In 1898 Ebenezer Howard, an obscure court stenographer, published Tomorrow: A Peaceful Plan to Real Reform.This book set out an inspired vision of a garden city of 30,000 people on a 6,000 acre estate, intended to combine the very best of town and country life.Howard was consciously attempting to put into practice, on a large scale, ideas he found in Herbert Spencer’s land scheme[1] (itself deriving in part from Thomas Spence’s Land Plan), the model city of James Silk Buckingham, Edward Bellamy’s utopian vision of state communism,[2] and Henry George’s land value taxation theories.
Letchworth
The Garden City Association was formed in 1899, and its members visited and admired experiments at Port Sunlight and Bourneville.In September 1903 the ‘First Garden City Ltd’ was incorporated and construction began at Letchworth, on 3,800 acres costing £160,000.
Letchworth attracted a stream of people keen to discover new ways of living: Tolstoyans, anarchists, vegetarians, trade unionists, socialists, followers of Ruskin - even Lenin, who found refuge there for a short time in 1907.George Orwell was to say that in the garden city you could find ‘every fruit juice drinker, sandal wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, nature cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England.’[3]
Schools were established on advanced principles: the school diet was based on butter, milk, eggs, fresh fruit, and vegetables, and morning assemblies were deliberative rather than devotional.George Bernard Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island, a comedy which apparently caused the Prince of Wales much merriment, contains the following exchange:
Have you heard of Garden City?
D’ye mean Heav’n?
No: it’s near Hitchin.
Land in common ownership
Howard’s approach was distinguished by its treatment of land values and tenure arrangements.Land for the settlement would be purchased by a Trust at agricultural land values (then about £40 per acre), with a rate of return for investors of not more than 4%.All occupants would pay a rent (referred to as the rent-rate as there was to be no separate general rate levied by the local authority) and the income received in this way would be used for three purposes: to pay interest on the initial capital sum; to pay back the capital; to pay for the general running costs, and welfare of the garden city.
Over a period of time the first two items of expenditure would fall away, and the Trust would be left with a greater choice of what it could do to improve amenities for the community.This was a radically different model from that which applied elsewhere, where rising land values were enjoyed primarily as a source of profit for private landlords.The secret, claimed Howard, was to retain the land in common ownership and to build this into the plan from the outset.
New garden cities
The influence of Letchworth spread rapidly.Joseph Rowntree appointed Raymond Unwin, the gifted architect of Letchworth, to design New Earswick outside York.Hampstead Garden Suburb was begun in 1907.Plans were drawn up for garden cities across the country: at Fallings Park near Wolverhampton, Warrington, Hull, Newport, and Bristol.One was Woodlands, a community planned for the employees of the Brodsworth Colliery near Doncaster.
In 1920, Ebenezer Howard, together with a group of followers (including several Quakers) established the New Town Trust and then the Welwyn Garden City Limited, with a capital of a quarter of a million pounds.
An agricultural guild was set up to supply the inhabitants of Welwyn with milk and vegetables, using land leased from the Garden City Company.The business was kept separate from the Trust, and without ownership of the land it had nothing to fall back on in time of financial difficulty.As a result it failed during the agricultural depression in the 1920s, and the land was re-let to tenant farmers.
Town planning
A town planning profession began to emerge.The Garden Cities Association grew into the Town and Country Planning Association.The first Town Planning Act came into force in 1909 to regulate development, and in the same year a department of civic design was established at the Liverpool School of Architecture, funded by William Hesketh Lever (the founder of Port Sunlight).
From garden cities to dull suburbs
In the 1930s industrialists and their friends in government came to realise that garden cities provided for employers the housing and other amenities which their Victorian predecessors such as Titus Salt had to provide themselves.
In Manchester the local authority purchased land and built Wythenshawe, on principles much diluted from those of Howard; there was for example no town centre.With large scale government investment, trading estates were established at Treforest in Glamorgan, Team Valley at Durham and Tyneside, and Hillington near Glasgow.These were often functional and uninspired places, and had little in common with Howard’s original vision.
Sources
W H G Armytage, Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England 1560-1960, 1961, pp 370-384.
Dennis Hardy, Community Experiments 1900-1945, 2000.
Robert Beevers, The Garden City Utopia: A critical biography of Ebenezer Howard, 1988.
[1] Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics, 1851, sets out an argument in favour of common ownership of land; but Spencer said the way forward was not through small communities as advocated by Robert Owen and others but rather though ‘the joint stock ownership of the public’, ie nationalisation.
[2] Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 1888
[3] George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, DATE
