Merville Garden Village is a housing estate located at Shore Road, Whitehouse, Newtownabbey, County Antrim, Northern Ireland created by structural and landscape architect Edward Prentice Mawson. It was completed in 1949. Historical background Merville was originally a private house, the modern-day Merville House, and estate built in 1795 by the Belfast banker and merchant John Brown (c.1740-1808). It was intended as his country retreat. Other fêted people would come to reside at the sprawling 24-acre shoreline manor. Between 1849–1887, for example, it was the home of Sir Edward Coey (1805–87), noted as the first and only Liberal Party Mayor of Belfast (1861) and prominent wealthy businessman, who helped make Belfast one of the most prosperous manufacturing centres in the world during the 19th century. During WWII little to no houses were built and Belfast was becoming densely populated. So in 1947-49 the Garden Village, the first such housing development in Ireland, was constructed. It was the idea of Lurgan-born builder Thomas McGrath who had established his company, Ulster Garden Villages Limited, in January 1946. Thomas Arlow McGrath was born into a working-class family in Lurgan in 1896. Having trained initially as a cabinet maker, and following service in the First World War, he formed a successful building business with his carpenter brothers, Andy and Bob. McGrath was an admirer of the Garden Village movement which had developed in England, listing notable examples of the work of various housing societies such as Bourneville and Letchworth, and commenting: “An important part of the policy of the housing society movement is that of giving every attention not only to the welfare of its estates, and care in the maintenance of its properties but to the welfare of tenants.”. English architect Edward Prentice Mawson, eldest son of internationally renowned English landscape architect Thomas Hayton Mawson, became known to McGrath after being introduced to him by his site manager Jesse Williams, who previously worked with Mawson in England. E Prentice Mawson, was the past President of the Institute of Landscape Architects, having originally trained at the London School of Architecture and at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Mawson's philosophical approach to planning had a sound commercial basis and dovetailed well with that of McGrath: "Good design and beauty are commercial assets, quite apart from their psychological effect on everyone."(Mawson, 1934). Subsequently, Mawson was appointed the consultant architect of all of McGrath's ambitious Garden