Chartist Cottage, Nottingham Road, Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire
This is a pair of cottages that were built in 1846-7 for the Chartist Co-operative Land Company. They were part of a planned community known as O'Connorville. It had a school and 35 cottages, each with 2 to 4 acres of land. It was founded by Feargus O'Connor, the Chartist leader, as the first settlement under his Land Plan. It was to enable poor people from factory towns to live on smallholdings, providing food for themselves and qualifying for a vote. However it was a failure. The amount of land was not enough to feed a family, especially as most of people living there had no experience of farming. It's development though was an important legacy of Chartism and a precursor of the later Garden Cities.
