Colonel Light Gardens a fitting planned garden suburb tribute in 1920s by Charles Reade to Adelaide city 's founder

The orginal planned 1920s concept for Colonel Light Gardens suburb by first town planner by Charles Reade. Inset: The suburb retains its wide-streets bungalow look into the 21st Century.

Colonel Light Gardens, a heritage-protected Adelaide suburb, was a fitting memorial to Adelaide city’s founder and planner.

Colonel Light Gardens was created in the 1920s by South Australia’s first government town planner Charles Reade, appointed in 1916, who also prepared South Australia’s Australia-first planning laws under the Town Planning and Development Act 1920. The South Australian government appointed Reade, then working in New Zealand, after his 1914 Australian town planning tour.

Reade was a major advocate of the garden cities movement and the Crawford Vaughan Labor state government in 1915 decided to set up a model garden suburb by buying an area east of Goodwood Road, formerly a World War I army training camp and, before that, Grange Farm, from the estate of William Tennant Mortlock.

The post office on Goodwood Road originally opened as being in Light's Gardens. For many years, residents in the northern section of the suburb adopted Reade Park as their address to distinguish themselves from the Thousand Homes Scheme area. The Thousand Homes public housing scheme from 1924, financed through the State Bank with government support after World War I, was to address a housing shortage, particularly for returned soldiers and their families and lower income groups. Walter Scott Griffiths, Reade’s successor from 1925 as town planner, changed the original plan for Colonel Light Gardens so 363 houses could be fitted into the south of the suburb, at the expense of some public spaces.

The suburb was renamed Colonel Light Gardens in 1929 and Daw Park in 1967. Until the 1970s, the suburb was administered under the Garden Suburb Act and controlled by a South Australian government-appointed garden suburb commissioner, who ran it as a local government entity until it was eventually absorbed by the Mitcham Council.

Colonel Light Gardens remained known for wide tree-lined streets, bungalow homes, rounded street corners, and maintained open space.