Eastern Suburb

The trail winding along Slovanská Avenue from Jirásek Square to today’s Milada Horáková Square will take you through the residential part of the former Prague Suburb. The growth of this area built upon the housing development of the Petrohrad district in time and space, but its character fundamentally differs from the once working-class district. These two areas are approximately separated by Jirásek Square and its immediate surroundings, which is created by leaving out several rectangular blocks in the regular grid of the built-up area. To the south-east of the square, the strictly orthogonal structure of the city blocks, which is highly typical of Petrohrad, was replaced by a composition with radially arranged, generously sized streets lined with greenery and smaller apartment and single-family houses. This change, inspired mainly by the ideals of English garden cities, put an emphasis on the quality of public spaces.

Thus, the route of the trail presents the local architecture and building culture especially of the interwar period, where, besides individual objects, the harmonious effect of the whole stands out. Most of the stops on the trail are quality realizations of single-family and apartment houses or their complexes built by private owners or construction cooperatives. However, the principal hubs of the trail are formed by three important public buildings – the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary with the convent of the Dominican Monastery, the building of Masaryk School and the that of the former boys’ school, later used as a maternity hospital, in Čapek Square.