Romanticism arose in late eighteenth-century Europe as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism, exalting nature, feeling, history and the irregular over geometric order. Its aesthetic counterpart, the Picturesque, theorised by William Gilpin, Uvedale Price and Humphry Repton, prized variety, asymmetry and the framed visual scene as principles of landscape design. These ideas reshaped the English landscape garden and, through it, the layout of suburbs, parks and curving residential roads. They offered a deliberate alternative to the straight street and the formal axis.
It supplied the aesthetic justification for the winding, naturalistic suburb and the urban park, influencing Olmsted, the garden city and Sitte's critique of the gridiron. The Picturesque established irregularity and visual sequence as legitimate principles of town design.