The Victorian reformer who dreamt up the garden city
HOUSE IN THE COUNTRY by Simon Matthews 256pp, Oldcastle, £19.99, ebook £12.99
How do you persuade buyers your new development isn’t really in a city? Call it a “garden suburb” or a “garden city”. Anyone curious about the origin of those two strange oxymorons can learn much from Simon Matthews’s House in the Country, a history of British town planning over the past two centuries.
The garden city movement was founded in the early 1900s by Ebenezer Howard, in response to a growing sense that the city had become a social problem. In 1809, London’s population was just over a million. By 1850 it had more than doubled; by 1861 it was nearly four million. There was a housing shortage, overcrowding and disease. Think the “rookery” (or slum) “Tom-All-Alone’s” in Dickens’s Bleak House. London’s “Great Stink” of July 1858, caused by raw sewage in the Thames during a hot summer, didn’t help.
With the Public Health Act of 1848, the government, for the first time, took responsibility for epidemics, but it didn’t do the same for housing, leaving most of it to speculators, philanthropic trusts or industrialists, who built “model villages” for their workers, like George Cadbury’s Bournville or William Lever’s Port Sunlight.
By 1871, when Howard emigrated to the US as a young man, early versions of what would later be called “garden suburbs” had started to appear in Britain, such as The Avenues in Hull, or Chiswick’s Bedford Park, popular with artists (Yeats and Pinero lived there), but mocked by GK Chesterton: “The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them.”
Howard came back to England five years later, but the rapid and geometric building and rebuilding of towns in the vaster American spaces left an impression. Working as a shorthand writer in the House of Commons, he lobbied influential politicians with his vision of new suburban Jerusalems, articulated in his book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898). Howard’s Garden City Association had soon raised enough money to look for sites. It bought the land for Letchworth in 1903, and swiftly demonstrated the practicability of building an entire new town. Welwyn followed in 1920.
Matthews speculates interestingly on how various advocates of land reform and utopian schemes shaped Howard’s thought – although some parallels are brought in for light relief rather than relevance. “Less certain, but more intriguing, is whether he borrowed his ideas from Robert Pemberton,” begins a digression about Pemberton’s The Happy Colony (1854), which wanted working men to emigrate to New Zealand. The working men had other ideas, and the scheme failed. As Matthews puts it: “New Zealand was a very long way from the UK, and building a large new town on the edge of a volcano possibly had less appeal than [Pemberton] imagined.”
The book can feel like a history of the entire modern era in which nothing is important unless it relates to town planning. Rarely can so much space have been devoted to debunking the claim that Lenin visited Letchworth. Yet amid this wealth of detail, one is left with questions. Did the rest of Britain share Howard’s satisfaction at what seemed to him the classlessness and unconventionality of Letchworth?
The morals Matthews draws from his story are also questionable. He argues that the UK now “follows two different models: high-density urban living vs low-density suburban living”. This is overly schematic. There is surely a spectrum, with mediumdensity developments in both, especially once you escape London and its crazy-money prices. What perplexes Matthews, though, is the “hold” that the utopian garden city/ suburb ideal still has on the British imagination – in 2014, the government drew up a proposal for two new garden cities in Kent and Buckinghamshire. Matthews claims this harks back to “a mythologised version of how [some] people had lived in the past”.
But does it? Matthews’ observation applies better to the Victorian nostalgia for medieval ways of life than it does to post-Second World War new towns like Stevenage and Milton Keynes. It didn’t take long for the word “suburban” to become derogatory. Most suburb dwellers now are there for practical compromise (space and schools traded off against commuting time) rather than cultural fantasy. Even before the reek of the barbecue and grind of the lawnmower, you’d need a bigger garden than garden cities afford to fool yourself you are in the middle of nowhere.
In architectural terms, though, the contrast between modernism and retro ruralism is still with us. Here, Matthews is on firmer foundations. His book about garden suburbs and cities is also an argument for (as the subtitle has it) “Why it’s Time to Leave them Behind”. The two main reasons he gives for why they no longer work as a vision of the future are compelling.
First, modelling urban planning on rural ideas may have made sense in the US or Russia, but those countries were 38 and 100 times larger than the UK. Britain just doesn’t have the room to carry on garden city or suburb development much longer, but doesn’t seem to have realised it, even though the Victorians were already alarmed by tentacular sprawl that sprang up around cities, and encroached on the countryside. To HG Wells, the London sprawl in 1909 seemed “the unorganised, abundant substance of some tumorous growth-process”; CEM Joad, too, wrote after the war of “bungaloid growths”, and the “red rash” of suburbia’s “advancing armies”.
In other words, the garden city idea wasn’t just a solution to inner city crowding and insanitariness; it was also an attempt to focus development so as to preserve the countryside. But that only makes sense if you leave some countryside to preserve.
Second, when this escape from polluted Victorian cities was being devised, it was sustained by trains. “Metroland” was inconceivable without the Metropolitan Railway. But American-style suburbs require car ownership, which makes them environmentally unsustainable. So Matthews’s prescription is “unashamedly high-density” modernism: the Ville Contemporaine of Le Corbusier, set against what Matthews defines as an “English vernacular” style in suburbia: “a melange of Elizabethan and Queen Anne period detailing reproduced in Victorian red brick”.
Doubtless more of us will live in higher-density city developments; and architects will devise ingenious ways to surprise us with hanging gardens in urban spaces. But the tension between city and country is likely to remain a wicked problem. Perhaps it’s the working-from-home movement which will prove the heir to Howard’s garden city crusade, and will reshape our thinking both about cities and about new forms of rural community – the “Remotevilles” proposed by American economist Matt Kahn.
Meanwhile, it is the British love of property and privacy – homeownership and herbaceous borders – rather than nostalgia which perpetuates the lure of the garden suburb. An Englishman’s home is really his garden. To order a copy for £16.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk