I feel like “gated community” is closer in meaning than “suburb”, in the contemporary U.S. at least.

> [Samuel Brooks] bought 60 acres of land[,] surrounding it with a high wall (parts of which can still be seen on Upper Chorlton Road). To keep the city at bay he employed his own private police force and set up toll gates, which is where we get the name Brooks Bar.

Also, people have been doing this for years. Versailles is where it is to escape the busy city. Union Square in Manhattan started as a residential area in the 1830s.

I think the thing that truly makes the modern suburbs suburban, is copy-pasting of common styles and uniform lots.

The author may be backprojecting salient features of the postwar bedroom suburb onto early waves of low-density urbanization as though his were _the_ salient features of the whole family tree. I think he admits as much by claiming that the essence of the Manchester pattern was the "complete break" between the urban core and desirable residential addresses. I don't find that he can establish his case that this is what this or all suburbanization essentially amounts to, so I disagree he shows that what happened here was what "the world copied." It does look like probably a lovely place to live.

The garden suburb "first emerged in England in the 1830s" per David Fishman [NB: not the same scholar as Robert Fishman] Bob Stern, and Michael Tilove's book "Paradise Planned," but garden suburbs are just one of the forms that subsequent waves of suburbanization have taken; earlier waves were also going on, and have continued to as well.

The Georgian (1710s-1820s) squares of many cities in England, for example, didn't have estate-style lawns nor walls around the neighborhoods, but they often had locked fences all around the garden. These private parks were known as squares, yes, but had little in common with cobblestoned market squares; the houses were sometimes even low-rise fashionable villas (among them Lloyd Square -- near the Angel of Islington -- a development which is still intact in Inner London). The fancy Clifton area of Bristol is at a higher elevation than the old port city but I disagree that separation from the core or social desirability are really what define a neighborhood as being suburban. Lloyd Square is a little unnervingly low; its buildings struggle to effectively amplify the space or create "positive space" because architecturally they can't anchor or confine it. So one perspective on suburban environments is this: they all exhibit urbanization processes where the spaces between buildings frequently do not even register primarily as "spaces between buildings" but as horizontal visual landscapes unfolding in various directions. I may have gotten this notion from the townscape studies movement.

Canal and waterfall mill workforce neighborhoods on both sides of the Atlantic significantly predate Fishman's and this author's wave of lower-density higher-skill suburban growth.

The arrival of more than ten thousand relatively skilled French Protestant families of mostly weavers to Spitalfields and Bethnal Green and the surrounding area east of the London wall between 1585 and 1587 caused rapid development of a pretty comparatively suburban character. For a more planned version, the architect Inigo Jones' Covent Garden specifically attracted wealthy homeowners in the 1630s and 1640s when future Soho Square was still undeveloped and the West End was not a business center. For a less planned and more-exurban growth pattern I think of Quakers moving between the City of London and the more bucolic area of Stoke Newington north of town.