her beloved High Weald in Kent. She suggested a network of paths, ‘a green belt’ as she called it, linking open spaces already secured for Londoners. 

Octavia Hill was first published in 1990 to great acclaim and has been substantially revised for this paperback edition.

About the author

Gillian Darley is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster on architecture and landscape. Her first book Villages of Vision, which led her to Octavia Hill and Victorian reforming women, was revised and reissued in 2007. Her biographies of John Soane (1999) and John Evelyn (2006) were both shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.  She was the architectural correspondant of the Observer and is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the TLS. Since 2008 she has been on the Council of the National Trust, representing the SPAB, of which she is a Trustee.

Enterprising Women: The Garretts and their Circle

by Elizabeth Crawford

Soft cover, 338 pages with 75 illustrations in black and white
ISBN 978 1 903427 18 7

Normal price £25

The book

Enterprising Women tells the story of a group of women around the Garrett family, who in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth changed the position of women in Britain forever. Pioneering access to education at all levels for women both in academic and vocational subjects as well as training for the professions – medicine, architectural decoration, landscape design – they also involved themselves in politics and the campaign for women’s suffrage. As well as discussing in detail the work of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Emily Davies, this book brings to the foreground the careers of some less well known members of the group, including Rhoda and Agnes Garrett, the first women interior decorators, and Fanny Wilkinson, the first professional woman landscape gardener.

The author

Elizabeth Crawford is the author of The Women’s Suffrage Movement: a reference guide 1866–1928. Her business, The Woman and Her Sphere, specialises in selling antiquarian books, postcards, pamphlets and ephemera by and about women.