This was a circular guided tour of Letchworth Garden City, covering the politics, economics, philosophy, religiosity, architecture and design of the world’s first prototype Garden City.

The usual stats:

• Event led by Martin T.

• Attendance: 24 men.

• Distance: 6.94 miles (11.2 km).

• Time: start 11:12, end 19:06 (sunset 20:17), lunch 40 minutes, other breaks 102 minutes (narration of a guided tour and tea breaks).

• Speed: moving arithmetic average 1.26mph (2kph).

• Terrain: road, pavement, track, field, field edge, woodland on highway, footpath and bridleway.

• Weather: sunny spells, temperature up to 16°C, easterly wind ~5mph (8kph).

• Number of sewage works: 0.

• Number of churches: 7, plus 1 disused church.

• Number of golf courses: 0.

A long term depression in British agriculture in the 1800s, particularly in the second half of the century, set the scene for a perfect storm against tenanted farmers, with the final blows being a series of harvest failures in the 1870s and volatility of purchasing power of the British Pound from 1873. A constant stream of domestic migration from ~1830s, of former farmers drifting towards urban areas – essentially creating shanty towns – turned into a deluge by 1879, resulting in horrific living conditions in many of the slums. Whilst the Arts & Crafts movement wrung their hands in futile despair, hung up on the problem of how a choice of external bricks might solve world poverty, the British state swung into action by brutalising the poor for daring to be poor (and also their political activists for drawing attention to poverty).

It took the exceptionally well-read mind of one man to draw together a coherent business plan, financial plan and social plan. That man was Ebenezer Howard. His set out his ideas in his book, To-Morrow: the Peaceful Path to Meaninging Reform, published in 1898. In spite of his publisher’s misgivings – to the extent that a friend needed to underwrite the cost of printing – the book sold well to a wide constituency of activists, ranging from financiers to designers and artists. By 1902, the Garden City movement had sufficient mass to launch the building phase of the prototype Garden City.

As a consequence, Howard ended up inventing a long-term financial plan to fund construction, whose “rent-rates” on the tenants would re-pay the debt and then continue to to save for old age pensions. Howard allocated land use, thus invented the concept of zoning (residential, commercial, industrial and vast amounts of land set aside for productive agriculture, which Abercrombie later re-purposed and re-named to the “green belt”). Howard provided no direction about religion, strongly preferring freedom of choice. Howard provided for a means of the town’s governance which looked a lot like a method of today’s version of sortition.

Howard’s most important diagram was a comparative gap and strength analysis of three environments: the urban environment, the rural environment and an optimal combination of both. Howard’s drafted this diagram as the “Three Magnets Diagram”, a level of succinct, clear-headed brilliance whose importance was so high that it was translated into numerous languages, including Japanese.

Two other men contributed the most to the look and feel of Letchworth: the Parker & Unwin partnership, comprising Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin. The essence of their plan was the then equivalent of building regulation, General Suggestions for Buildings Other Than Factories in the Garden City Estate. This required:

• lots of living space (~930ft², ~86m²)

• lots of natural light and ventilation;

• no slate roofing;

• no local bricks from Arseley;

• most profound of all: no useless ornamentation.

It is the latter requirement which has set the style for south-eastern English architecture and planning throughout 20th century. For this reason, in our time, we unjustly tend to see Letchworth as just another town, nothing special. Without knowing the history, we would have no clue that Letchworth was the template of our modern town re-generations and housing estate developments in the south-east of England. Parker & Unwin compounded the Letchworth look-and-feel in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a second instance of the same ideas, which likely sealed the design style as a permanent feature in English civic development.

Even today, The Town & County Planning Association still promotes Garden City Standards.

The tour included:

• the historic context in which To-Morrow was written;

• the role of Mrs Howard;

• the importance of religion, how it dissolved into a non-conformist mess and how the Catholics deftly struck an appropriate balance in the town between liberalism and conformism;

• appraisal of design features of key properties and estate layouts;

• the role of industry and how industry nudged the choice of Letchworth over an alternative site in the Midlands (Chartley, Staffs.);

• the Cheap Cottage Exhibitions 1905 & 1908 and the Urban Cottage Exhibition 1907;

• after 60,000 people attended the Exhibitions, a belated realisation that perhaps one ought to have built a pub (the Skittles Inn, 1907);

• reputation management problems flowing from deciding that the pub needed to be a teetotaller’s pub (oops);

• a factory that sought to disguise itself like a middle class country house (the Spirella Building, a grade II* listed building, aka “Castle Corset”);

• Ebenezer Howard’s reading list (summarised below);

• post-war political machinations, allegations of shareholder fraud and an emergency nationalisation;

• how Domesday recorded the area in 1086;

• Theosophy and Theosophical Meditation: the Cloisters building, a grade II* listed buliding;

• an ad hoc excursion to a house designed by Cowilshaw for his ex-wife, designed with only one bedroom, intended that she did not re-marry, an insight from one of the participants of this walk;

• the pre-history of Welwyn Garden City.

• three cinemas;

• the after-thought that became the commercial areas of Letchworth.

Churches:

• Letchworth Free Church (blog, directory), a grade II listed building.

• Letchworth Salvation Army Church

• St Hugh of Lincoln Roman Catholic Church

• former church St Michael’s Letchworth (archive, news 09May2023)

• St Mary the Virgin Church (wiki)

• Society of Friends Meeting House (of the Quakers), a grade II listed building, building is named “Howgills”.

• St Alban Church of Liberal Catholics (blog)

• Methodists’ Church

4 members joined the optional pub stop at the end of the walk at the Garden City Brewery.

More pictures to follow.

Tour bibliography:

• “To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform”, Ebenezer Howard, 1896.

• “Letchworth: the First Garden City”, Mervyn Miller, 2nd edition, 2002.

• “Ebenezer Howard: Inventor of the Garden City”, Frances Knight, Oxford Press, Spiritual Lives, 2023.

• “To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform”, Ebenezer Howard, 1896, narration and analysis by Peter Hall, Dennis Hardy, Colin Ward, 2006, foreword by David Lock.

• “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor”, anon (subsequently revealed to be Andrew Mearns and W.C. Preston), London Congregational Union, 1883.

• “Letchworth Conservation Area”, Brian G Hull, Planning Officer, North Herts District Council, Oct1977.

• And countless unattributable sources from the internet, some available now only on the internet archive (not yet scrubbed for being politically inconvenient).

Known contents of Ebenezer Howard’s bibliography:

• Draper’s Intellectual History of Europe.

• Darwin’s Descent of Man.

• Herbert Spencer’s Social Statistics.

• Paine’s Age of Reason.

• B Richardson FRS’s Hygeia: A City of Health.

• Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879.

• The Nationalisation of the Land in 1775 and 1882, Thomas Spence 1775, via H M Hyndman 1882.

• The Real Rights of Man, Thomas Spence 1775 via H M Hyndman 1882.

• Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000-1887.

• Utopia, Spence.

• Crusonia, Spence.

Words by Martin Thornhill. Pictures by Peter O’Connor.