Let every dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close:– then let every one of these short lives leave its sure record of some kindly thing done for others – some goodly strength or knowledge gained for yourselves; so, from day to day, and strength to strength, you shall build up indeed, by Art, by Thought, and by Just Will, an Ecclesia of England, of which it shall not be said, “See what manner of stones are here”, but, “See what manner of men.”

John Ruskin, Lectures on Art (1870)

(found in Raymond Unwin’s favorite quotations)

It is invidious, but it needs saying: despite doughty competition, Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) is the most important single character in this entire tale. So it is important to get him right; even though almost everyone has got him wrong. His many self-appointed critics have, at one time or another, been wrong about almost everything he stood for. They called him a “planner,” a term of derogation, whereas he earned his living as a shorthand writer. They said that he advocated low-density prairie planning; in fact, his garden city would have had densities like inner London’s, which – so later planners once came to believe – needed high-rise towers to make them work. They confused this garden city with the garden suburb found at Hampstead and in numerous imitations – though, it must be confessed, one of his principal lieutenants, Raymond Unwin, was originally to blame for that. They still think that he wanted to consign people to small towns isolated in the deep countryside, while he actually proposed the planning of conurbations with hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people. They accuse him of wanting to move people round like pawns on a chessboard, whereas, in fact, he dreamed of voluntary self-governing communities. Most mistakenly of all, they see him as a physical planner, ignoring the fact that his garden cities were merely the vehicles for a progressive reconstruction of capitalist society into an infinity of cooperative commonwealths.

They cannot claim that he made it difficult for them. In his 78 years he wrote only one book, and a slim one at that. First published in 1898 under the title To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, it was reissued in 1902 with the title Garden Cities of Tomorrow. This was perhaps catchier, but it diverted people from the truly radical character of the message, demoting him from social visionary into physical planner.

The Sources of Howard’s Ideas

Better to appreciate Howard’s contribution, he must be set against the background of his time. He developed his ideas in the London of the 1880s and 1890s, the age of radical ferment described in Chapter 1. An eclectic thinker, he borrowed freely from the ideas that were circulating at the time.¹ But there were other, earlier influences. Born in the City of London in 1850 – a fact commemorated by a plaque at the edge of the huge Barbican redevelopment, which almost certainly he would not have liked at all – he grew up in small country towns in southern and eastern England: Sudbury, Ipswich, Cheshunt. At 21, he emigrated to America and became a pioneer in Nebraska, where he met Buffalo Bill² but proved a disaster as a farmer. From 1872 to 1876 he was in Chicago, beginning the career as a shorthand writer that he was to follow all his life. We know little about these years, but they must have been important to him. As a farmer on the frontier he had personal experience of the Homestead Act of 1862, which opened up the prairies and the plains to pioneers free of charge, thus establishing an economy and society of prosperous farms and small towns, and an educational system devoted to technical improvement in agriculture and the mechanical arts. Then, as a resident of Chicago, he saw the city’s great rebuilding after the fire of 1871. Still, in these pre-skyscraper days, it was universally known as the Garden City: the almost-certain source of Howard’s better-known title. He must have seen the new garden suburb of Riverside, designed by the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, arising on the Des Plaines River 9 miles outside the city.³ Howard always denied that he found his inspiration in Chicago, but the broad outlines of the idea must have originated here. Here too he first found the idea of the planned city in a pamphlet of 1876, Benjamin Ward Richardson’s Hygeia, or the City of Health; its main ideas – low population density, good housing, wide roads, an underground railway, and plenty of open space – all found their way into the garden-city concept.⁴

Back in Britain, he settled himself and his family in a cramped home in a boring street in Stoke Newington,⁵ and began in earnest to think and to read. A huge agricultural depression was forcing thousands off the land and into the cities, above all the London slums.⁶ He joined a freethinking debating society, the Zetetical Society; it already included George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, with whom he was soon on good terms.⁷ Later, in the book, he was adamant that he had thought out the central ideas himself but that he had then found other writers who supplied the details. But there were certainly plenty of precursors. From Herbert Spencer he borrowed the idea of land nationalization, and then from a forgotten predecessor, Thomas Spence, he discovered a superior variant: purchase of farmland by a community, at agricultural values, so that the increased values, which would follow from the construction of a town, would automatically pass back to the community coffers. But Spence nowhere explained how the people are to appropriate the land – which brought him to planned colonization, advocated in J. S. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, by the Social Democratic Foundation in its pre-Marxist days, by Keir Hardie, and most notably by Thomas Davidson, a Scottish-American philosopher who founded the Fellowship of the New Life from which the Fabian Society split off (as Shaw inimitably said, “one to sit among the dandelions, the other to organise the docks”).⁸ Edward Gibbon Wakefield, 50 years earlier, had developed the idea of planned colonization for the poor. The scheme he had promoted, Colonel Light’s celebrated scheme for Adelaide in South Australia, provided the idea that once a city had reached a certain size, a second city, separated from it by a green belt, should be started: the origin of the notion of Social City, as Howard acknowledged, though Raymond Bunker has demonstrated that in Colonel William Light’s plan North Adelaide was an integral part of the plan from the start, not a subsequent satellite as Howard imagined.⁹ Controversy has raged ever since 1986, when Donald Leslie Johnson and his ex-PhD student Donald Langmead argued that Light’s deputy, Charles Strickland Kingston, not Light, not only chose the location but was principal designer of the Adelaide plan, adapting a renaissance city template by Pietro Cataneo (1567) to the site. In 2008 they repeated the charge.¹⁰ Robert Freestone caustically records that “While it has not quite resulted in fisticuffs, I have witnessed some terse and heated exchanges in symposia when the issue has been raised (but only in Adelaide).”¹¹ James Silk Buckingham’s plan for a model town gave him most of the main features for his diagram of Garden City: the central place, the radial avenues, and the peripheral industries. Pioneer industrial villages in the countryside, like Lever’s Port Sunlight near Liverpool and Cadbury’s Bournville outside Birmingham, provided both a physical model and a practical illustration of successful industrial decentralization from the congested city.

The economist Alfred Marshall, in an article of 1884, had suggested the idea that there were “large classes of the population of London whose removal into the country would in the long run be economically advantageous – that it would benefit alike those who moved and those who remained behind.”¹² His reasoning had been that new technologies would permit this dispersal – an idea taken up by the anarchist Peter Kropotkin in his Fields, Factories and Workshops of 1898, which certainly influenced Howard. And Marshall even suggested the mechanism:

the general plan would be for a committee, whether specially formed for the purpose or not, to interest themselves in the formation of a colony in some place well beyond the range of London smoke. After seeing their way to buying or building suitable cottages there, they would enter into communication with some of the employees of low-waged labour.¹³

That idea, adopted with enthusiasm by Howard, was based on a critical assumption, as Robert Fishman has pointed out: that workers could find steady employment in a small self-contained city, distant from the metropolis. That proved a prophetic assumption for much of the following century; but entering the twenty-first century, we have returned to the chaotic, flexible job patterns of the 1890s.¹⁴

Charles Booth, wrestling with the problem of his Class B poor, “the crux of the social problem,” had a paternalistic version of the same answer: to withdraw them from the labor force by the formation of labor colonies, “an extension of the Poor Law,” outside London:

my idea is that these people should be allowed to live as families in industrial groups, planted wherever land and building materials were cheap; being well housed, well fed, and well warmed; and taught, trained, and employed from morning to night on work, indoors or out, for themselves or on Government account; in the building of their own dwellings, in the cultivation of the land, in the making of clothes, or in the making of furniture. That in exchange for the work done the Government should supply materials and whatever else was needed.¹⁵

Booth admitted that this solution was draconian: “The life offered would not be attractive” and “The difficulty lies solely in inducing or driving these people to accept a regulated life.” His (non-related) namesake, General William Booth of the Salvation Army, was similarly advocating the colonization of the destitute into agricultural smallholding colonies with small-scale industries, within reasonable distance of London but far enough from any town or village to escape the influence of the public house, “that upas tree of civilization,”¹⁶ a feature Howard endorsed in his book and then imposed on bone-dry Letchworth, where the Skittles Inn offered rustic pastimes and wholesome conversation over lemonade and ginger beer.

Canon Barnett’s Toynbee Commission of 1892 had followed the same tradition in calling for “industrial regiments” for the “demoralised residuum,” providing “compulsory work under humane discipline”; a solution later embraced by the Fabian Society.¹⁷ But Howard, following Marshall, did not see his Garden Cities as colonies for the undeserving poor. On the contrary: they were to be founded, and managed, by the stratum immediately above – Charles Booth’s Class C – who were thereby to be freed from the thraldom of the urban slum. So Howard’s proposal derives more from the Society for Promoting Industrial Villages, founded by the Reverend Henry Solly, which flourished from 1883 to 1889.¹⁸ His solution was not paternalistic – at least, apart from some residual undertones; rather, it belonged firmly in the anarchistic tradition.

By the end of the 1880s Howard had all the ideas he needed, but he still could not bring them together. The real key was Edward Bellamy’s bestselling science-fiction novel Looking Backward, which he read early in 1888, shortly after its American publication. He personally testified to the influence it had on him.¹⁹ He began to talk about his ideas to the more progressive London sects, at least from 1892.²⁰

Every single one of Howard’s ideas can thus, in fact, be found earlier, often several times over: Ledoux, Owen, Pemberton, Buckingham, and Kropotkin all had towns of limited populations with surrounding agricultural green belts; More, Saint-Simon, Fourier all had cities as elements in a regional complex.²¹ Marshall and Kropotkin saw the impact of technological development on industrial location, and Kropotkin and Edward Bellamy also appreciated that it would come to favor small-scale workshops. But Howard, attracted as he was to Bellamy’s Looking Backward, rejected his centralized socialist management and his insistence on the subordination of the individual to the group, which he saw as authoritarian.²² His biographer, Robert Beevers, points out that all these major influences came from the English dissenting tradition; none, save Kropotkin, were continental European.²³

More widely, Howard could not fail to be influenced by the Back to the Land movement, which – fueled by urban growth and urban squalor, agricultural depression, nostalgia, quasi-religious motives, anti-Victorian conventions – flourished among the intelligentsia between 1880 and 1914: a genuine alternative movement, similar in many respects to such movements in the 1960s and 1970s.²⁴ At least 28 such nineteenth-century communities can be traced, all but five or six of which were rural; their inhabitants included utopian socialists, agrarian socialists, sectarians, and anarchists. Few survived for long, though sometimes their settlements do, transmogrified: Heronsgate, established by the Chartists in Hertfordshire after the failure of their political demands in 1848, is today a smart stockbroker community next to the M25 motorway.²⁵ Behind these manifestations lay a much wider movement, well represented by such writers as Morris and Ruskin, which aimed to reject the grosser trappings of industrialization and to return to a simpler life based on craft and community. So, as Howard wrote, the idea of community-building was everywhere in the air.

The Garden City and the Social City

The ingredients, then, were far from original. What Howard could claim – and did, in a chapter heading, claim – was that his was a unique combination of proposals. He started with the famous diagram of the Three Magnets. Today it has archaic charm, particularly in the colored version of the first edition. But it packs on to one page a set of complex arguments that would take far more space to say in modern jargon. The Victorian slum city, to be sure, was in many ways a horrific place; but it offered economic and social opportunities, lights, and crowds. The late Victorian countryside, now too often seen in a sentimental glow, was, in fact, equally unprepossessing: though it promised fresh air and nature, it was racked by agricultural depression and it offered neither sufficient work and wages, nor adequate social life. But it was possible to square the circle, by combining the best of town and country in a new kind of settlement, Town-Country.

To achieve this, a group of people – necessarily, including several with commercial competence and creditability – should establish a limited-dividend company, borrowing money to establish a garden city in the countryside, far enough from the city to ensure that the land was bought at rock-bottom, depressed agricultural land values. They should obtain agreement from leading industrialists to move their factories there; their workers would move too, and would build their own houses. The garden city would have a fixed limit – Howard suggested 32,000 people, living on 1,000 acres of land, about one and a half times the historic medieval city of London. It would be surrounded by a much larger area of permanent green belt, also owned by the company – Howard proposed 5,000 acres – containing not merely farms, but also all kinds of urban institutions, like reformatories and convalescent homes, that could benefit from a rural location.

As more and more people moved out, the garden city would reach its planned limit; then, another would be started a short distance away. Thus, over time, there would develop a vast planned agglomeration, extending almost without limit; within it, each garden city would offer a wide range of jobs and services, but each would also be connected to the others by a rapid transit system (or, as Howard called it, an Inter-Municipal Railway), thus giving all the economic and social opportunities of the giant city. Howard called this polycentric vision Social City. Because the diagram was truncated in the second and in all subsequent editions, most readers have failed to understand that this, not the individual garden city, was the physical realization of town-country: the third magnet.

But – though almost universally understood as merely a physical blueprint²⁶ – it was much more than that. The final words under the third magnet, “FREEDOM, CO-OPERATION,” are not just rhetoric; they are the heart of the plan. As Lewis Mumford so rightly says in his 1946 introduction to the book, Howard was much less interested in physical forms than in social processes.²⁷ The key was that the citizens would own the land in perpetuity. The land for each garden city and its surrounding green belt, an area of 6,000 acres (2,700 hectares), would be purchased in the open market at depressed agricultural land values: £40 an acre (£100 per hectare), or £240,000 in all, the money raised on mortgage debentures paying 4%. This land would be legally vested in four trustees.²⁸ Soon, Howard argued, the growth of Garden City would raise land values, and thus rents.²⁹ Here was the innovative core of Howard’s proposal: rents could and would be regularly revised upwards, allowing the trustees to pay off the mortgage debt, and then increasingly to generate a fund to provide a local welfare state.³⁰ All this was embodied in yet another colored diagram in the first edition that was subsequently omitted, with dire consequences to the understanding of Howard’s message: entitled The Vanishing Point of Landlord’s Rent, it illustrates how, as urban land values built up in Garden City, these would flow back to the community. In particular, they would make it possible “to found pensions with liberty for our aged poor, now imprisoned in workhouses; to banish despair and awaken hope in the breasts of those that have fallen; to silence the harsh voice of anger, and awaken the soft notes of brotherliness and goodwill.”³¹

Howard could thus argue that his was a third socio-economic system, superior both to Victorian capitalism and to bureaucratic centralized socialism. Its keynote would be local management and self-government. Services would be provided by the municipality, or by private contractors, as proved more efficient. Others would come from the people themselves, in a series of what Howard called pro-municipal experiments. In particular, people would build their own homes with capital provided through building societies, friendly societies, cooperative societies, or trade unions. And this activity would in turn drive the economy; 40 years before John Maynard Keynes or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Howard had arrived at the solution that society could spend its way out of a recession.

It would do so, however, without large-scale central state intervention. Howard’s plan was to be realized through thousands of small-scale enterprises: every man and woman a craftsman, an entrepreneur. It would call, he said “for the very highest talents of engineers of all kinds, of architects, artists, medical men, experts in sanitation, landscape gardeners, agricultural experts, surveyors, builders, manufacturers, merchants and financiers, organizers of trades unions, friendly and co-operative societies, as well as the very simplest forms of unskilled labour, together with all those forms of lesser skill and talent which lie between.”³² It is a peculiarly American vision: the homesteading spirit, brought back home to industrial England. But it is homesteading harnessed to new technology, to create a new socio-economic order: a remarkable vision, not least for its startling modernity, even a century later.

For Howard, communal ownership of land was the essential foundation of his garden city. “But the collective ownership of land was, in Howard’s view, as far as things needed to go. Other forms of capital could be privately, cooperatively, or municipally owned. That was entirely up to the people who lived in his new garden city.”³³ But collective provision also of housing, through the co-partnership tenants’ movement, became a central mechanism in Letchworth and many pre-1914 garden suburbs, as well as some industry at Letchworth.

Letchworth and Hampstead: Unwin and Parker

Howard was thus a dreamer of great dreams, but he was much more: he was quintessentially a doer. The modern reader, going back to his book, is surprised that so much of it consists of pages of calculations about finance; Howard was writing not for utopian simple-lifers but for hard-nosed Victorian businessmen who wanted to be sure they would get their money back. These calculations appeared realistic: in low-inflation late Victorian England, consols might pay as little as 2% a year; “philanthropy plus five per cent” was a well-known concept.³⁴

One of the many brilliant features of the plan was that it could be achieved incrementally, by a series of separate local initiatives which would progressively reinforce each other. As Dennis Hardy has written, the garden city was a “quasi utopia,” a perfect city that was achievable in an imperfect world.³⁵ So, eight months after the book was published, at a meeting at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street in London on June 21, 1899, Howard took the lead in setting up a Garden City Association (GCA) to discuss his ideas, and “ultimately to formulate a practical scheme on the lines of the project with such modifications as may seem desirable”; he took care to make it politically bipartisan and to include manufacturers, merchants, and financiers as well as cooperators, artists, and ministers.³⁶ By 1902, when the second edition of the book appeared minus those key diagrams, membership had risen to over 1,300; there were two peers, three bishops and 23 members of parliament, a few academics including Marshall, and half a dozen industrialists, including Cadbury, Lever, and Rowntree. Ralph Neville, a distinguished lawyer who soon afterwards became a judge, became Chair of Council in 1901, injecting hard practical sense; and a young and able Scots journalist, Thomas Adams, provided some more on his appointment as secretary.³⁷ But before that, in 1900, the young GCA had already resolved to form the First Garden City, Limited, with capital of £50,000 and a 5% dividend; two years after that, the Garden City Pioneer Company was registered with a capital of £20,000, in order to survey potential sites.³⁸

The directors of the Pioneer Company laid down criteria closely following Howard’s: a site of between 4,000 and 6,000 acres, with good rail connections, a satisfactory water supply, and good drainage. The favorite site, Childley Castle east of Stafford, was rejected as too far from London. Letchworth, 34 miles from London in an area of severely depressed agriculture and low land prices, met the criteria and – after delicate secret negotiations with 15 owners – the 3,818-acre site was bought for £155,587. The First Garden City Company was registered on September 1, 1903, with a £300,000 capital, of which £80,000 was to be raised immediately, and a 5% dividend.³⁹ After a limited competition, Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker were chosen as architect-planners in 1904.⁴⁰

Now, crucially, more business expertise needed to be injected: the First Garden City Company had Neville in the chair, and seven industrialists including Cadbury, Lever the soap king, Idris the soft-drink manufacturer who traded under the slogan “Idris because I’se dry,” plus a cotton-spinner, a newspaper proprietor, and an ironmaster. Thomas Adams was borrowed part-time from the Garden Cities Association, on a disarmingly casual basis, to run the new company; with abundant energy, imagination, shrewdness, charm, tact, and unfailing good humor, he lacked management experience.⁴¹

There was very successful publicity, and in the summer of 1905, 60,000 people came to see progress with the new city.⁴² But, as Denis Hardy concludes,

The kind of money that was needed to build a new city drew Howard away from any immediate hope of financing the venture primarily from within the ranks of fellow radicals, excited by the prospect of a “co-operative commonwealth”, and, increasingly, into the world of Edwardian company boardrooms and the panelled lounges of gentlemen’s clubs.⁴³

George Bernard Shaw, who was one of Howard’s lifelong staunchest supporters yet one of his most trenchant critics, brilliantly caught his limitations:

We went down to Hindhead from Saturday to yesterday. On Monday Ebenezer the Garden City Geyser lectured in Hindhead Hall, with a magic lantern giving views of that flourishing settlement in the manner of Mr. Scadder in Martin Chuzzlewit. I had to make a speech which had so fell an effect, in spite of my earnest endeavors to help him over the stile, that the audience declined to put up a single hand for the resolution. Finally the chairman put it again, coupling it with a vote of thanks, when, the situation becoming too poignant, I ostentatiously held up my paw, on which the others followed suit and Eb was saved. I pointed out that manufacturers were ready enough to go into the country; but what they went there for was cheap labor. I suggested that half a dozen big manufacturers building a city could give good wages, and yet get so much of them back in rent and shop rent, or in direct butcher, baker and dairy profits, that the enterprise might pay them all the same. At this the Hindhead proletariat grinned from ear to ear, and concluded that I was the man who really understood the manufacturing nature, the Geyser being a mere spring of benevolent mud.⁴⁴

Shaw, with his usual brilliance, had grasped the key point. As early as 1901, he wrote a letter to Neville, in which he questioned whether capitalists would ever agree to a trust deed limiting their freedom; they might tolerate a maximum 5% dividend but they would not distribute their profits; to realize the ideal, the only way might be to nationalize the garden city like the telegraphs and public roads.⁴⁵ He was soon proved right. Letchworth was chronically undercapitalized: at the formal opening in 1903, only £40,000 out of a projected £300,000 had been subscribed, all by the directors; a year later, it was clear that firms were not being attracted; it was a major breakthrough when the printing and binding works of J. M. Dent, a major publisher, was attracted;⁴⁶ in the first two years, only one thousand residents arrived, and most were idealist, artistic folk who gave Letchworth a permanent reputation for crankiness that it later ill-deserved: “here was a whole colony of eccentrics making an exhibition of themselves rather too near our sacred borders. We wished they would remove their mad city a little nearer Arlesley.”⁴⁷ Arlesley was the local mental institution. That was doubtless overdone, but there were grounds for suspicion.⁴⁸ At The Cloisters, a residential college where residents slept on hammocks separated by canvas screens arranged in a horseshoe around a marble fountain, they grew wheat according to what were thought to be Kropotkinesque principles, each grain receiving individual attention; the result was mainly weeds and thistles.⁴⁹

For a long time it was not possible to build houses, shops, factories, or public buildings; no dividend was paid until 1913, and then only at 1%.⁵⁰ Soon, the directors excluded Howard from any managerial function; maybe he already realized that he was not cut out for the work.⁵¹ “The directors, a constantly changing group, were nervous men, anxious for instant profitability and fearful of imminent collapse.”⁵² In August 1905, after little more than a year; they replaced Adams by W. E. H. Gaunt, manager of Trafford Park and the kind of man who should have been appointed in the first place.⁵³

Already, there was no mention in the Memorandum and Articles of Association of any legal obligation to transfer power progressively to the community.⁵⁴ Then, the directors faltered on the key issue of the gain in value to the community, and there was a compromise: tenants would be offered a choice between a “Howard lease” with ten- (not five-) year revisions and a normal 99-year fixed lease; most predictably settled on the second.⁵⁵ Effectively, Howard and his central ideas were being eased out of the frame; Adams resigned from the Board, probably because he opposed the “New Policy.”⁵⁶ As Robert Fishman has commented, instead of a peaceful alternative to capitalism the garden city became a device for preserving it.⁵⁷

The directors proved equally conservative on other matters: when, in 1905, they gave away part of the proposed town center – a Buxton-style Crescent – for a cottage housing exhibition that was to become permanent, Raymond Unwin turned his energies to Hampstead Garden Suburb. In fact, even this attempt was insufficient; it showed that houses could be built for as little as £150 and let at rents from 22p to 82p per week, but even this was too much for unskilled workers who had to find poorer housing outside the garden city; ironically, the press saw them as more suited for weekenders than for the deserving poor, and the Manchester Evening Chronicle described middle-class ladies gushing over them: “what a darling wee, little place”; “oh, how too, too charming!”⁵⁸ Many of the first houses were built by speculative contractors with eccentric designs that Parker and Unwin had wanted to banish.⁵⁹ Unwin did, however, remain consultant architect until dissolution of his partnership with Parker in May 1914; C. B. Purdom’s statement that “Unwin, fighting a losing battle, fled during 1906 to Hampstead Garden Suburb … and Letchworth hardly saw him again” was, it seems, a melodramatic overstatement.⁶⁰

Soon, though, the original middle-class eccentrics had been overwhelmed by the blue-collar workers who were to provide the raison d’être for the garden city’s existence. But ironically, far from participating in the cooperative spirit of the enterprise, they embraced trades unionism and socialism.⁶¹ Many, in a development that had its own special irony, joined in-commuters from neighboring Hitchin in the giant Spirella factory, “to make corsets which Letchworth women obviously never wear, but which their husbands sell at great profit to the less enlightened women in other towns.”⁶²

What survived from all this was, however, a watered-down essence of the Howard vision. The town began to pay dividends after a decade; it continued to grow, more slowly than the promoters hoped, to reach 15,000 – less than half its planned target – in 1938; after World War Two, aided by government-subsidized decentralization schemes, it was at last completed, on a slightly smaller scale than originally planned. Ironically, at that point it became the victim of land speculation, from which it was rescued by a 1962 Act of Parliament that put its management in the hands of a special corporation.⁶³ Above all, it found its perfect physical realization in the hands of Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker. Almost too perfect, in fact; Unwin–Parker architecture clothed the Howard skeleton so memorably that, ever after, people could hardly distinguish one from the other.

To understand what Unwin and Parker so memorably achieved, here and at Hampstead and in other places, they need to be set in a context of place, time, and culture. Unwin was born in 1863, Parker in 1867, within a dozen miles of Sheffield in northern England; they were half-cousins, and Unwin married Parker’s sister. Neither was formally trained as an architect; Unwin started as an engineer, Parker as an interior decorator. They grew up in an intense ferment of ideas, deriving in large measure from William Morris, which were to influence all their subsequent work. As a young man Unwin considered a career as a priest; asked by Samuel Barnett, Vicar of St Jude’s in Whitechapel, whether he was more troubled by man’s unhappiness or by his wickedness, Unwin replied unhappiness; Barnett advised him not to enter the church.⁶⁴ He and Parker shared the view that creativity came from an imaginative understanding of the past; that the Middle Ages provided an historic standard; that old buildings grew out of the ground they stood on; that the village was an organic embodiment of the small, personally related community; that the architect and planner were guardians of social and aesthetic life, maintaining and enhancing the traditional values of the community for future generations.⁶⁵

Unwin early became a socialist in the William Morris tradition, joining the Sheffield group started by Edward Carpenter, a founder of the Fabian Society; here Kropotkin lectured on the union of craft and intellectual work.⁶⁶ Before 1900, he was working on the design of cottages for mining villages in his local area.⁶⁷ From this stemmed his book Cottage Plans and Common Sense (1902), an impassioned plea for better working-class housing: “It does not seem to be realized that hundreds of thousands of women spend the bulk of their lives with nothing better to look on than the ghastly prospect offered by these back yards, the squalid ugliness of which is unrelieved by a scrap of fresh green to speak of spring, or a falling leaf to tell of autumn.” Yet, “If, instead of being wasted in stuffy yards and dirty back streets, the space which is available for a number of houses were kept together, it would make quite a respectable square or garden”; cottages, each correctly orientated to give a sunny aspect to the chief room, would be planned around “quadrangles opening one into the other” after the manner of Oxford and Cambridge colleges.⁶⁸

Already, that year, Parker and Unwin were working on their first major commission: the garden village of New Earswick for the Rowntree chocolate family, to be developed not as a charity but as an independent trust, close to their factory on the northern edge of York. It contains in embryo many of the features that were to be worked out on a much larger canvas at Letchworth and then at Hampstead. The village is separated from the factory, and from the city, by a narrow but quite distinct green belt, part natural, part in playing-fields. The cottages are disposed in terraces and grouped either around communal greens, or along pedestrian ways – thus anticipating the Radburn layout by more than a quarter-century – and, later in the design process, culs-de-sac. A village green and a folk hall are prominent central features. Everywhere, natural features – trees, a small brook – are integrated into the design. It has in supreme measure what Parker and Unwin themselves called “the first essential in the form and design of any decorative object … reposefulness”: the visitor, arriving in whatever psychological state, immediately receives a quite extraordinary impression of calm, of an informal but natural order of things, which is all-pervasive. Beautifully preserved, sympathetically restored to Unwin and Parker’s original intentions, New Earswick is a small gem, dazzling to the eye at the age of more than 100. In one respect only it failed: the standards of design were so high that the lowest-paid could not afford it. That, indeed, was to prove a recurrent defect.

At Letchworth they had a larger and more complex problem. For one thing, industry had to be integrated in with the housing. The fact that a railway line bisected the site determined that here the industry must be. As against New Earswick’s modest village hall and row of shops, a whole town center had to be planned. Writing later in his great textbook of planning, Unwin exhaustively analyzed the town plans of the past, concluding that both formal and informal approaches had their merits; though it was never in doubt that his tastes lay toward the informal, Letchworth also has more formal elements in the form of radial avenues, ronds-points, and, above all, the big central Town Square dominated by the major municipal buildings. It does not work out right. The best of the informal housing layouts are as good as New Earswick, some – planned around huge village-green-like spaces – maybe even better. And the Spirella factory is a joy, designed – perhaps to try to avoid the associations – in a very free Viennese Jugendstil. But the town center is a terrible mess, with streets that seem to lead nowhere in particular, lined (well after Unwin and Parker departed) by an amorphous mixture of the worst interwar commercial Neo-Georgian and even worse sixties tatty, all gone slightly to seed.

Significantly, Unwin confesses that when designing it all he had not yet read Camillo Sitte’s book Die Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen, published over a decade previously, with its stress on the informal qualities of medieval cities. It was a lesson Unwin was not to forget; Town Planning in Practice, published in 1909 – a mere half-decade after Letchworth – is memorable above all for the brilliant line drawings of old English and French and German towns and villages, from which he developed his understanding of the relationships of buildings and spaces. Or, rather, their understanding: together, Unwin and Parker raised the art of civic design to a level of pure genius, after which almost everything else was pedestrian anticlimax. They were specific that their job was above all to promote beauty or amenity, terms which for them were interchangeable: “above all, we shall need to infuse the spirit of the artist into our work.”⁶⁹ But, as well, their thoughts were always imaginatively with the people who would live in the buildings, walk, or play in the spaces they created. And this went down to minute particulars: good architecture and planning, for them, was the multiplication of right details:

The children, too, must not be forgotten in the open spaces. The kinderbank, or low seat to suit their short legs, should always be provided, and where possible spaces of turf be supplied with swings or seesaws, with ponds for sailing boats, and with sand pits where these can be kept sufficiently clean.⁷⁰

They wanted, too, to pursue social ends. “Both in town and site planning it is important to prevent the complete separation of different classes of people which is such a feature of the modern English town.”⁷¹ But, in Edwardian England, there were limits. Both at Letchworth and at Hampstead, areas are shown for “cottages,” away from the grander middle-class houses: close enough, but not too close.

Hampstead was a turning-point, both for the English garden-city movement in general and for Unwin in particular. For it was self-confessedly not a garden city but a garden suburb; it had no industry, and was openly dependent on commuting from an adjacent tube station, which opened just as it was being planned. In fairness, and for the historical record, it must be said that it was not the only or even the first in this genre. Ealing Tenants Limited, the first London housing cooperative, had been founded in 1901 and had bought their 32-acre Brentham Estate site off The Mount Avenue in 1902, even before Letchworth; they had hired Unwin and Parker to design a model garden village by 1906, a year before the Hampstead commission.⁷² It was a garden village suburb, little different in scale from New Earswick, distinguished by the high quality of its design, its inimitable feeling of easeful domesticity, its central social club (a notion borrowed from New Earswick, and indeed from the first garden suburb at nearby Bedford Park 30 years previously), its central communal superblocks for small-scale cultivation (an innovation copied 20 years later by Stein and Wright at Sunnyside Gardens, by Geddes in Tel-Aviv, and then in a great variety of places), and its proto-green-belt, formed by the meadows of the adjacent River Brent.⁷³

Ealing is interesting for more than design, though. It represents the way that garden cities and garden suburbs were supposed to be built: Howard’s Freedom and Cooperation in action. Unwin had commended cooperative housing in a pamphlet of 1901, arguing that this way groups of prospective owners could obtain housing at low cost on land bought at farm value: Howard’s argument again. But additionally, “The houses could be grouped together and so arranged that each would obtain a sunny aspect and an open outlook; and portions of the land could be reserved for ever from being built on to secure these views”; and common rooms could be provided for music and general recreation, and also for meals. Groups of houses, he suggested, could be developed around quadrangles, each with a common room; the quintessence of that medieval spirit of community that Unwin so earnestly wanted to recapture.⁷⁴ Unwin sat on the executive committee of the Co-Partnership Tenants Housing Company; he and Parker developed not only Ealing, but also suburbs outside Leicester, Cardiff, and Stoke-on-Trent.⁷⁵ The 1909 Housing and Town Planning Act allowed such “Public Utility Societies” (PUS) to borrow public money at low rates of interest, and by 1918 there were more than 100 of them.⁷⁶ They had two distinct advantages: loans from the Local Government Board carried lower rates of interest than available in the market, and they were also able to borrow a higher proportion of the value of their development costs than other limited profit organizations. Probably a majority of the 128 PUS registered and active before 1914 were co-partnership societies, drawing part of their capital from shareholders who were (or intended to become) tenants of the society. The close identification of the PUSs with prewar garden suburb developments, as well as Letchworth, might be seen as strengthening their claim to be involved after the war because of the government’s commitment to a new standard of housing for the working class, based on garden-city principles.⁷⁷ But the Treasury resisted a clause which would have allowed them to borrow money on the same terms as local authorities, and this constrained them as local housing development agencies.⁷⁸ In 1913, when Henry Vivian – who had founded Co-Partnership Tenants in a pub in Ealing in 1901 – became a member of the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association (GCTPA) Council, effectively the two movements began to merge.

But Hampstead was an altogether bigger affair. Its begetter was Dame Henrietta Barnett, redoubtable wife of the Warden of Toynbee Hall. They had a weekend house at Hampstead, and heard in 1896 of a plan to build a new tube station next door. (The line soon became part of the empire of Charles Tyson Yerkes.) In true English middle-class fashion, she resolved to campaign to buy up land to extend Hampstead Heath and frustrate the real-estate ambitions of the promoters. After a five-year campaign involving the dispatch of 13,000 letters, the 80-acre Heath extension was bought by the London County Council (LCC) for £43,241; the tube station, stopped in mid-construction, became one of the London underground’s several ghost stations. In the middle of it all, someone suggested the idea of a garden suburb; it took another 243-acre purchase from the Eton College Estate, using £112,000 invested from the appeal, in 1907. A trust was already set up to provide 8,000 houses; Unwin and Parker were appointed architects – a dilemma, since Unwin had attacked suburbs in The Art of Building a Home, in 1901, quoting his hero Morris.⁷⁹

From the first, the suburb had high social purposes: as a contemporary put it, it would be a place “where the poor shall teach the rich, and the rich, let us hope, shall help the poor to help themselves”; the first plan included barns for the storage of coster barrows.⁸⁰ But soon, land values and rents began to rise, and – like Letchworth, or Bedford Park before that – the suburb began to acquire a reputation, which Dame Henrietta was at pains to refute: it was untrue that the inhabitants were “all eccentric, sandalled, corsetless ‘cranks’ – we are just ordinary men and women”:

Some of us keep servants, some don’t; some of us have motors, others use “Shanks’ pony”; some read, some paint, some make music, but we all work, we all wash (“no house, however small, without a bathroom” – vide advertisement) – and we all garden … relieved from the oppression of wealth, and able to meet each other on the simpler and deeper grounds of common interests and shared aspirations.⁸¹

Of the three separate house-building organizations that provided the great bulk of the houses, two were co-partnerships.⁸² But the objective, “day-to-day coexistence which would sooner heal the estrangement of the classes,”⁸³ was frustrated by the suburb’s own success; today, even the tiny artisans’ cottages are well and truly gentrified.

What does survive is the physical quality. In some ways it is curiously transitional. Unwin was by now heavily influenced by Sitte and by his own German wanderings; restrictive local by-laws were overcome by using special parliamentary powers.⁸⁴ So Unwin was free to demonstrate on the ground what a few years later, in his enormously influential pamphlet Nothing Gained by Overcrowding!, he demonstrated on paper: that a proper planning scheme could give everyone much more space, without using more land. The key to this trick was to cut the land needed for roads from 40% (as in the typical by-law scheme) to 17%, thus raising the land available for gardens and open space from 17% to no less than 55% of the total area.⁸⁵ This new freedom is used at Hampstead to produce a typically informal layout, with irregular curving streets, culs-de-sac, and great variety of housing types; Unwin aimed, even at this early date, to design traffic out, and today it notably still proceeds with respectful sedateness.⁸⁶ And the design consciously, even winsomely, recalls German medieval models: there is a town wall against the Heath extension, with gatehouses; next to the shopping parade on the Finchley Road, Unwin places a huge gateway that was modeled on the Markusthurm at Rothenburg, which on first sight in 1900 – so his wife Etty later recalled – he greeted with “tears of joy.”⁸⁷

But in the central Town Square, placed by desire of the Dame on the suburb’s highest point,⁸⁸ and in the adjacent streets, Unwin defers completely to Lutyens, the designer of the two big churches and the adjacent Institute. The result is an anomalous, heavily formal exercise in the City Beautiful tradition: approaching through the main gateway from the Heath, the expectant visitor expects to find a pastiche of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, with narrow streets leading to the kind of market place Unwin delighted to draw, but instead finds a processional way that looks suspiciously like a dummy run for the approach to the Viceroy’s Palace at New Delhi (Chapter 6). And the whole concept, vast in scale, is curiously dead; hardly anyone ever goes there, and the square looks as if it is waiting for an Imperial Durbar that will never now take place. Perhaps, though, as Creese said, the intention was not to entertain the inhabitants, or offer them recreation or shopping, but to impress them; and it presumably did that.⁸⁹ But Unwin had blessed it; and at Letchworth, he too had formal moments.

But Hampstead thoroughly confused the faithful. From the start, as Abercrombie pointed out in 1910, the Garden City Association had as objectives, as well as the “building of new towns in country districts on well thought out principles,” also “the creation of Garden Suburbs, on similar principles, for the immediate relief of existing towns” as well as “the building of Garden Villages … for properly housing the working classes near their work.”⁹⁰ In 1906, the Association added garden suburbs to its objectives; at the November AGM, after a lecture by Henrietta Barnett, Rider Haggard proposed a motion and secured a unanimous vote in favor of garden suburbs; the garden suburb and garden village appeared more realistic objectives than the garden city.⁹¹ In 1909, a Special General Meeting agreed to make the promotion of town planning the Association’s primary objective, and to change the name to Garden Cities and Town Planning Association; henceforth, garden cities were relegated to a subsidiary role.⁹² At a dinner in honor of Howard in 1912, well-planned garden suburbs were not only acknowledged in their own right, but were commended as worthy of support.⁹³ But the question would increasingly be whether the good was not the enemy of the best. Hampstead in Unwin and Parker’s hands was allowable, even commendable; so, presumably, were most of the dozen or so schemes coordinated by Co-Partnership Tenants between 1901 and World War One;⁹⁴ but the “purist” wing of the Association reacted with fury to the fact that “many of the schemes that are called garden city schemes have nothing in common with the garden-city movement but the name, which they have dishonestly appropriated. Schemes of the wildest speculation, land-sweating and jerry-building have all been promoted in the hope that the good name would carry them through,” Ewart G. Culpin complained in 1913.⁹⁵

After the war, C. B. Purdom, the new editor of the Association’s magazine, complained: “There is hardly a district in which the local council does not claim to be building one, and unscrupulous builders everywhere display the name on their advertisements … The thing itself is nowhere to be seen at the present date, but in Hertfordshire, at Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City.”⁹⁶ In 1918, a breakaway movement emerged: the National Garden Cities Committee, led by Purdom, together with Howard, F. J. Osborn, Abercrombie and G. D. H. Cole; it produced a pamphlet, New Towns after the War, by “New Townsmen,” in fact by Osborn. It caused a frisson in the Association, though eventually a merger was arranged.⁹⁷ But even Welwyn was dubious, for, as Michael Hebbert points out, it “was developed and marketed in the first decade as a middle-class dormitory for city commuters, and its values protected in a manner not envisaged by Ebenezer Howard involving the segregation of factories and weekly rented housing to the further side of the railway tracks.”⁹⁸ When, at the end of the 1920s, Abercrombie was appointed to assess the feasibility of Wythenshawe and Parker was appointed architect, the Association referred to it condescendingly as a “semi-garden city,” which, in fact, it was.⁹⁹

In 1919, the Association adopted a carefully restrictive definition of the “thing itself”; the following year, embarrassed by the 69-year-old Howard’s unilateral purchase of a huge tract of land at Welwyn without the money to pay for it, they bailed him out and started the Second Garden City there.¹⁰⁰ Designed by Louis de Soissons in the neo-Georgian style that by then had swept the Unwin–Parker neo-vernacular off the stage – Unwin himself had turned coat – it is much more formal than either Letchworth or Hampstead, especially in its huge Lutyens-like central mall, almost a mile long: a kind of Garden City Beautiful. But the architecture shows how very good Neo-Georgian can be in the right hands. And it has been beautifully cared for; a cheat, perhaps, because unlike Letchworth it soon became popular with middle-class commuters. The fact, heretical though it may be to say out loud, is that it is actually much more appealing than Letchworth.

The Garden-City Movement between the Wars

Meanwhile, in 1918 and 1919 the movement had faced a double crisis. In 1912 Unwin had already committed what for some was the great apostasy: in a lecture at Manchester University, he had commended the building of “satellite towns” next to cities, garden suburbs depending on the city for employment. In 1918, placed in a position of unequalled power as key member of the Tudor Walters Committee, he wrote that into the official prescription for the postwar public housing program, which received legislative blessing in the Addison Act the next year; the consequences have been detailed in Chapter 3. The result was that of the million or so publicly subsidized dwellings built by local authorities between the wars, none – with the exception of a handful at Letchworth and Welwyn – was built in the form of true garden cities. This was a severe blow to the Association, which was campaigning simultaneously for a vastly expanded public housing program and for garden cities. Howard himself had no faith at all in the capacity of the state to do the job, and perhaps no ideological relish for the idea either: as he told his faithful lieutenant Frederic Osborn in 1919, “My dear boy, if you wait for the Government to do it you will be as old as Methuselah before you start.”¹⁰¹

There was another blow: the co-partnership societies simply faded away. When the emergency housing program was abandoned in 1921, they had made a negligible contribution: less than 2%. A civil servant wrote an acid note to the Minister of Health in February 1922: “These societies have performed pitiably in the way of helping on housing.” Sir Arthur Robinson, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Health from 1920 to 1935, could observe the performance of the PUSs from close quarters, and he was not impressed. Ten years of experience, he commented, showed that they were bodies neither efficient nor easy to deal with, as their members were not normally men of affairs. He considered, therefore, that they had only a very small contribution to offer at the price of much inconvenience. That seems to sum up the achievement of the PUSs since the end of the war: they had built very few houses, and had alienated the top civil servants in the Ministry of Health.¹⁰²

So Howard obtained Welwyn by his own unconventional methods, the country was given satellite towns, the co-partnership ideal collapsed, and the cause of large-scale new-town building in Britain was set back 30 years. Perhaps it was inevitable: the political objections to the large-scale removal of urban slum dwellers into the countryside, coupled with the threat of massive boundary extensions, would have been huge, as the LCC’s troubles in planning its satellite estates, and Manchester’s at Wythenshawe, amply demonstrated.

Partly the problem was one of failure of imagination. Some of the so-called satellites – above all the LCC’s Becontree, in Essex – were huge, many times Howard’s planned 30,000 target, and equal to a medium-sized English town. And they were distant from their parent urban authority. But they lacked the necessary industry to make them self-contained – though, after 1928, Becontree had the windfall of the Ford Dagenham plant – and they even lacked decent public transport links. And, too often, they were design failures too. The housing was worthy enough, and it conformed to Unwin’s pattern books; it, and the layouts within which it was embodied, were just plain dull.

The provincial satellites were partial exceptions. And Wythenshawe, designed by Barry Parker for Manchester in 1930, really is a rather outstanding one. Its early history was tortuous. Abercrombie, appointed as consultant, had recommended that the city buy the 4,500-acre estate; it purchased half of it in 1926. At the public inquiry, Unwin was inspector; he recommended his old partner Parker as consultant.¹⁰³ In 1927 the city had commissioned Parker to produce a plan. On a huge site of 5,500 acres, he was given a free hand to design a virtual new town. There had followed a huge battle by Manchester to incorporate the area, won in Parliament in 1931; it was unsuccessful in obtaining an order to buy the rest of the land. By 1938, with over 7,000 corporation and some 700 private houses, it was already bigger than either Letchworth or Welwyn and was still only one-third of the way to its planned target of 107,000.¹⁰⁴ Parker himself described it, in 1945, as “now the most perfect example of a garden city.”¹⁰⁵ It is, to be sure, an imperfect one. The population target was three times that recommended by Howard, though close to that of the larger post-World War Two new towns. Though the land was purchased at near-agricultural values, it was separated from the city only by a half-mile-wide, thousand-acre green belt along the River Mersey. Though a large industrial area was planned – like Letchworth, alongside the railway that bisects the site – it could not provide jobs for all the working inhabitants; a subsidized express bus service to the city was necessary.

Its achievement lay in introducing three American planning principles, borrowed directly by Parker from the New York region, which he had visited in 1925.¹⁰⁶ The first of these was the neighborhood-unit principle, the origins of which will need to be discussed later in this chapter. The second was the principle of the Radburn layout, which Clarence Stein and Henry Wright had developed in their 1928 plan for the garden city of the same name, also to be described later in this chapter, which they had discussed with him as early as 1924.¹⁰⁷ The third was the principle of the parkway, which Parker – visiting New York with Unwin and Howard in 1925 for the International Federation for Garden Cities and Town Planning Conference, staying on as guests of the Regional Planning Association of America¹⁰⁸ – had observed in Westchester County, but which he now used in a completely original way.

The original New York parkways – the Bronx River Parkway of 1914, and the examples developed by Robert Moses as part of his recreational parks plans of the 1920s – were limited-access highways designed for private car traffic only, and deliberately landscaped to provide a recreational experience.¹⁰⁹ Parker’s genius at Wythenshawe was to combine these with another, older American parkway tradition, conceived by Frederick Law Olmsted and widely used by planners in the City Beautiful tradition at the start of the century: the idea of parkways as access roads to residential areas, linked to civic parks¹¹⁰ – an idea that had been tentatively employed in Britain, by Soissons at Welwyn and by the landscape architect T. H. Mawson around Stanley Park, Blackpool, in the 1920s – to provide the main element of the circulation plan for an entire garden city.¹¹¹ Thereby he planned to avoid one of the principal planning defects of the 1930s, so evident around London, of ribbon development along new arterial roads. At Wythenshawe, he explained,

such roads … will lie in strips of parkland and they will not be development roads. They have been planned to skirt existing parks, future recreation grounds, school playing fields, existing woodlands, coppices and spinnies, the proposed golf course, the banks of streams and everything which will enhance their charm and will widen them out into great expanses of unbuilt upon country.¹¹²

These roads, he argued, should in American terminology properly be called “freeways,” not “parkways,” because they were not restricted to recreation and would be used by all kinds of traffic. (Indeed, they were akin to the notion of segregated arterial roads as the highest level in a hierarchical system of traffic planning, as enunciated by Alker Tripp in 1938 and then borrowed by Abercrombie and Forshaw as a major element in their County of London Plan in 1943.) But eventually, once finished, Parker’s main north–south artery was called the Princess Parkway. Its fate was ironic: originally planned with junctions to the local street system at grade, 30 years later it was upgraded into a motorway by the transport planners. Approached from the city through a mass of concrete spaghetti, it is now a freeway, in the Angeleno sense of that word, with a vengeance. The other planned parkway, unaccountably, was abandoned halfway, the park strip wandering on shorn of its original point.

Manchester, in fact, has not dealt kindly with its masterpiece. The shopping center, completed very belatedly, is 1960s-tawdry; some of the postwar flats are monstrosities. A second and third generation of incomers have not treated the place as kindly as the original arrivals; there is all too much evidence, for those who would like to believe that civilized surroundings will engender civilized behavior, of graffiti, vandalism, and petty crime. The place looks down-at-heel in that distinctively English way, as if the city has given up on it; it now appears a distinctly poor relation to the booming city center. But despite its best efforts, it could not obliterate Parker entirely. The huge green space of Wythenshawe Park, right in the center, almost turns the green-belt concept inside-out; this is a green-heart city. The housing, which deftly embodies Georgian motifs into the vernacular of Letchworth, is cunningly grouped round a multitude of small green spaces. For all its latter-day shabbiness, it fully deserves the appellation of Third Garden City.

Meanwhile, the faithful soldiered on. Chamberlain, always the friend of garden cities while in office, had government subsidy written in to legislation in 1921, 1925 and – in the face of treasury opposition – in 1932.¹¹³ But it did not do much good. By the 1930s the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Health, Sir Arthur Robinson, was openly confessing that “beginning as a supporter of garden cities, properly so called, I have in the course of time changed my views on them – they are fine in theory but in practice they do not seem to work. What is properly called a satellite town is a much better method of approach … But the satellite town is just what several of the large housing schemes of local authorities are producing, and the line of progress is to encourage it.”¹¹⁴ And, once Chamberlain had managed to create the Barlow Commission, Unwin, giving evidence to it in 1938, could argue that Howard’s great contribution had been the garden suburb, not the garden city; satellite development would be sufficient to guard against the continued sprawl of London.¹¹⁵

In vain, Osborn railed at the consequences: “To build cottage estates on the outskirts gives people good immediate surroundings, but imposes on them an intolerable burden of journeys, costing money, energy and leisure. It also cuts off London as a whole from playing fields and open country.”¹¹⁶ The only way out of this, he was arguing in 1938, was to establish a London Regional Planning Commission with powers to establish executive boards to build new towns or expand existing ones,” and to decentralize industry and business within an enlarged London region.¹¹⁷ Against that view, of course, it could be argued that London was special; for the much smaller provincial cities, satellites – like Manchester’s Wythenshawe or Liverpool’s Speke – were perfectly acceptable. But Osborn would have none of that: “the fate of London may give cause to those responsible for the great towns and town-conglomerations of the North and Midlands … what Londoners can be got to stand today, England will be asked to stand tomorrow.”¹¹⁸ The establishment of the Barlow Commission – one of the first acts of Neville Chamberlain on becoming Prime Minister – at last gave him his chance; he did not miss it. As he confessed shamelessly to Lewis Mumford, he redrafted for Abercrombie some of the key paragraphs of the 1940 majority report and of Abercrombie’s own minority report, which recommended sweeping controls on industrial location and which finally – in 1945 – was embodied into legislation.¹¹⁹ After years in the political wilderness, the friends of the garden city were at last about to come into their own.

The Garden City in Europe

Over the water on the European mainland, the garden-city notion soon became just as thoroughly diluted or, as the faithful would say, traduced. As Stephen Ward has shown, in these years planning ideas were being furiously exchanged from country to country: Britain went to Germany for town extensions, zoning, and organic urban designs; the Germans admired British housing and above all the garden city; the French borrowed German zoning and the British garden city; but in the process, the idea became subtly transmogrified.¹²⁰ One problem was that several countries each had a home-grown garden-city advocate, who could – and sometimes did – claim that he thought of the idea independently. Insofar as these claims can ever be settled, all did; but in any case, their notions are subtly but importantly different from Howard’s.

The first in time was undoubtedly the Spanish engineer Arturo Soria y Mata (1844–1920), who conceived of his ideal of La Ciudad Lineal in a magazine article of 1882 and developed it into a detailed proposal in 1892. Its essence was that a tramway, or light rail, system running out from a big city could give extraordinary linear accessibility, which would permit the development of a planned linear garden city: “A Cada Familia, Una Casa, En Cada Casa, Una Huerta y un Jardín,” as an advertisement put it.¹²¹ But the linear city was never more than a commuter suburb, developed as a commercial speculation. Started in 1894 and completed in 1904, the first section of the planned 48-kilometer (30-mile) city ran for 5 kilometers (3 miles) circumferentially between two major radial highways east of Madrid; on either side of a main axis 40 meters wide, carrying the tramway (originally worked by horses, and not electrified until 1909), villas were laid out on superblocks measuring approximately 200 meters in depth and with 80- or 100-meter frontages.¹²² That was all that was built, and in 1934 the Compañía Madrileña de Urbanización gave up the ghost.¹²³ After World War Two the stupendous growth of the city almost buried the linear city; travelers from the airport pass under it without noticing. Those curious enough to divert will find it still quite recognizably there, with the tram replaced by a metro; they thoughtfully named a station for Arturo Soria. Some of the original villas, too, are still standing; but one by one, they are being replaced by apartment blocks, and soon the linear city will be a memory. Soria had grander dreams of linear cities across Europe, which in 1928, after his death, inspired an Association Internationale des Cités Linéaires masterminded by the influential French planner Georges Benoît-Lévy; echoes of his scheme can be found in the Russian deurbanists of the 1920s and in Corbusier’s thinking of the 1930s, where we shall encounter them later.

The French Howard was Toni Garnier, an architect from Lyon, whose Cité Industrielle was first presented as a student study, rejected by the examiners, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1899–1900 and first exhibited in 1904, to be revised in the version we know now in 1917.¹²⁴ Garnier was a strangely isolated figure, even in his native France: serving on a policy committee, the only foreign book he could mention was one written by a Belgian; he recommended to the mayor, Edouard Herriot, to read Camillo Sitte in 1918, 16 years after its French translation was published.¹²⁵ If there is an intellectual provenance, it is the French regional thinking of Le Play and of the French school of geography, with its anti-metropolitan stress on the development of vigorous provincial craft culture; it is anarchist in its emphasis on common property and its rejection of such symbols of bourgeois repression as police stations, law courts, jails, or churches, and its large central building where 3,000 citizens could meet together.¹²⁶ All the odder, then, that Garnier makes his city depend economically on a single huge metallurgical plant (though questions of economics are given short shrift), and that the physical plan is dominated by strong axial boulevards and housing on rectangular grids; rather, as Reyner Banham put it, like Camillo Sitte with the serpentinings taken out.¹²⁷ His was an architect’s vision, more utopian than Howard’s, and was never built.¹²⁸

If Garnier is not quite of one piece, his German equivalent is even weirder. Theodor Fritsch published his Die Stadt der Zukunft two years before Howard, in 1896; he had an obsession that Howard had stolen his ideas, though it seems clear that Howard had developed his independently before that.¹²⁹ True, in purely physical terms there are similarities between Garden City and City of the Future: the circular form, the division between land uses, the open land at the center and the surrounding green belt, the low-rise housing, the peripheral industry, the communal landownership. But these recur in other ideal plans, including Buckingham’s, which Howard specifically acknowledged. And Fritsch’s city, “eine Mischung von Grossstadt und Gartenstadt,” lacks the specific function of urban decentralization which is central to Howard’s thinking; it apparently would have been much bigger, with up to one million people.¹³⁰ Most important, the underlying ideology is totally different: Fritsch, a rabid propagandist of racism, plans a city where each individual immediately knows his place in a rigid, segregated social order.¹³¹ Overall, any resemblance between Fritsch and Howard is one of surface appearance; and, as already seen, Howard was not in the least concerned about that. Fritsch remained a “lonesome preacher in the desert”; Fritsch’s version of the garden city was largely ignored by the Deutsche Gartenstadtgesellschaft (DGG; German Garden City Association), founded in 1902. Howard was honored as the sole inventor of the garden city, even in Germany. For the DGG had a social reformist garden-city vision. In return, Fritsch never mentioned the existence of Letchworth, Welwyn, or all the German garden suburb developments, such as Hellerau or Margarethenhöhe: “Fritsch ignored the DGG, accused Howard of plagiarism and wrote later that he was probably a Jew.”¹³²

For, before long, it was Howard’s ideas which – to the chagrin of Fritsch – were carried across the water to influence thinking on the European mainland; but there, almost immediately, they were misunderstood. One of the earliest foreign interpretations of Howard’s ideas, Le Cité Jardin by Georges Benoît-Lévy, managed to make an elementary confusion between garden city and garden suburb, from which French planners never afterwards extricated themselves.¹³³ Or, perhaps, they thought that the pure Howard gospel would not work for the incurably urban French.

Henri Sellier was the person who made it happen. Originally a trade unionist, then an active local socialist and national politician,¹³⁴ he was committed to the notion that the ordinary manual worker should become accustomed to bourgeois standards of respectability and comfort, so fostering the emergence of a new middle class.¹³⁵ As director of the Office Public des Habitations à Bon Marché du Département de la Seine, planning 16 cité-jardins around Paris between 1916 and 1939, he certainly understood that his interpretation was not pure Howard, but Unwin’s Hampstead variant; he took his architects to visit Unwin in England, in 1919, and used the Unwin text as a basis for design.¹³⁶

What they shared was some key aspects of the Unwin prescription, albeit translated into French terms: small size, between 1,000 and 5,500 units; land bought outside the city at low agricultural prices; densities that were low for Paris, 95–150 persons to the hectare (40–60 to the acre), and plenty of open space. Then, rising land and housing costs, plus population pressure, brought modifications: more and more blocks of five-story flats were included; densities rose to 200–260 to the hectare (80–105 per acre), though still with generous open space and social services.¹³⁷ Visited today, a typical example like Suresnes – 6 miles from the center of Paris, a mere mile from the Bois de Boulogne, and the city for which Sellier was mayor during virtually all the interwar period – looks like nothing so much as an LCC inner-London apartment-block scheme of the same period: until one wanders into some of the peripheral streets, Unwin’s, certainly, is not the first name that springs to mind.¹³⁸ And in the 1930s, as the proportion of apartment blocks rose even higher and the architects joined the modern movement, as at Le Plessis-Robinson in the southern suburbs, the divergence was complete.

In Germany, they did better. In 1902 a salesman visiting England, Heinrich Krebs, brought back Howard’s book, had it translated, ran a conference, and started a German equivalent of the Garden City Association. There was an enthusiastic response: German industrialists, almost unbelievably, thought that the garden-city movement helped explain good British industrial labor relations.¹³⁹ That, to be sure, was some kind of obsession with German industrialists.

Before World War One, its outstanding expression was the garden village of Margarethenhöhe at the edge of Essen in the Ruhrgebiet, developed by the Krupp family in 1912 as the latest in a long line of such industrial housing estates that went back as early as 1863. It served Krupp workers, including 4,000 white-collar workers at the time of foundation, but not exclusively so: in 1913 less than half the tenants were “Kruppianer.”¹⁴⁰ Small, with only 5,300 people at the end of the 1930s, it is physically a transplanted New Earswick. Its architect, Georg Metzendorf, faithfully followed the Unwin–Parker tradition to create a magic little town, separated from the city by a wooded mini green belt, its entrance gateway, its central market square, its medieval-looking inn, its narrow curving streets from which all through traffic is excluded. Thus, ironically, it out-Unwins Unwin; it really does look like a twentieth-century Rothenburg. Perhaps it took a German architect, working in a German environment with a top German planner – Metzendorf worked hand in hand with Essen’s municipal architect Robert Schmidt – to achieve what Unwin so zealously strived for. Whether it served Krupp’s purposes is another question altogether; apparently, by herding his workers together in their own town, it made them even more class-conscious.¹⁴¹

The Gartenstadtbewegung, however, aimed higher: they wanted a German Letchworth, as their leader Hans Kampffmeyer said in 1908.¹⁴² They never quite achieved it, though they came near. The garden city at Hellerau, 8 kilometers (5 miles) outside Dresden, was – like Margarethenhöhe – essentially a garden suburb at the end of a tram line. But, like Letchworth in its heady early years, it – and the movement in general – was heavily imbued with principles of the Life Reform Movement: not merely housing, but eating, clothing, and lifestyle generally were to be simplified and stripped of nineteenth-century dross. Hellerau contained the Deutsche Werkstätte für Handbaukunst, and even a Society for Applied Rhythmics.

The latter-day pilgrim, visiting it, goes into a time warp. It is isolated from the city, in open heathland that provides a natural green belt against the city, but that once served as a Red Army training ground, punctuating the arcadian peace with eerie explosions. Now it is peaceful once again, as it should be. The GDR government lacked resources to do much with it, leaving it rather charmingly down-at-heel; since reunification money has been lavished to restore it as a national monument, which it certainly is. Heinrich Tressenow’s terrace and semi-detached houses, utterly faithful to the Unwin–Parker tradition, wear their years lightly. There is even a Radburn-style pedestrian layout, anticipating Radburn itself by two decades. It leads to the Werkstätte, long a People’s-Owned Enterprise, now restored to its original management. The market square, reminiscent of Margarethenhöhe – which, surely, Tressenow must have visited – manages to achieve what Unwin and Parker should have done at Letchworth and Hampstead, but unaccountably never did. It is an anomalous small gem.

It represents what could be called the left-wing side of the German garden-city movement; but there was always another side too, and over time it became more and more insistent. It stemmed from the fear of the giant city; it spoke of biological decline of the race in the great cities, and of the need to recolonize the declining countryside, especially on the borders of German settlement against Slav Europe. Already, ominously, in the middle of World War One, the word Lebensraum was in use; it entailed the removal of population that was harmful to the “national character”¹⁴³. In the 1920s, these themes were to become a potent element of Nazi thinking.

But that, still, was in the realm of intellectual speculation. In the real world, immediately after World War One, the reality was similar to that in Britain: a fear of revolution. And perhaps in Germany it had sounder foundation. In Frankfurt, as elsewhere, a Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council dominated politics for a year after the 1918 armistice. When the Social Democrats finally achieved power in the city, their strategy under Mayor Ludwig Landmann (1924–33) was to restore social peace through an implicit compact between capital and labor: a theme that was to recur in the creation of the Wohlfahrtsgesellschaft after World War Two. Frankfurt’s central business district was to be preserved and enhanced as Germany’s leading financial center; the banks of the Main were to be developed for high-technology industry. But, to satisfy the demands of labor, the city would also embark on an active housing policy.

Landmann attracted the architect-planner Ernst May, who had acquired a considerable reputation with his plans for the city of Breslau (Wrocław). Thanks to the far-sighted policies of Frankfurt’s famous prewar mayor, Franz Adickes, the city had acquired enormous landholdings, at rock-bottom agricultural prices, in the open countryside around.¹⁴⁴ Thus, on arrival in 1925, May had all he needed to evolve a startlingly innovative development plan.

May, like Sellier in Paris, was heavily influenced by the garden-city movement; he had worked with Unwin, in 1910, on both Letchworth and Hampstead; he maintained close contact with him. His original notion was a pure garden-city one, with new towns 20–30 kilometers (15–20 miles) distant, separated from the city by a wide green belt. It proved impossible to realize politically; May fell back on a compromise, the development of satellite cities (Trabantenstädte), separated from the city by only a narrow green belt, or “people’s park,” dependent on it for jobs and for all but immediate local shopping needs, and therefore linked to it by public transportation.¹⁴⁵ But these were to be developed by the city, as public housing; the comparison is with the British housing program after the 1919 Act (Chapter 3), not with the early British garden cities and garden suburbs.

In another important respect May broke away completely from Unwin, and indeed from the British tradition of the 1920s: his satellites were to be designed uncompromisingly as modern architecture, in the form of long terraces of flat-roofed houses with roof gardens, on which people could breakfast, sunbathe, raise plants. But that difference is skin-deep: in his insistence on single-family homes with gardens, carefully aligned in relation to the light of the sun, May proved an apt pupil of his master. Indeed, he took issue with Walter Gropius, his fellow-German member of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), at a 1929 meeting in Frankfurt: Gropius favored high-rise 10-story steel-frame construction, May low-rise three- and four-story prefabricated concrete and brick.¹⁴⁶

The entire program was not large: 15,000 houses, though it did constitute the great bulk of all housing built in the city in that period, 1925–33. May’s tenure would last only five years, but during that time his program, dubbed the “New Frankfurt,” rehoused over 10% of Frankfurt’s population, some 60,000 people in 15,000 units of housing and 14 new settlements. In all of Europe, only Berlin built more. And it was never completed as planned; the money ran out, and the community halls – an echo, perhaps, of Unwin – were never completed. The individual schemes, for all their fame then and subsequently, were minuscule, and many of them were disposed unmemorably on small plots around the city; only a few, strung out along the valley of the river Nidda northwest of the city, represent the classic satellites, and even these are surprisingly small: 1,441 dwellings at Praunheim, 1,220 at Römerstadt.¹⁴⁷ What made them memorable was the disposition of the houses in long rows alongside the river, the placing of schools and Kindergarten on the lower land, and the use of the valley as a natural green belt between the city and the ring of new settlements, in which are concentrated all kinds of uses: allotments, sports grounds, commercial garden plots, gardening schools for young people, even perhaps a fairground.¹⁴⁸ Here May worked with Max Bromme, who had sought to preserve the valley as parkland. The great central basin became the seat of recreation, sport, and outdoor education:

With its vast meadows, bounded by forests and terraced housing, sports facilities and vegetable gardens, the Nidda River Valley became the great leisure realm of the northwest settlement zone. Botanical and school gardens replaced formal gardens and new types of leisure facilities abounded: wading pools and sandboxes for the children, and swimming pools, gymnasia, sunning terraces, dressing rooms and copses scattered with hammocks for adults. Working-class families who could not afford the trip to the seaside now only had to look in their own backyard.¹⁴⁹

Römerstadt, largely completed in a single year (1928), was the quintessence in which May sought to recapture the idyll of Hampstead Garden Suburb, experienced in a two-year sojourn in Raymond Unwin’s Hampstead office (1910–11).¹⁵⁰ It had a low density, a predominance of single-family row houses (comprising over half the total 1,220 units), garden allotments for all, and a generous allowance for streets and pedestrian pathways. The original 1927 plan also had extensive community facilities: two schools, a day care center, shops, a cooperative store, a community center, a church, a guesthouse, a communal laundry, a theater, cable radio, and a youth clubhouse, most of which disappeared in cutbacks in 1928, but still left it the most complete and generously equipped among the Frankfurt settlements.¹⁵¹

Count Henry Kessler took the French sculptor Aristide Maillol on a tour of the Frankfurt Forest Stadium in June 1930; looking at the nude bodies he said, “A people really want to live in the sense of enjoying light, happiness, and the health of their bodies. It is not restricted to a small and exclusive circle, but is a mass movement which has stirred all of German youth.”¹⁵² And here lay the essence. One publicity picture (and there were many) shows a young couple enjoying open-air freedom on a roof garden of one of the new houses; she is the archetype of the “New Woman” with bobbed hair, loose clothing, and short skirt.¹⁵³ The Nidda Valley settlements, one might say, were designed for her and her sisters.

After the war, Frankfurt dealt brutally with its miniature masterpiece: two urban motorways now slice across the valley, one cuts Römerstadt in half, and the satellites are totally swallowed up in a much larger and completely amorphous satellite town called – with appropriate impersonality – Nordweststadt. But still, with the eye of imagination and the eye of faith, one can get a feeling for what it might have been, what it was, and what it still remarkably is. It is almost totally gentrified, with only 11% of the blue-collar workers for which it was designed; but it is beautifully maintained. After more than half a century the vegetation is mature, making of it the garden city that May imagined. In the summer sunlight the hard clean lines of the long cream-colored terraces are masked, almost submerged, by the trees and flowers; across the valley, the blue industrial haze achieves the serendipitous effect of making the city’s new high-rise townscape appear almost like a magical world.

What has vanished is the spirit. And that, now, is hard even to imagine. May differed on many things with the other great planner of the Weimar time, Berlin’s Martin Wagner; but both shared a belief in a new social partnership between capital and labor, and in a reintegration of working and living. This they also had in common with Howard and Unwin; but there was an absolutely crucial difference. The May–Wagner variant was a collective one, diverging sharply from the anarchist-cooperative sources of the Howard–Unwin tradition: in May’s own words, it aimed at “the collective ordering of the elements of living.”¹⁵⁴ For May, a well-planned residential environment could complement the pursuit of efficiency in the workplace, and – to quote May again – “The uniform box-shapes of the roof gardens symbolize the idea of collective living in a uniform style, like the similarly shaped honeycombs of the beehive, symbolizing the uniform living conditions of their inhabitants.”¹⁵⁵

It all sounds too perfectly like raw material for a Marxist PhD thesis: the capitalist state coopting the local state in a plot to secure the reproduction of the labor force. In any event, both Howard and Unwin would have hated it; no wonder, perhaps, that Unwin made himself thoroughly unpopular by holding out against modern architecture to the end. And no wonder either, perhaps, that after Frankfurt May went on to design model cities in the Soviet Union – none of which, ironically, were ever built as planned, for by then the spirit of Stalin had descended on the Soviet City.

But Wagner went significantly further – much further. Appointed Berlin City Planner in 1925, aged 30¹⁵⁶ and a leading Social Democratic intellectual figure, in April 1931 he resigned from the party, disillusioned by corruption over support for land speculation and privatization of public bodies. He wrote incessantly, editing 12 issues of Das Neue Berlin in 1929, and then contributing a two-volume unpublished book of the same title, in 1932.¹⁵⁷ In often very abstract German, he argued for a new collective style of architecture.¹⁵⁸ In 1929, he was demanding

the leadership with clear aims that can provide a comprehensive direction of all forces into a cosmopolitan tapestry. The director (Regisseur) of the world city of Berlin is lacking. The ordering, demanding dynastic will has died out. Today, the world city of Berlin is not governed by a single democracy but by a whole system of democracies that lack decisive and unified leadership.”¹⁵⁹

David Frisby, the chronicler of modernism, comments, “The post of director to which Wagner refers is, at the very least, ominously reminiscent of the charismatic leader.”¹⁶⁰

Later, in 1932, he had made a radical shift, calling for new urban areas for 50,000 people in Brandenburg, his “fifties.” He emphatically declared that these were not garden cities, at least architecturally:¹⁶¹ they were to be “ribbon cites (Bandstädte), new cities [built] in accord with the idea of the perfect machine.”¹⁶² He demanded a technocratic leader, free of politics, to make it happen:

Leader to the back! Leader to the front! Politicians and lawyers to the resting place, engineers to the front! This must happen and it will happen. … City planning is economic planning, and economic planning is only possible if we work with the machine but not against the machine.¹⁶³

These are to be organic communities set in the countryside. But, Frisby rather politely remarks, “The moral rhetoric directed at ‘the sin against the holy spirit of the machine’… and assertions (with reference to the new form of life in the new cities) that ‘the new form grows out of the organic’ are difficult to reconcile.”¹⁶⁴

He was dismissed by the Nazis in 1933 and emigrated, first to Istanbul and then, in 1937, to Harvard where he remained until his death in 1957.¹⁶⁵ There, he joined his fellow émigré Walter Gropius in promoting a modernist CIAM-based urbanism, playing a key part in shaping the postwar American landscape. In the process, from 1944 onward, “the city and its future became the subject of a simmering feud between Hudnut and Gropius, which finally escalated into a raging battle” from which Gropius and Wagner emerged victors, playing a key part in shaping the postwar American landscape.¹⁶⁶ Hudnut, however, had a strange posthumous revenge: in 1945 he coined the phrase “postmodern” to oppose the modernists’ obsession with technology, efficiency, economy, and social expediency and their neglect of individual needs, local customs, and the spiritual qualities of form.¹⁶⁷

Wagner, like May, was coordinating a major housing and planning program, albeit on a much larger scale. His big difference with May concerned the role, and thus the character and the location, of the new estates. Wagner did not believe at all in satellites; his ideal was the Siedlung – the concept and the term were first developed by the coal and iron barons of the Ruhrgebiet – wherein houses were grouped around a factory, but with no independent – or even semi-independent – existence from the rest of the city.¹⁶⁸ The ideal is Siemensstadt, developed by the giant electrical company around their complex of works in the northwest sector of the city between 1929 and 1931. It is a Grosssiedlung, a complex of housing areas, planned and executed on a lavish scale; every name in German architecture of the 1920s has his piece of it; it is a place of reverent pilgrimage, and pieces are being restored by the Federal government as historic monuments. The pilgrims arrive at the U-Bahn station, Siemensdamm, a busy urban boulevard just over 20 minutes from the center of West Berlin; this announces itself from the start as an urban development. Yet, a couple of minutes away, they are in another world: the masters – Scharoun, Bartning, Häring, Gropius, and others – have placed their four- and five-story apartment blocks in a huge garden, that – as with the two-story rows of Römerstadt – has grown over the decades so as to seem almost to envelop them.¹⁶⁹

The overwhelming impression, just as much in any English garden city, is that of peacefulness. Any sceptic from Britain or the United States, who believes that collective apartment schemes mean slum living, any indeed who believes that an apartment garden city is a contradiction in terms, should see Siemensstadt and think again. The reflections have to be these: first, uncompromisingly modern apartment blocks, so long as kept moderately low and strongly horizontal, can be as reposeful – that special Unwin–Parker quality – as uncompromisingly modern houses, or as traditional ones. Secondly, the quality of the surrounding garden space is crucial. And thirdly, maintenance is all: Siemensstadt works, as does Römerstadt, because it is in good heart.

The same goes, outstandingly, for the two other great developments of the Wagner years in Berlin: the Grosssiedlungen Onkel-Toms-Hütte (1926–7), at Zehlendorf in the southwest sector of the city, and Britz (1925–7), in the south. Both were developed by Gehag, the great housing agency formed in 1924 through the merger of several building societies with trade union funds and the Berlin Social Housing Society, which was responsible for so much publicly subsidized housing in Berlin at that time and in the Federal Republic after World War Two: a living illustration of the kind of agency Howard wanted to build his garden city, but never had on the scale needed.¹⁷⁰ (Ironically, its postwar successor was racked by scandal in the 1980s.) Both were and are pure garden suburbs, at the then-periphery of the city, developed on extensions of the U-Bahn system.

Onkel-Toms-Hütte, built between 1926 and 1931, calls itself a forest-settlement (Waldsiedlung) and indeed the first impression is of the huge canopy of tall trees that extends, with almost military uniformity, across the whole site. Under its cover are two- and three-story houses, the bulk of them by Bruno Taut and Hugo Häring, uncompromisingly in 1920s modern idiom, washed in pastel shades, developed in rows along long gently curving or shorter straight streets.¹⁷¹ Again – especially to those hardened by experience of British council estates – the astonishing feature is the level of upkeep: the houses, still owned by the housing association, convey the unreal impression that they are almost brand-new. Britz (1925–31), designed by Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner, is more formal: its two- and three-story terraces of houses are grouped around the celebrated Hufeneisensiedlung, where the four-story block wraps itself in a huge horseshoe round a lake.¹⁷² In the streets around, the houses – again impeccably maintained – show an unexpected counterpoint: Bruno Taut’s are respectably conservative, Martin Wagner’s Disneyland-fantastic. An underground station stands at each end of the settlement, which on its east side faces out on to the huge open space of the Köningsheide.

Both these developments are splendid; both, ironically, represent the very antithesis of the garden-city idea. It might be argued that May in Frankfurt, like Parker in Manchester, was dealing with a spatial scale different in kind from that of London, which provided Howard’s model urban problem; both were quintessentially medium-sized provincial cities, with between half and three-quarters of a million people, and so a satellite solution might seem more workable and more appropriate. But the same could hardly be said of the Greater Berlin of the mid-1920s, already – with some four million people – the second greatest single urban mass in Europe. The fact was that by this time, racked by lack of funds and by political realities, the planners of the Weimar Republic no longer thought that the self-containment of the garden city was worth fighting for.¹⁷³

Garden Cities in Far Places

What was astonishing about the garden-city movement was how easily it was exported from its homeland, but also how strangely it became transformed in the process.

The Japanese took it up as enthusiastically as any; railway companies built them around Tokyo and around Osaka in the 1910s and 1920s. The Japanese name, den-en toshi, suggests green paddy fields, quiet rural villages, and a beautiful breeze; these were to be oases of rural calm, appealing to people who had migrated from the countryside into a polluted industrial city. But of course they were pure commuter suburbs, without any social purpose: the profits went not to the community, but straight into the account books of the train companies.¹⁷⁴

Down in Australia, as in Britain, the movement was strongly associated with the idea of building “homes for heroes” after the 1914–18 war.¹⁷⁵ Colonel Light Gardens, in the southern Adelaide suburb of Mitcham – initially known (in 1917) as the Mitcham Garden Suburb but, in 1921, in deference to Charles Compton Reade’s wish to commemorate “the Pioneer Town Planner of South Australia,” renamed in honor of the first Surveyor-General of Adelaide, Colonel William Light¹⁷⁶ – would not have appealed to Howard as illustrating the correct principles of city growth; it was a pure tram-based garden suburb. It was administered by a Garden Suburb Commission comprising a sole Commissioner responsible to the Parliament, and having the powers both of a development corporation and of a municipality, a distinction that sets it apart from Letchworth and Hampstead, and anticipating the post-1945 UK new towns.¹⁷⁷ It was and is a remarkable piece of urban design, distinguished by very generous park space, from formal parks to neighborhood parks used for tennis clubs, by a hierarchy of streets designed to exclude through traffic, and by provision of community facilities.¹⁷⁸ It was the work of Charles Compton Reade (1880–1933), a New Zealander who as an Auckland journalist had unsuccessfully campaigned for garden cities in his homeland¹⁷⁹ and had then spent time in London as Assistant Secretary to the GCTPA before becoming Government Town Planner for South Australia, and who designed the new suburb as part of a comprehensive metropolitan plan.¹⁸⁰ But he was by all accounts a difficult and even tragic person: though “a man of delightful personality with a strong sense of humour and a rich fund of anecdotes,”¹⁸¹ a member of the South Australian Legislature said of him “When a visitor to your house calls your paintings oleographs, your silver spoons brass, and your dog a mongrel, he is hardly the man you would want to meet again.”¹⁸² In 1921, apparently frustrated by political battles to secure adequate planning legislation, he left Australia to become Government Town Planner in the Federated Malay States, but, after bureaucratic battles there and in Africa, he shot himself in a Johannesburg hotel.¹⁸³

Garden Cities for America

Across the Atlantic Ocean, too, the garden-city tradition never quite developed as Howard had hoped. It was not, however, for want of trying. During the 1920s, the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) not only acted as guardians of the sacred treasures; rather in the manner of a reforming church, they actually extended and purified the gospel, writing the holy texts that Howard might have delivered if appropriate disciples had been at his sleeve. But their god was a twin god, Howard–Geddes, and their creed embraced the planning of entire regions; so they deserve a goodly part of a chapter to themselves, which they will have in Chapter 5. Here, we need to talk of their contributions to the garden city without benefit of that context; difficult, illogical even, but necessary in the interests of coherence.

The architects in this small and distinguished group were Clarence Stein and Henry Wright. Their unique contribution to the garden city lay in the handling of traffic and pedestrian circulation through the so-called Radburn layout, which they developed for the garden city of the same name in 1928. But to appreciate it fully, they need to be related to another figure, oddly not associated with the RPAA group at all: Clarence Perry.

Perry was a very early example of a breed that was to become commoner, the sociologist-planner. He worked as a community planner for the New York-based Russell Sage Foundation from 1913 until his retirement in 1937. Even before this, he had become interested in a movement – clearly derivative from the approach of Jane Addams in Chicago – to develop local schools into community centers through the involvement of parents. He was also profoundly influenced by the writings of the American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley, who had stressed the importance of the “primary group,” “characterized by intimate face-to-face association and cooperation,” which he held to be “fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual” and which was especially important in the dense, highly fragmented life of the modern city.¹⁸⁴

That was a theme taken up by leaders of the settlement house movement, who had argued that the time had come for “a great renewal of confidence in the vitality of the neighborhood as a political and moral unit,” especially in those “Disorganized neighborhoods … which have lost their responsible leadership,” whereby “under-average mothers in relatively resourceless neighborhoods … can be trained and held to their task” and “the loss of productive power” could be corrected by “the vocational extension of our public school system.”¹⁸⁵ Socialization of the immigrant, and of the immigrant’s children, was clearly the object here.¹⁸⁶ But it was more than that; as a resident in the model garden suburb of Forest Hills Gardens, developed by the Russell Sage Foundation from 1911 – itself a railroad suburb, some 9 miles from Manhattan, where Grosvenor Atterbury’s plan is clearly derivative from Chicago’s Riverside and London’s Bedford Park – Perry learned just how much good design could contribute to the development of a neighborhood spirit.¹⁸⁷ It derives in spirit from Unwin and Parker’s quasi-Teutonic at Hampstead, and from the real thing at Margarethenhöhe and Hellerau; but it goes beyond any of them, to create a kitsch-like quality that anticipates Hollywood. Supreme irony: in true American fashion, Atterbury used prefabricated panels with embedded electrical wiring, which he then incorporated into experimental Tudor-style houses.¹⁸⁸ Yet, like all the best suburban dream environments before it, from Nash’s Blaise Hamlet onwards, the point is that it works: in the presence of this superb theatrical set, disbelief is immediately suspended.

But theater is put to serious purpose. Life in Forest Hills Gardens gave to Perry the concept of the neighborhood unit, which he first developed at a meeting of the American Sociological Association and the National Community Center Association in Washington, DC, on December 16, 1923, and subsequently developed in greater detail in his monograph of 1929 for the Regional Plan of New York, which was financed by Russell Sage and in which Perry played a principal role as a social planner.¹⁸⁹ Its size would be set by the catchment area of the local elementary school, and so would depend on population density; its central features would be this local school and an associated playground, reachable on foot within half a mile; local shops, which, by being placed at the corners of several neighborhoods, could be within a quarter-mile; and a central point or common place for the encouragement of community institutions:

The square itself will be an appropriate location for a flagpole, a memorial monument, a bandstand, or an ornamental fountain. In the common life of the neighborhood it will function as the place of local celebrations. Here, on Independence Day, the Flag will be raised, the Declaration of Independence will be recited, and the citizenry urged to patriotic deeds by eloquent orators.¹⁹⁰

The inspiration is unmistakable: it is a latter-day reinterpretation of Jane Addams’ desire to integrate the new immigrant, now become the immigrant’s American-born children, as they move out from the city slums to their new suburban homes.

The raison d’être then was socio-cultural; but, Perry already argued at the end of the 1920s, “the automobile menace” had made the definition of such neighborhood units imperative, proving thus “a blessing in disguise.”¹⁹¹ The arterial streets, wide enough to carry all through traffic, would thus provide logical boundaries; the internal street network would be designed to facilitate internal circulation but to discourage through traffic.¹⁹²

In the celebrated diagram in the 1929 report, one element only is missing: a clear indication of how, precisely, the unwanted traffic was to be kept out. Perry himself knew this to be the only real defect of the Forest Hills Gardens plan.¹⁹³ But already, a few miles nearer Manhattan along the same commuter rail line, Stein and Wright were tentatively showing the way. In 1924, Alexander Bing, a successful developer, had been inspired by Stein to launch the City Housing Corporation (CHC) in order to build an American garden city. As a first trial, from 1924 to 1928, they took Sunnyside Gardens, a still-undeveloped 77-acre inner-city site only 5 miles from Manhattan, planning it on the basis of big traffic-free superblocks to create vast interior garden spaces – albeit frustrated by the same kind of rigid restrictions against which Unwin had fought in England (and had overcome at Brentham).¹⁹⁴ Lewis Mumford, who was one of the first residents, long after testified to the quality of life, both physical and social, there;¹⁹⁵ but it was no garden city.

There was a strange contemporary echo far away in Tel-Aviv. There, in 1925, Patrick Geddes – to receive attention in Chapter 5 – who had been working for the Zionist Congress, accepted an invitation to produce a new plan for the city. There was a contradiction: Geddes was a devout believer in new towns, but the Zionist agenda stressed agricultural settlement and urban consolidation. But Geddes squared this circle by making the city into a garden: the major Jewish urban center in Palestine would be partially rural.¹⁹⁶ Geddes’s concept of the “home block” consists of groups of small residential blocks connected by short inner streets, organized around an inner open space reached by pedestrian alleys, 1.5 meters wide, and envisaged by Geddes as lanes covered with roses and vines. These passages, at the back of the private plots, allow the residents easy access to communal facilities located in the central open space.¹⁹⁷ Alas, as Tel-Aviv mushroomed from 40,000 people in 1925 to 180,000 at independence in 1947, his vision did not survive the vast urban development, the extensive demands for building land, and the speculative character of development.¹⁹⁸

Meanwhile, apprenticed in Sunnyside Gardens, Stein and Wright moved on to the real thing. In the borough of Fairlawn in New Jersey, 15 miles from Manhattan – a place with no zoning ordinance and no roads plan – the CHC bought 2 square miles, on which Stein and Wright planned three neighborhoods.¹⁹⁹ The trick was to take the Sunnyside superblock, release it from the rigid New York City grid, and combine it with cluster housing so that not merely through traffic, but all traffic, was excluded. As one of the consultants on the design put it, “we abolished the backyard and made it the front yard … we are building houses that have no backs, but have two fronts”²⁰⁰ – a feature Wright had noticed in Irish peasant houses.²⁰¹ But the main influence, interestingly, was Unwin: Bing had sent Stein and Wright to England in 1924 to study new towns and housing designs; they met Howard in Welwyn and Unwin at his home on Hampstead Heath, afterwards reflecting that the Letchworth plan “did not altogether work,”²⁰² but impressed by the urban design in Hampstead, which – in culs-de-sac like Reynolds Close off Hampstead Way – has minor elements of the Radburn layout; and in 1928, on a visit to Radburn, Unwin became deeply involved in its design.²⁰³

Years later, after World War Two, Arthur Ling in Coventry would return the compliment by designing the first British Radburn layout at Willenhall Wood.²⁰⁴ And here lay a tale: Gordon Stephenson, then editor of the Town Planning Review, who had studied city planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1930s when Stein was sometimes a visiting lecturer, published the projects of Stein, Wright, and associates in 1949–50 and then Stein’s book Toward New Towns for America in 1951. This had a direct influence on UK design, first in Stephenson’s own project in Wrexham and then in the New Towns. Stephenson appointed Stein as consultant for the Stevenage central business district in mid-1950, and this became the first pedestrianized New Town shopping center in Britain. Ling’s Willenhall Wood was designed from 1955, evoking public resistance because people wanted the “front door” to face the road where people arrived by car.²⁰⁵ Though there is no evidence of direct contact between Stein and Arthur Ling, Hugh Wilson, or Paul Ritter before the 1960s, British planners were much influenced by Ling’s Coventry schemes and by Wilson’s designs for Cumbernauld with its extensive pedestrian system, extending outside the town, which – as Kermit Parsons concludes – are “among the most successful and complete such facilities in existence anywhere, exceeded for the comprehensive, continuous pedestrian path system only by several of the Stockholm suburban communities planned from 1948 to 1973 …”²⁰⁶

There seems to be some kind of general law in planning history that the first time is the best. Certainly that was true of New Earswick and Letchworth; certainly it is so here. Radburn is the best Radburn layout. The hierarchical arrangement of roads – here used for the first time, though almost immediately copied by Parker at Wythenshawe – is very natural and easy. The houses, modest enough in themselves, cluster cozily alongside the short culs-de-sac from the distributor roads – a motif borrowed directly from Unwin and Parker at Hampstead and the later part of New Earswick, as Stein freely acknowledged;²⁰⁷ obscured by the rich New Jersey summer vegetation, they look almost as if they grow out of the ground. The central open space, with its serpentine pedestrian and bicycle paths diving under rusticated overbridges, has an informal naturalness. It looks and feels right.

The feeling was bought at a cost. Though a Radburn Association controlled and managed the space, the houses were sold, and – despite the hopes of social mix – by 1934 three in five family heads were at least middle executives; there were no blue-collar workers at all. Even worse, the realtors kept out Jews and blacks.²⁰⁸ From the start, the site was too small to allow for a proper green belt. The depression stopped further development, keeping the population pegged at 1,500: far too low to support the elaborate range of community programs and services originally envisaged. Even to maintain the communal part of the development, the Association depended on CHC and Carnegie grants. It proved difficult to attract industry; so, to keep up cash flow, the CHC was forced to abandon all hope of creating a true garden city, advertising it as a pure commuter suburb. Many owners were forced to sell; finally the CHC too, overwhelmed by land-carrying costs, went down in a sea of acrimony and legal actions.²⁰⁹ Finally, Stein reflected more than 20 years after, the Radburn experience showed that a private corporation had at best a gambler’s chance to build a new community.²¹⁰

And, of course, it was not and would never become a true garden city. Stein later wrote that “Radburn had to accept the role of a suburb.”²¹¹ But what Mumford called the “Radburn idea” provided the basis for virtually every American new town from then to 1980, including the green-belt towns, Reston and Columbia, the federal new communities of the 1960s and 1970s, and Californian “master-planned communities” like Irvine, Valencia, and Westlake Village.²¹²

There were, immediately, two other Radburns, on both of which Stein served as consultant: Chatham Village (1932) in Pittsburgh, a pioneer venture in low-rent housing only 2 miles from the Golden Triangle; and Baldwin Hills Village (1941) in Los Angeles. Both were financial successes. At Baldwin Hills, the planners significantly modified the layout, substituting collective vehicle courts for the culs-de-sac, and throwing some of the three linked central open spaces – vast enough, to be sure – into private enclosed space, thus saving maintenance costs.²¹³ But the shopping center and three childcare centers disappeared in budget cuts, and a second phase was never started; worst irony of all, though the project was at first racially integrated, after a decade many white families left complaining of problem families; in the 1970s a rescue group converted the development from rental housing to condominiums, banned children under 18, and – final ignominy – renamed it The Village Green.²¹⁴ Today, though Baldwin Hills still has an extraordinary physical quality, its nearness to a low-income public housing project gives unease to its predominantly older residents; after nightfall motor-bike patrols guard the estate, making mockery of the very qualities it was designed to protect.

The Stein-Wright Radburn cities are unquestionably the most important American contributions to the garden-city tradition. True, on strict criteria, like their European counterparts they fail to qualify; all three are now long since submerged in the general sprawl of suburbia, and to seek them out on the ground demands a good map and some degree of determination. But as garden suburbs, they mark perhaps the most significant advance in design beyond the standards set by Unwin and Parker. They are not, however, the only examples of new towns in America. Most of the others are one-off examples associated with particular initiatives, like the new town of Norris in Tennessee, developed as part of the Tennessee Valley Authority exercise in regional development, which will be briefly discussed in the appropriate place (Chapter 5). But the green-belt cities, developed by Rexford Guy Tugwell’s Resettlement Administration in the early years of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal (1935–8), deserve separate and special attention.

There are curious historical parallels between their origin and that of Howard’s idea: both were conceived in the depths of a major depression; in both, destitute ex-farm workers were crowded in poverty-stricken cities, which could offer them no work. By 1933, there was an embarrassing shanty town of the unemployed right in the heart of Washington. FDR’s original notion was a back-to-the-land movement; Tugwell, a Columbia University economist who had become one of the most innovative members of his brains trust, persuaded him that this path led nowhere.²¹⁵ His idea was “to go just outside centers of population, pick up cheap land, build a whole community, and entice people into them. Then go back into the cities and tear down whole slums and make parks of them.”²¹⁶ He used a threat of resignation to force Roosevelt, in April 1935, to create the Resettlement Administration, which neatly bracketed the land and the poverty problem; under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, this was given the power of eminent domain (compulsory purchase of land).²¹⁷

“Just outside the cities” was the critical phrase: intended essentially to be self-contained, the green-belt cities would also have to offer the possibility of commuting to the city, so a suburban fringe location was essential; this also represented the existing trend of population.²¹⁸ Tugwell hoped for 3,000 of them; but of the first list of 25, the program was allocated funds only to start eight; Congress whittled this to five, of which two (in New Jersey, and outside St Louis) were blocked by legal action. So the eventual program consisted of just three towns: Greenbelt, Maryland, outside Washington; Greenhills, Ohio, outside Cincinnati; and Greendale, Wisconsin, outside Milwaukee.²¹⁹ Persuaded out of a prejudice against architects, Tugwell – working at speed against a deadline – hired separate teams for each town: so Greenbelt and Greenhills have Radburn-style superblocks; Greendale also has a Radburn layout but without superblocks or major park areas – it has conventional streets and traditional architecture. But all have very low densities of between four and eight units per acre.²²⁰ And the largest of the three – Greenbelt, designed with advice from Stein and from fellow-RPAA architect Tracy Augur – is a classic adaptation of the Radburn layout: the houses, built in five superblocks forming a huge horseshoe around a central open space, all have direct pedestrian access to parks, shops, and community facilities.²²¹ The architecture is more uncompromisingly modern-movement than at Radburn, and the overall effect is curiously reminiscent of the best German schemes of the 1920s: an exclave of Frankfurt, or Berlin, in the middle of the Maryland countryside.

All too soon, the program was at an end. As a leading New Deal planner, Tugwell was an obvious target for conservative congressmen, the media, the building and real estate industries, and the banks, to whom the “Tugwelltowns” represented the start of a socialist takeover; they complained about “shifting people around from where they are to where Dr Tugwell thinks they ought to be.”²²² The United States Court of Appeals, in May 1936, held that the provisions of the 1935 Emergency Relief Appropriations Act were invalid; and, though the ruling applied only to the proposed town at Greenbrook, New Jersey, few doubted that this was the end of the road.²²³ Construction was virtually complete by mid-1938, when the three towns were transferred to the Federal Public Housing Agency; in the 1950s, they were sold off.²²⁴ At Greenbelt, by far the largest of the three, the original core of the development went to a cooperative housing association which has managed to maintain it intact; extensively (and expensively) rehabilitated with federal loan money between 1979 and 1983, it is now on the National Register of Historic Places. But the rest of the huge site has been cut through by major highways and developed piecemeal by different developers, with no continuity of style at all.²²⁵ And post-1945 urban dispersal has overwhelmed the entire notion of planned dispersal: Greenbelt, like its illustrious post-1945 successors – among them Reston, and Columbia, built nearby in Maryland a few years later, both built by private agencies but financed with federally guaranteed loans – are “deeply enmeshed in the ‘vast, formless sprawl’ of the regional new city.”²²⁶

In purely quantitative terms, therefore, the green-belt towns were almost a non-event: “providing an attractive environment for only 2,267 families can hardly be called that significant.”²²⁷ And, as experiments in planning, they were – like so much that FDR did – curiously circumspect: blacks were excluded; the rents, though moderate, excluded the poorest; unit costs were high; local jobs were lacking; public transportation links with the parent cities were often poor; the houses, parking areas, and shops are now all too small-scale to meet the needs of affluent Americans.²²⁸

They are less important, in fact, for what they did than for what they symbolized: complete federal control over development, bypassing local government altogether; thus complete discretion to Tugwell in choice of sites; compulsory purchase of the land; control over construction by the same agency; even, because the land was federal, no right to local authorities to levy property taxes. Doing what successive interwar British governments never dared do, they, in fact, provided a model for the postwar new towns.²²⁹ No wonder that almost everyone was against them.

History would repeat itself, when, in 1968 and 1970, Congress passed new towns legislation. The brainchild of Robert Weaver, chief administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency and then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and an economist with a long-time interest in comprehensive urban planning, who hailed the legislation as a victory for planning that would “eliminate the costly clutter of blindfold growth and blunderbuss expansion,” the Johnson administration gave financial assistance to private developers who built 13 new towns in various locations around the country. But, it soon emerged, everyone was against it: not only the business organizations that traditionally opposed all varieties of housing reform as a threat to free-market capitalism, but also big city mayors who resisted support for any form of suburbanization. By the time these interests had been sufficiently mollified, the Johnson Administration was entering its last days. Like so many other Great Society programs that foundered in the Nixon era, the new towns suffered when a Republican White House suffocated the program in bureaucracy and refused to provide the financial support authorized by Congress. “Simply put, the new towns perished in floods of red tape and red ink.”²³⁰ By the early 1980s, officials of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development concluded that the experiment had failed in all but one of them, and arranged for bankruptcy and foreclosure proceedings.²³¹

The green-belt towns provide, therefore, something of an exception in the first 40 years of the garden-city movement. Though private initiative built two true garden cities (Letchworth, Welwyn), and though sometimes municipalities built satellite towns (Wythenshawe, Römerstadt), nowhere else did government move in to produce the real thing. There is a slight irony in that it all happened in the United States, which is almost the last country anyone would expect it to happen. And there, it is hardly surprising that it failed.

New Towns for Britain: The State Takes Over

It is hardly surprising either that after World War Two Britain again seized the lead; or that, this time around, the state took control. But even then, it was touch and go. There was a Labour government, but one dominated by Fabian socialists, who believed in gradual change through municipal government (above all, the London County Council) and a working-class majority in Parliament and, thus, poured scorn on the “unpalatable dough” of Howard’s blueprint. They had long argued that “we have got to make the best of our existing cities, and proposals for building new ones are about as useful as would be arrangements for protection against visits from Mr Wells’s Martians.” In a similar vein, George Bernard Shaw had some years earlier dismissed attempts to form new communities in the countryside, compared with addressing urban problems directly, with the words “one to sit among the dandelions, the other to organise the docks.”²³²

On the other hand, the wartime coalition government nailed its flag to the private enterprise mast. Peter Malpass has shown that planning for postwar housing had begun as early as 1941, and that a detailed and ambitious policy was in place well before the end of the war. It provided that local authorities would play a major role in the transitional period, but that, in the longer run, the majority of new building would be left to the private sector, with the local authorities reverting to their prewar role concentrating on slum clearance and provision for the least well off.²³³ Labour fought this: already, in May 1942, Ernest Bevin proposed a National Housing Corporation, to provide mortgages at cheaper rates and to ensure that purchasers were given value for money, but he got nowhere. Both he and Clement Attlee had expressed “grave misgivings” about subsidy for private enterprise, which appeared in a White Paper. Abandoning this position, Malpass points out, was one of the most significant changes made to housing policy by the Labour government elected in July 1945.²³⁴ But the established Labour position was that the local authorities – Labour-controlled, of course – should do the job.

In Britain, Lewis Silkin, the incoming Labour minister, conscious of possible reluctance among colleagues to launch a new towns program, appointed a committee in October 1945 to tell him how they should be built. At its head he put Lord Reith, the ex-director of the BBC, an intense, driven man who had managed to offend almost everyone in British public life and who had, in consequence, become virtually unemployable. Osborn was a member; the others were L. J. Cadbury of Birmingham and Monica Felton of the LCC, both known new-town advocates.

Unsurprisingly, given this composition, within a mere three months the committee emerged with interim recommendations. It faced three possible mechanisms: local authorities, intermediate nonprofit organizations, for which Letchworth and Welwyn offered “ambivalent precedents,” and ordinary profit-seeking private developers. But there was a possible built-in bias, for the committee included only two private-sector members. Volume builders – like Taylor Woodrow, John Laing, and Wates – said they could take contracts to build new towns, and the financial institutions agreed. But, given the composition, the conclusions were predictable: new towns should be in the size range 20,000–60,000, just as the Town and Country Planning Association (which had now dropped garden cities from their name) had always said; they should generally be built by public corporations, one for each town, financed directly by the Exchequer. In certain cases, one or more local authorities might do the job; and, though housing associations probably lacked both legal authority and competence, specially constituted “authorised associations,” promoted for this specific purpose, would be appropriate. So the committee paid its lip service to Ebenezer Howard; but the public corporation was “our primary choice of agency.”²³⁵ Thus, ironically, at one stroke they resolved the perennial problem of how to fund the new towns but also destroyed the essence of Howard’s plan, which was to fund the creation of self-governing local welfare states. Top-down planning triumphed over bottom-up; Britain would have the shell of Howard’s garden-city vision without the substance.

Against all odds, the Reithian position won out. Osborn was not to be as old as Methuselah before the government started on new towns; he was 61 when, on August 1, 1946 (even before the Reith Committee’s final report was out), the New Towns Act received the royal assent; on November 11 the first, Stevenage, was already designated.²³⁶ Between then and 1950, the Labour government designated 13 new towns in Britain: eight for the London area, two for Scotland, two in northeast England, one in Wales and one in the English Midlands. That emphasis, again, underlines that in the 1940s as in the 1890s the core of the British urban problem was still seen to lie in London; though new towns were actively considered for Manchester, Liverpool, and a number of other cities, and though sites for Manchester at Mobberley and Congleton in Cheshire were seriously considered, both ran into objections.²³⁷

Four of the eight London new towns were in one county, Hertfordshire; and three of them form a group, running along the Great North Road and the parallel main railway line north of London. Stevenage, the first to be designated, was soon joined by Welwyn Garden City, which was given the dignity of a development corporation shared with next-door Hatfield, where there was an urgent need to tidy up some messy development around a big aircraft factory. And, though Letchworth remained fiercely independent, it forms effectively part of the group; so that here, uniquely, the student can see Howard’s vision of the Social City on the ground. Each garden city is surrounded by its own green belt, so that each appears as a separate urban community against a background of agricultural land. But all four are tied together by the modern equivalent of Howard’s inter-municipal railway: the electrified commuter line that also joins them to central London, and the motorway completed in the mid-1980s. Passing from one to another in a few minutes, you go from the roar of the motorway into a serene, green world; none of the new towns is any longer new, and the vegetation long ago lushly enveloped them, softening some of the over-simple lines of the budget-conscious housing. There are detailed quibbles in plenty, to be sure; but it looks and feels very much like that final chapter of To-Morrow.

It had, however, come about by a route of which Howard would probably have disapproved. In the land of its birth, the garden city was now nationalized and bureaucratized, as the coal mines and the railways were shortly to be. That is unsurprising, in a way; the Attlee government was committed to that particular variety of socialism; Reith, who was convinced that his BBC was God’s own design for broadcasting, could be relied on to repeat a similar prescription for new towns or indeed any other new institution. And there was wisdom in it too: if London’s persistent housing problem was as bad after half a century as Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan was just then saying, and if the evident mistakes of the interwar years were not to be repeated, then some very tough and resilient machinery must be provided, capable of rolling roughshod over local special interests if needs be. Almost immediately, the unholy row that broke out over the Stevenage designation was to underline that point; and later, after 1951, when the incoming Conservative government resisted further designations, the resulting strains and stresses caused them within a decade to reverse that decision.²³⁸

The Marxist commentators can of course again have their field day: once again, the capitalist state was managing the system to make it acceptable; new towns had become an essential part of that welfare-state management, designed to guarantee the reproduction of the skilled labor force for the high-technology industries that so enthusiastically moved there. Yet as usual, all this misses the rich complexity of the decision process. There was a new, fresh, radical Labour government, swept into power not by the machinations of the capitalist machine but by the votes of the armed forces. It was determined to make a fresh start. New towns were an important part of its ideology; Attlee himself had written in favor of the national planning of towns and countryside.²³⁹ The garden-city propaganda machine had swung into action, led by Osborn; and Osborn, unlike his erstwhile mentor, had campaigned for a quarter-century in favor of state new towns. Of course, they might all be mere puppets, agents of the system; but difficult, for anyone who knew him, thus to view Osborn.

What is certain is that in the process a great deal was gained and something was lost. The new towns were built, and, in the imperfect world of politics, that was something of a miracle: eight of them around London, almost as Abercrombie had prescribed, and roughly according to a timetable laid down. True, they were criticized at first, often by people who had no sympathy from the start: their architecture was boring; they had no urban feel; the people moving into them, deprived of the crowds of London and often suffering from belated building of shops and other services, suffered from “new town blues.” (This last was a distinct sociological curiosity; the phenomenon was discovered not in a new town at all, but in one of the LCC’s inadequately planned and hastily built satellite estates; yet the media either did not know or did not want to know the difference.) True, too, the new towns absorbed a mere 400,000, a fraction of the population growth in the belt around London in the 1950s and 1960s; Abercrombie’s sums had failed to allow for the baby boom.

All that said, the new towns were built as planned, according to the latter-day Reithian version of the Howard gospel; and, so far as anyone can judge, they did what their supporters always expected of them. Mark Clapson has shown that, contrary to some sociological interpretations, working-class households moved to them in search of better housing, and if they were given the housing they expected, they settled in quite happily; they did not, however, retreat behind lace curtains, but actively joined organizations. Thus, he concludes, “the grim diagnoses of suburban neurosis and new town blues … were misleading. The undoubted problems of moving on and settling in were, for the majority, overcome as newcomers sought to make a fresh life for themselves. They attempted to achieve a meaningful balance between home, wider family and the social and material opportunities offered by the suburban and new towns context.”²⁴⁰ When, in 1979, the Milton Keynes community television station announced as an April Fool joke that the entire new town would be ploughed into the ground, a viewer declared he would not go back to London: “Milton Keynes had given him a garden, something he’d never had before, and he was damned if he was going to give it up now.”²⁴¹ The new towns are still rather good places to work and to live, and the best thing that can be said about them is that half a century after the first of them were started, they are almost completely non-newsworthy: the media notice them only on the rare occasions when (like The Guardian in August 1986) they want to write about a place without problems.

The irony is that Milton Keynes and its American equivalent, Reston outside Washington, both planned during the 1960s, have proved so popular with their residents because of their low densities and suburban ethos. Yet their planners had very different intentions. They aimed for compact living clusters set in a tamed countryside of parks and open spaces, characterized by late-modern urban housing styles. In both places, popular tastes later led their managers to embrace traditional–vernacular models, complementing their countrified setting.²⁴²

There was yet a further irony. During a lecture tour of North America in the 1940s, Frederic Osborn confessed to his audience that he had “not realised the extent and high quality of your better-class residential developments”: “The pattern of living in these places, with the detached family home in well-planted surroundings, represents I am sure the ideal of a way of life held at heart by most Americans, as by nearly all English people.”²⁴³ That “ideal” had been at the heart of the appeal of both Reston and Milton Keynes.

Nor did the vision prove enduring in other places. Howard’s notion, “that the community should primarily grow from a collective sense of ownership of the garden city by its people. Physical planning and design would reflect this common ownership rather than be a substitute for it,”²⁴⁴ did not find traction. With a few notable examples, like Curitiba and Singapore, “The most telling feature of the Howard legacy is that a majority of the world’s city dwellers remain completely disinherited from it.”²⁴⁵ Eugenie Birch finds echoes of garden-city thinking in such diverse designs as Celebration, Florida, with its 4,700-acre green belt and 18-acre mixed-use downtown, replete with retail, civic, open-space, public-facility, and residential uses; or Tampines, Singapore, an 824-acre town with a population of about 180,000 that “shows the Howard influence,” despite its extremely high density, because it combines living, working, and other uses.²⁴⁶ But one senses that, aroused by a spiritual medium from the shades, Howard would fail to see much resemblance to his vision in either place.

And in the wider view, that vision is nowhere to be found: the shell is there, but not the substance. These are not anarchist self-governing commonwealths of free artisans; in them, the link is missing between industry and the land; the rich cooperative life, recapturing the traditions of the middle ages, is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it was a chimera from the start; perhaps, if all this ever was a faint hope, the realities of the late capitalist economy and the post-industrial society have finally dashed it. But in order to judge that better, it will be necessary to understand that there was yet a further and even more radical strand to this thinking, which requires another chapter to itself.