In 1848 in National Evils and Practical Remedies James Silk Buckingham, a traveller, journalist and social reformer, proposed a radically new way for people to live.
He outlined a vision of a city with iron buildings and glass-covered streets 100 feet wide, covering a square mile and housing 10,000 people. There would be plenty of open parks and green space, including a large park at the centre with public buildings grouped around it, and a green belt around the town.Housing would be grouped by social class, and the workers’ houses would be on the outside fringe nearest the green belt.
The objects chiefly kept in view have been to unite the greatest degree of order, symmetry, space, and healthfulness, in the largest supply of air and light, and in the most perfect system of drainage, with the comfort and convenience of all classes; the due proportion of accommodation to the probable numbers and circumstances of various ranks; ready accessibility to all parts of the town, under continuous shelter from sun and rain, when necessary; with the disposition of the public buildings in such localities as to make them easy of approach from all quarters, and surrounded with space for numerous avenues of entrance and exit. And, in addition to all these, a large intermixture of grass lawn, garden ground, and flowers, and an abundant supply of water--the whole to be united with as much elegance and economy as may be found practicable.
The city would be teetotal and tobacco-free, and no pawnbrokers’ shops would be allowed.Married families with children would have at least three rooms.Children should stay at school until they were fifteen.Medical services would be free, with doctors paid by the community, working to prevent disease rather than to cure it.
It would be a good thing, he suggested, if as many of the inhabitants as possible took their meals in large public halls provided for this purpose (a forerunner of modern co-housing).
Buckingham’s ideas were never realised in his own time, but were to inspire the Garden City movement of Ebenezer Howard a generation later.
Sources
W H G Armytage, Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England 1560-1960, 1961, pp 218-219.
James Silk Buckingham, National Evils and Practical Remedies ,1848
(see http://www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/buckham.htm).
