URBAN UTOPIA
The garden city movement in the early 20th century aimed to fight Victorian social evils, explains
Garden cities transformed town planning, Michelle Higgs explains
Two of the greatest problems faced by late 19th-century Britain were overcrowded city slums that led to disease and squalor, and the mass exodus from agricultural districts. Ebenezer Howard, founder of the garden city movement, was neither an architect nor a town planner, but he sought an answer to both of these issues. “Town and country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization,” he wrote in To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898). Howard’s book was reissued in 1902, with the title Garden Cities of To-Morrow.
In 1891, the term ‘overcrowding’ was officially defined as a room inhabited by more than two adults, (children under ten counted as half, infants under a year old were not included). This meant that a three-room house with four adults, four children and any number of infants was not considered overcrowded. Nevertheless, some 3.5 million people (11.2 per cent of the population of England and Wales) were forced to live in cramped, insanitary housing.
Between 1870 and 1900, 100,000 labourers left the countryside every decade to work in the towns. They also joined the army, the navy or the police, went navvying or moved to the colonies. The 1893 Royal Commission on Labour discovered many reasons for mass migration, including a need for greater independence, good housing and higher wages. There was also a desire for a more sociable life with a range of amusements.
The ‘Three Magnets’
Howard imagined solving rural migration and urban overcrowding by creating self-contained communities of no more than 32,000 people. Surrounded by ‘green belts’, these communities outside major cities would incorporate the best of town and country as ‘garden cities’. He summed up his reasoning in his famous ‘Three Magnets’ diagram. Town and country are depicted as magnets, each striving to draw people in. “Human society and the beauty of nature are meant to be enjoyed together,” Howard argued. “The two magnets must be made one.” A third magnet – ‘TownCountry’ – would bring together the benefits of both without the drawbacks. Providing decent housing for workers was nothing new. By 1825, Robert Owen had established New Lanark in Scotland and Sir Titus Salt built Saltaire in Bradford, West Yorkshire, during the 1850s and 1860s. The industrial villages established in 1895 by George Cadbury at Bournville, Birmingham, and in 1888 by William Hesketh Lever at Port Sunlight on Merseyside, went further. Their layouts included green spaces realised in tree-lined streets, gardens and public parks.
In the 1890s, books such as News from Nowhere by William Morris and Fields, Factories and Workshops by Peter Kropotkin described a utopian future and suggested different ways in which industry and agriculture could work together.
“Slumless, smokeless cities”
Ebenezer Howard brought together these ideas and some of the planned settlement designs to formalise his unique proposal for a garden city. He defined it as “a town designed for healthy living and industry; of a size that makes possible a full measure of social life... surrounded by a rural belt; the whole of the land being in public ownership or held in trust for the community”.
The principle of keeping the land in municipal ownership, for the benefit of the community, made garden cities different. The inhabitants were to pay ‘ landlord’s rent’ for their accommodation and ‘rate-rent’ – a type of ground rent. Rate-rent income was to be re-invested in the town’s development and maintainence of public works such as roads, schools and parks.
Howard’s design was concentric with six 120-foot-wide boulevards traversing the city from the centre to the circumference, dividing it into six equal parts or ‘wards’. In the centre were five-and-a-half acres of gardens surrounded by the main public buildings. Each garden city was divided into zones with factories and workshops at the outer limits. There was also to be sufficient space for shops and recreation facilities.
The housing density was deliberately low, at most 12 to the acre. Cottages were grouped in cul-de-sacs and short terraces, and there were also larger detached houses. The city was surrounded by a green belt of agricultural land, which fed the community.
Another of Howard’s diagrams showed how a cluster of six “slumless, smokeless cities” might be linked by an infrastructure of roads, canals and railways. Howard believed his garden city principle could one day be used to redevelop inner city areas.
Ebenezer Howard recognised the need for a working model of a garden city. In 1899, he founded the Garden City Association (now the Town and Country Planning Association) to promote his idea. Members included philanthropists, like George Cadbury and William Hesketh Lever, Socialists sympathetic to the ideals of William Morris and the Fabian Society, and politicians, such as Sir Ralph Neville QC, the association’s first president.
The association publicised garden cities through conferences, lectures and pamphlets. The Garden City Association Conference in 1901, held at Bournville, had 300 delegates. The following year at Port Sunlight three times that number attended.
In 1902, the Garden City Pioneer Company Ltd was established to fund and purchase a site for the first garden city. The sum of £156,000 was raised to buy the Alington Estate in Hertfordshire, along with land from surrounding landowners; there were 3,818 acres in total. In October 1903, First Garden City Ltd was founded and work was begun on Letchworth Garden City.
The first garden cities
Ebenezer Howard appointed two Arts and Crafts architects, Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, to realise his vision. The houses they designed had a distinctive ‘Letchworth’ style with roughcast walls, gables and red tiles on their pitched roofs, often with dormer windows and green doors. All the cottages had bathrooms with hot and cold water, except the smallest, and these had a bath fixed in the scullery, as well as a gas-stove for cooking.
By 1910, the city of Letchworth had 6,500 inhabitants and 1,300 houses and other buildings, together with 2,300 shareholders. Four years later, the population had increased to 14,500. The new inhabitants were made up of middle-class people wanting to live the utopian dream and the workforce of the factories, which had relocated to the town. The WH Smith Bookbinding Works, St Edmundsbury Weaving Works, the Spirella Company and the Phoenix Motor Works all came to Letchworth.
The Garden City Association successfully lobbied for the introduction of statutory planning under the 1909 Housing and Town Planning Act. Afterwards, the association changed its name to the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association to reflect its more wide-ranging interests.
Perhaps surprisingly, the next garden city was built at Rosyth on the Firth of Forth, near Dunfermline. The Admiralty had opened a new dockyard there in 1915 and needed housing for its workers and their families to replace the existing shanty town. The Edinburgh branch vigorously promoted the garden city concept, and in 1913, the Admiralty appointed Barry Unwin to create the town plan.
The design followed the model set by Letchworth and Glasgow Garden Suburb built in 1912, and also had similarities with Bournville. Between 1915 and 1919, around 1,900 cottage-style houses were
‘Overcrowding’ was officially defined as a room inhabited by more than two adults
built with generous front and rear gardens, tree-lined avenues, green spaces and a green belt around the town’s circumference.
Ebenezer Howard had hoped that the working model at Letchworth would encourage the government to adopt garden cities as public policy. Instead, garden suburbs were promoted as part of larger conurbations, offering high quality, spacious housing. An alternative small-scale garden village community was designed with a level of self-sufficiency. The Westfield War Memorial Village in Lancaster provided employment for soldiers disabled during the First World War, and the Garden Village for workers at Reckitt & Sons, Kingston upon Hull.
In 1919, Howard found a 2,400 acre site for his next project at Welwyn, 15 miles from Letchworth. This was at a time when ‘Homes fit for heroes’ were being constructed for First World War veterans. Howard founded Welwyn Garden City in 1920 and was closely involved with the project. Architect Louis de Soissons included three elements used at Letchworth: a great axis, a formal centre and zoning. Instead of Arts and Crafts housing, the buildings were constructed in a Neo-Georgian style.
As with Letchworth, the success of Welwyn Garden City depended on attracting industry to the town. Shredded Wheat, Murphy Radio and Roche Products moved their factories to Welwyn. As a result, there were over 1,800 houses by 1926 and the population had expanded to 13,500 by 1938.
Life in a garden city
Garden cities were designed to be socially mixed, and they attracted liberals and free-thinkers – from vegetarians to pacifists and unorthodox religious groups. In Letchworth, Theosophists and Liberal Catholics built their own churches and the town also had its own vegetarian restaurant.
Letchworth’s residents were described as “very unconventional” by the Sheffield
Weekly Telegraph (10 May 1913): “There are many vegetarians and fruitarians and simple life folk. Many ladies, even for out-of-doors, wear the loose, artistic style of dress, often without hats, or with merely a lace or chiffon scarf over their heads, and some wear sandals instead of boots or shoes.”
Temperance was often a theme of garden cities. In Letchworth, the Skittles Inn, the “pub with no beer”, was built in 1907 and the residents regularly voted against having a licence for alcohol, albeit narrowly. Welwyn, however, was more relaxed and residents could enjoy a drink at The Cherry Tree.
Despite the success of the garden city, the fact that only three were built in Britain is testament to the scale of the undertaking. Elements of the concept were used in garden suburbs across the UK, including the model suburbs created by the Manchester and Liverpool Corporations at Wythenshawe, Speke and Knowsley. Campaigning by the Garden Cities Association and other groups led to the 1946 New Towns Act, which incorporated many garden city principles such as low density housing organised around civic amenities.
Ebenezer Howard’s ideas had a huge influence on town planning across the world and the garden city concept was copied everywhere from Canberra, Australia, to New Delhi, India. Howard’s green belt principle to prevent urban sprawl is still held dear today.