6
By 1901, Howard’s Garden City Association was being chaired by Ralph Neville KC, formerly MP for Liverpool Exchange. With the Cadbury family confirmed as significant supporters, a conference was held at Bournville.(1) George Bernard Shaw attended, and remained sceptical, particularly regarding the vague governance structures, but Howard now enjoyed immense influence. A second edition of his book appeared in 1902, by which point the Garden City Association had 1300 members, and no fewer than 101 Vice Presidents. In addition to Shaw and Neville, these included the Countess of Warwick, the Bishop of London, the various nonconformist house-builders (Cadbury, Rowntree and Lever), Cecil Harmsworth, HG Wells, Aneurin Williams, the book illustrator Walter Crane (a colleague of William Morris) and George Holyoake, one of the Rochdale pioneers from 50 years earlier.
Relatively few figures from the emerging Labour movement were to be found in the organisation, and the politics of the more notable members remained either erratic or decidedly centrist. The Countess of Warwick, for instance, had been the mistress of Edward VII in the 1890s, during which time her investments (in Tanganyika) were handled by Cecil Rhodes. She lived in Warwick Castle with her husband, the 5th Earl, a Conservative politician and one of the most senior freemasons in England, and yet she was also a member of Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation. Arthur Winnington-Ingram, Bishop of London, was noted both for his interest in social work in east London and his progressive views on housing. Regarding the latter, these were so advanced for the time that streets on the Hampstead Garden Suburb were named after him, including Bishops Avenue.(2) He adopted an extreme anti-German and jingoistic rhetoric after 1914. Both Harmsworth, from 1906, and Williams, from 1910 were Liberal MPs with Harmsworth also acting as Chairman of Associated Newspapers, the publishers of The Daily Mail.
The Garden City Association quickly registered as a company (the Garden City Pioneering Company Limited) and took premises at 77 Chancery Lane, London WC2. Negotiations began about buying a site at Chartley Castle, in Staffordshire, possibly selected because of a general proximity to Bournville. Here, 6.5 miles north-east of Stafford and adjoining a station on the Uttoxeter-Stafford railway, the land was level and theoretically could have been developed… except that it was difficult to see major employers locating there, and Howard’s scheme depended on the new city being self-sustaining in employment terms. Whilst the practicalities of this were mulled over, Herbert Warren, the company’s solicitor, heard that 3,822 acres of land between Baldock and Hitchin were becoming available for purchase. It was agreed that this was a better prospect, 34 miles from London, but not under metropolitan influence, and therefore a location where a new city could be built from scratch, where employers were more likely to relocate and where progressively minded people might move. The land was purchased, at a cost of £160,378, and a prospectus issued in September 1903 asking for a share issue of £300,000 (£125m today) to fund the project.
Looking at these figures, it is clear that Howard and his colleagues paid £41.96p per acre for the land they purchased in Letchworth. This is equal to a price today of £17,455 per acre at a time when average agricultural land per acre is reckoned to be worth £6,690(3). Clearly, this was an expensive acquisition, and could only have been thought worthwhile on the basis that most of the housing built in the scheme would be for private sale, and, toward the upper end of that market. It was also the case that this expenditure was only for a fragment of Howard’s plan – the land purchased was barely sufficient for Rurisville. Its surrounding settlements and their supporting array of facilities would clearly have to wait before they could be provided. Howard, who had never built anything, had grandiose ideas of what his garden cities should look like, and was given to comparing them to New York, remarking “…we may have finer buildings in London, but there is nowhere anything like such a succession of fine buildings…” In his mind Letchworth, as a prototype was intended to have both a “Fifth Avenue” (which Howard envisaged being 110 yards wide) and a “Central Park”. According to Charles Purdom, employed as a junior clerk by the Garden City Pioneering Company from its foundation, and later a major figure in UK town planning “…Howard was a good talker, but essentially simple-minded and fundamentally uneducated; his mind was that of an inventor… No invention is the work of a single mind, and that was true of Howard’s. He was, however, extremely sensitive about what he had done, and though in his book he quotes the names of three writers who, he says, had influenced him, he picked up ideas from many sources. He would not, however, discuss the matter, and inevitably changed the subject when it was referred to. The much-criticized term garden city was got from A. T. Stewart’s Long Island scheme of the same name, the beginnings of which Howard must have seen when in America, but he would not admit it…”
This is an interesting comparison. Alexander T Stewart, an Irish-American who opened the first department stores in New York in the 1840s, lived to become one of the richest men in the world. In his retirement, from 1868, he began planning “Garden City”, the building of which started in 1869 and continued slowly for many years. Whether or not Howard was actually aware of it is probably beside the point.(4) The key issue is that Stewart’s Garden City, which was spread across 7,000 acres and has today a population of only 22,000, was an ultra-low-density residential district in a country that had an abundance of space. Whether such a project should ever have become the template for major developments in a much smaller country with an existing population density that was quite high, doesn’t seem to have crossed Howard’s mind, nor those of his colleagues. For Howard, matters were clear. Once one of the new garden cities had been announced, people would simply stream out of their overcrowded abodes in London and gratefully take residence in the new environment, leaving behind them depopulated areas that could be pulled down and replaced by parks and open spaces.
The reality, however, of planning and laying out a completely new town in isolation from any adjoining settlements, proved significantly more difficult than Howard and his colleagues had anticipated. By 1904, the share issue had not been taken up and, if Letchworth was going to emerge out of the fields any time soon, a more conventional approach to development would have to be pursued. The Rowntrees, the Cadburys and Lever, who had built model villages themselves, at this point carefully and diplomatically excluded Howard from any day-to-day management of the scheme. Recognising, though, his talent for political and social networking, he was retained and paid £350 a year (approximately £140,000 today) to promote and get publicity for the garden city project. About this move Charles Purdom would state “…No one who knew him could regard Howard as a practical man, and it is a fact that he took an inconspicuous part in the task of building Letchworth and Welwyn; but it cannot be gainsaid that his garden city project was practicable in the highest degree. He had the vision, and presented it in explicit terms. He had no idea how the town he described was to be built, but he formulated its essential structure and economic basis, which was the creation of land values by converting rural into urban land…” The final sentence here, possibly unwittingly, reveals the logic behind the garden city plan: buy land cheaply in rural areas (rural land is, and always has been, cheaper than urban land), build pleasant houses in a pleasant setting and sell them to private buyers. In theory, the sales values, though marginally lower than in traditional towns and cities, would, because of the lower land value, produce enhanced profits for the developer. In basing the economies of his project on this, Howard and his colleagues were doing no more and no less than a great many private housing developers had always done (and still do). Where they differed was in presenting the public with the notion of a completely new town, with many embellishments, reserved for an elect, discerning population who no longer wished to live in traditional urban settings. The problem was, in Letchworth in 1904, given how much the land cost the company, and whether there were sufficient people willing to migrate to such a setting, it was both unlikely that the anticipated profits would accrue and uncertain if selling the completed homes would be a quick process.
The company appointed Richard Parker and Raymond Unwin as architects. Howard had met them when he addressed the Manchester Ruskin Society in November 1901. Unwin, from Rotherham, had heard Ruskin lecture at Oxford in the early 1880s, and via his political connections, (at one time he was Secretary of the Socialist League in Manchester) had also met William Morris, whose “arts and crafts” philosophy he admired and emulated. Unwin’s sister married Parker, who was from Chesterfield, making them brothers-in-law, and from 1902 they had been engaged in building New Earswick, a model village near York, for the Rowntrees.(5) A smaller scheme than Letchworth, this proceeded slowly with the properties being owned from very early on by the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust. But, like Letchworth, it had ambitions, albeit on a reduced scale: two fruit trees were provided for every home, there were allotments and a “folk hall” for social activities.(6) It fell to Unwin to convert Howard’s diagrams into a practical plan.
Doing this much was reasonably easy. Though Howard based his preferred densities and building dimensions on examples that had been extant since mediaeval times, his scheme proposed housing 30,000 people across 1,000 acres, which was low, but not unimaginable. The plan to build Letchworth as a gigantic cooperative failed early on – as would be the case today relatively few people wish to live in a self-managing cooperative. More to the point, it proved difficult to attract well-to-do house buyers to a new settlement that was in the earliest stages of construction, lacked many of the facilities of a traditional town, and required commuting to and from their place of work. This was despite the fact that a new station, Letchworth Garden City, was opened on the Hitchin-Cambridge line in 1903, to facilitate access to the area. Not surprisingly, the Garden City Pioneering Company soon adopted the approach that had worked at New Earswick: building traditional terraces of cottages for local workers, which, in this instance were placed, from 1911, under the management of the newly formed Howard Cottage Society.(7)
By then, Unwin had left to work, with Parker, on Hampstead Garden Suburb, taking over from Edwin Lutyens. Compared to Letchworth, this was – as a piece of architectural and master-planning work – a considerably easier project. Covering 243 acres, on what was then mainly countryside outside the London County Council boundaries in Golders Green, it consisted of Wylde’s Farm and adjoining agricultural land near where the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway (now the TfL Northern Line) opened a station in June 1907. The site had been purchased from Eton College by Dame Henrietta Barnett, wife of Canon Barnett of Toynbee Hall and the East End Dwellings Company, to provide 5,000 properties housing 13,000 people.(8) Barnett, who lived at Hampstead’s North End, a mile to the south-east of the Hampstead Garden Suburb site, was highly motivated and socially conscious, and disliked what she had seen of how typical middle-class-type housing arrived in an area once a railway station, or, as was likely then, a tram route, had been opened. Admiring settlements like Bedford Park and New Earswick, she set out to ensure that what was built once electric trains were running to and from Golders Green was a cut above what would probably happen there if nothing were done to prevent it.
The back-story to Hampstead Garden Suburb is actually quite revealing. In a way that makes one think they were channelling John Galsworthy’s A Man of Property, Eton College, the owners of the land, refused to deal with Barnett because she was a woman. This obstacle was duly surmounted by forming a committee to conduct the purchase, in which Barnett was joined by, among others, Lord Crewe, Earl Grey, Sir John Gorst, Sir Robert Hunter and the Bishop of London. The land itself was actually purchased by the London County Council – for £140,000, approximately ten times the price per acre paid in Letchworth – and vested in the ownership of the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust Limited.(9) To approve this somewhat unusual and not particularly straightforward arrangement, and to circumvent the local authority (Hendon Urban District Council, established 1894), the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust required, and got, its own Act of Parliament. This stated that its aims were to cater for all classes of people and all income groups, to provide housing built at a low density, to have wide, tree-lined roads, to replace boundary walls with hedges between houses, to give access to open space within the scheme (woods and public gardens) which would be free to all, and to have as little noise within the area as possible, with, in particular, the ringing of church bells prohibited.
The Trust, with Alfred Lyttelton MP as President and a membership that included Lever and the Cadburys, issued a share prospectus for £75,000 (considerably less than that required to get things moving in Letchworth) and commenced building in 1907. Due to its proximity to London and abundance of public transport links, this went well and, as set out in the Act of Parliament, some of the early properties were cottages available at a low rent. However, after 1919, rising construction costs meant that a limited company like the Trust could no longer afford to provide housing for “all classes of people and all income groups” and this part of their activities was quietly shelved. But it continued acquiring land and building and covered 800 acres by 1935. What emerged was a large, affluent, low-density suburb that had been set up with public funds, but, within which, the majority of the public who had funded it were unable to reside because of the expensive nature of the housing it provided.(10)
Barnett and her colleagues had persuaded the London County Council to acquire land outside its boundaries on the grounds that the opportunity arose to lay out and build a new garden city within easy reach of central London. They argued that they would develop something better than typical house-builder projects elsewhere. As an immediate precedent, they could point to the LCC cottage estate scheme in Lordship Lane, Tottenham (954 houses), construction of which started in 1904 and which, like Hampstead, was outside the LCC boundaries.
Looked at today, it is not clear how great a justification there was for their arguments. If one compares Hampstead Garden Suburb, with, say Eltham Park, some interesting points arise. The latter covered 334 acres (it was 37% larger than Hampstead Garden Suburb), was within the LCC area and required no public funds for land purchase. It was built from 1899 by Archibald Cameron Corbett, as his successor scheme to a similar development a few years earlier, where he built 3,200 houses, on agricultural land between Hither Green and Catford. Corbett paid £50,000 for his Eltham estate, far less than Howard or Barnett managed per acre, and it would appear on that basis alone that Eton College extracted a handsome profit from the sale of their holdings in Hampstead to the LCC. Corbett built rapidly, and completed his project far quicker than Letchworth or Hampstead Garden Suburb, and was assisted by the opening of Shooters Hill and Eltham Park stations, on the Lewisham-Dartford line, in 1908. Eltham Park contained a broad range of housing, from large stately properties for the well-to-do through to middle-class dwellings available at annual rentals of around £38 (14s per week then, approximately £284 per week now) with smaller terraced houses available for the working class at lower, weekly, rents in selected streets. With Howard, Barnett and the whole “Garden City” ideal, of course, the LCC were buying into a particular vision. And yet Corbett had a vision of his own too. His Hither Green-Catford scheme had been promoted as a “modern Hygeia”, encouraging healthy living and healthy minds.(11) Plots of land were set aside for shopping parades (with residential accommodation above), schools, churches and local parks. There were also back-land sites where businesses and local small-scale manufacturing could be accommodated. Public houses were, however, banned. Corbett, a Presbyterian and supporter of the temperance movement, ensured that anyone buying or leasing a property on one of his developments was precluded from selling alcohol. Thus, from a moral point of view, he emulated Howard and, like Howard, he had his own celebrity supporters. Charles Booth compared his development, which was popular with Methodists, to “…a new Garden of Eden, with young married people and no public houses…” in his Life and Labour of the People in London.(12)
The March 1907 LCC elections that followed the acquisition of the Hampstead site were a disappointment to many of those who had supported the Barnett proposal. The Municipal Reform (Conservative) candidates took control, defeating the Progressive (Liberal) group, in a neat local reversal of the sensational “Liberal landslide” result in the general election held a year earlier. If the intention had been to present the development of the LCC’s first garden city as a coup for progressive minded people, this failed at the ballot box. But, at central government level (and many of the Progressive members of the LCC 1904-1907 were elected MPs in 1906), matters were different. The government headed by Henry Campbell-Bannerman (and from 1908 by Herbert Asquith) appointed John Burns President of the Local Government Board and began implementing a programme of legislation to improve housing, planning and urban conditions generally. There were Royal Commissions into Registration of Title (1906), Land Transfer (1908) and Housing of the Industrial Population of Scotland, Rural and Urban (1912) and a new Housing Act (1909). Most importantly of all, there was a Housing and Town Planning Act (1909). This banned the continued construction of back-to-back housing, obliged local authorities to draw up development plans for their area and strengthened legal standards for the construction of new homes(13).
Burns also took a major role in promoting the House and Cottage Exhibition held at Gidea Park in March 1910. In some ways the pre-1914 apogee of the garden suburb/garden city phenomenon, this took place because of the ambitions of Liberal MP, Herbert Raphael, to develop 650 acres of land that he purchased near Romford in 1897. Inspired by the example of Hampstead Garden Suburb, and claiming that he wished to give working-class families the chance to enjoy a new home, he set up the Gidea Hall Development Company, and set aside 450 acres of his land for the building of a garden suburb. (The bulk of the remainder was designated for use as a golf course). Building started in 1909, as soon as Raphael had secured the provision of a new railway station at Gidea Park, on the main line into Liverpool Street from Chelmsford. The foundation stone for the first dwelling on what was now called the Romford Garden Suburb was laid by Burns on 20 July 1910. He was fulsome in his praise, proclaiming “…This is one of the most beautiful sites I have ever been associated with in twenty-five years’ connection with Housing and Town Planning – surroundings formerly enjoyed in splendid isolation by the few… When this estate is completed, you will have one of the lowest death rates in England and Wales. You will be the envy of Bournemouth… The object is to bring the Town into the Country and the Garden into the Town, to secure something more beautiful and more human than the majority of houses and streets erected in and around London during the past hundred years…”
Raphael, a man of artistic and literary interests (he was a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery) was keen to build something of lasting significance. Inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder, he held a development competition with architects from across the UK, including Parker and Unwin, vying to build the most attractive home in the “arts and crafts” style. Advice was sought from Thomas Hardy, Millicent Fawcett, Arnold Bennett and Sir Edward Poynter (President of the Royal Academy) about what made the perfect house and how the most up-to-date and modern types of homes could be provided. The scheme, containing 140 houses and cottages, was ready by early 1911. Development costs by that stage totalled £80,000 (£26.3m in 2020), which implied an average pre-sales value of £571 then (£188,000 now).(14) The likelihood of working-class families buying into this was slight, and it was clear that, whichever way you looked at it, this was a fairly upmarket and expensive development, accessible at best for the middle classes. What the Romford Garden Suburb showed was the extent to which Howard’s plans had been appropriated by housing developers and how much political support that had. The comments made by John Burns deserve some analysis. He would have known, for instance, that the density at Romford (and for that matter Hampstead and Letchworth) was very low, much lower, in fact, than the density on the first LCC cottage estate, built at Totterdown Fields, Tooting in 1901, when he was LCC representative for Battersea and Clapham. (Totterdown Fields had 1,244 houses on 38 acres).(15) Burns would also have been aware that – unlike Hampstead – no LCC funds were committed to the Romford Garden Suburb, and that the chances of a large amount of working-class housing being built there were low. Perhaps he was happy to support a political colleague, knew that in any event Romford Garden Suburb was more affordable than Hampstead Garden Suburb, and supported the ideals of quality design that Raphael embraced. But… even in 1910, schemes like this were never going to solve the UK’s dreadful housing problems.
In the meantime, Letchworth had been slowly taking shape. Howard was sufficiently confident to set up the Garden City Pioneer Company Limited in 1902. By 1906 Ewart Culpin had been appointed secretary of the Garden City Association and a year later had founded the International Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, actively cataloguing similar projects around the world and campaigning within the UK to raise the profile of Howard’s scheme. By August 1907, enough of Letchworth had been built for Howard to take a delegation from the World Esperanto Congress (held then in Cambridge) around the nascent city. Claims were made subsequently that Vladimir Lenin also visited that year, whilst he was in the UK for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party Congress. Originally planned for Copenhagen, this had to be hurriedly reconvened in London after pressure from the local police caused it to leave Denmark. Held between 13 May and 1 June 1907 at the Brotherhood Church, Southgate Road, it was attended by all the leading figures of the movement: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Maxim Gorky, Rosa Luxemburg and many others, all of whom dispersed after the daily sessions to addresses across the city where they stayed under pseudonyms. Lenin and many others at the Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, Bloomsbury, Trotsky in a kosher bakery in Brick Lane, Stalin at a working man’s hostel in Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel and Rosa Luxemburg at The Three Nuns Hotel, 11 Aldgate High Street.(16) The Brotherhood Church, with its Tolstoy associations, was an obvious choice as a meeting venue, and indeed, Lenin had even visited services there to experience the Christian-socialist teachings propounded from the pulpit. John Wallace, the minister, was an early resident at Letchworth and may even have met Lenin. But there is no proof that Lenin actually visited Letchworth. Russian archives contain copious material on every hour of every day in Lenin’s life, and his whereabouts in 1907 (and on his other London visits in 1908 and 1911) are recorded in great detail. There is no mention of him visiting Wallace, or Howard, in Letchworth. Allowing for travelling to and from the town and spending about 2-3 hours there, he would have been away from his colleagues for a minimum of 5 hours. It seems more likely that this claim is either a garbled misrepresentation of the contact between Wallace and Lenin, or a fond basking in the reflected glories of the Russian revolution, presumably before knowledge of the purges and the Ukrainian famine were widespread, by a group of UK figures who saw themselves as similarly progressive, and part of the same political fraternity as the Russian exiles.(17)
Slowly but surely, Letchworth grew. Although attempts to acquire and/or use land in the vicinity for agricultural production, so it could be self-sustaining in food production, were abandoned, and only a few employers moved there (WH Smith was one), Howard remained optimistic, commenting in 1910 “…There is a most interesting society at Letchworth. Life is in many ways like Colonial life, bright, joyous and friendly; largely free from class distinctions, and without much regard for the narrower conventionalities…” The allusion here to “Colonial life”, with its images of settlers occupying a conveniently empty land, is quite revealing, given Howard’s time in the US, and the similarities of his scheme to the earlier New Zealand project. His remark about “narrower conventionalities” is also telling and reflects the number of free-thinkers, vegetarians and those interested in pushing the boundaries of sexual freedom who were choosing to live there. Among those visiting Letchworth to give lectures in the community hall there pre-1914 were ED Morel, a prominent pacifist and anti-colonial campaigner, Bertrand Russell, Lloyd George and Ramsay MacDonald.
The truth was that Letchworth had more in common with US suburbs like Shaker Heights in Cleveland, Ohio and Pasadena, California, than it did with most contemporary UK housing schemes. The first of these was developed from 1911 by the Van Sweringen brothers who enforced a number of fussy standards and restrictions, including, for many years, barring African Americans as residents, to maintain what they saw as the integrity and desirability of their development. Built to an extremely low density, its population grew slowly, reaching 28,000 by 1950. The second, with which the architects Greene and Greene were involved from 1908, was a network of immense and hugely expensive bungalows (actually two storey buildings) built in American Arts and Crafts style on the outskirts of an existing US city. The residents of both would have been comfortable with the claims Howard made for Letchworth, and would have recognised his comments about colonial life. Culpin also visited the US at this time, where he spoke publicly about the desirability of building new low-density housing schemes as extensions of existing cities, rather than as isolated, stand-alone projects in their own right. This must have seemed, to Howard, a shift away from his vision toward something that Cameron Corbett and other “developers” would have more readily recognised. In this context it may be significant that Culpin had acquired, by studying in his spare time, qualifications in town planning and architecture, things that Howard conspicuously lacked. The fruits of Culpin’s travels (and studies) were contained in his 1913 book The Garden City Movement Up-To-Date, which, privately, Howard resented.
None of these internal conflicts, though, affected the way Howard was seen by influential and well-connected people in the UK. There was a growing audience for his views and, in 1913, he was awarded a Civil List pension of £70 a year, roughly equivalent to £23,000 a year in 2020.(18) His embrace by the highest levels of the establishment was their way, perhaps, of acknowledging the progress that had been made since housing forced its way onto the UK political agenda 70 years earlier. It also reflected who Howard tended to deal with when promoting his schemes, and who were the most natural supporters for them. Now in his early sixties, and uninvolved in the day-to-day management of Letchworth, he appointed Frederic Osborn as Secretary of the Howard Cottage Society in 1912. An autodidact, Osborn had left school at 15, and worked his way up from being an office boy to editing the Fabian Society magazine for its younger members. An admirer of HG Wells, and like Wells from south London, Osborn was active in the Independent Labour Party and first encountered Howard at a Fabian meeting. His appointment to the position in Letchworth would be the start of an involvement in housing and town planning, alongside Purdom, that would last until the 1960s.
That same year of 1912, Raymond Unwin published Nothing Gained by Overcrowding, which extrapolated a set of town planning and architectural theories from his work in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Proposing houses big enough to have gardens with vegetable plots where potatoes could be grown, he recommended a density of at most 12 per acre, almost a third of that deployed by the LCC on its cottage estate in Tooting. Chiming neatly with Howard’s views, it had even greater resonance, given Unwin’s standing as a qualified professional architect. Around the same time, Ruislip Manor Garden Village, covering 133 acres, showed yet again what Howard’s ideas meant in practice. Built from 1911, on land that became available when King’s College Cambridge decided to emulate Eton College and sell up, it eventually covered 5992 acres. A careful geometric plan of streets, arterial roads, houses and shops, it had its own railway station (Ruislip Manor, on the Metropolitan Railway) and working-class housing provided by the Ruislip Manor Cottage Society, with, in more select areas, large detached properties at only 3 per acre. This is how the house-building industry applied Howard’s ideas in practice and, like Hampstead Garden Suburb, Ruislip Manor took until the 1930s to complete.
With the bricks and mortar came a crop of late Victorian and Edwardian urban and suburban writers who explored the social hinterland that was being created. Some, such as Arthur Morrison and HG Wells, had been popular in the 1890s. Morrison was noted for realistic crime thrillers, including a series of stories about an amoral working-class detective Horace Dorrington set in the continuing squalor of east London. Wells for his part enjoyed enormous success with Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910) all of which celebrated the ascent and subsequent social mobility of lower middle-class figures. London also produced Edwin Pugh, who enjoyed immense popularity pre-1914 with works like A Street in Suburbia (1895) and a series of appreciations of Charles Dickens, whose cockney, lower-class, characters he echoed. At the other end of the social spectrum, John Galsworthy explored the immense wealth and privilege of the upper classes in The Forsyte Saga (from 1906), about a family who owed their social position to having been successful house-builders since the mid-nineteenth century. Outside London, C Allen Clarke, who was active in both the Independent Labour Party and the Social Democratic Federation, wrote novels set in Lancashire and Yorkshire, whilst Arnold Bennett in Anna of the Five Towns (1902) and Clayhanger (1910) portrayed the Potteries towns around Staffordshire and Stoke. Possibly the most interesting work from this time would be The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, written in 1910 by Irishman Robert Noonan (under the pseudonym Robert Tressell) which is about the antics of private house-builders and decorators, and the miserable conditions, poverty and job insecurity they inflict on their workforce in order to guarantee their profits. Noonan died in 1911 and his novel only appeared in April 1914, with much of its political material removed. For many years a difficult work to obtain, it became an immensely influential text in left-wing and trade unionist circles, virtually a samizdat publication, and was eventually credited with helping to win the 1945 election for Labour.
Long before that, though, a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, fired two shots at point blank range at a car carrying the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Archduchess Sophie, after it had taken a wrong turning in its official drive through Sarajevo on the morning of 28 June 1914. Both died. Five weeks later Austria-Hungary and Imperial Germany were formally engaged, after a series of declarations of war, in a massive and bloody conflict with Serbia, Imperial Russia, Belgium, France and the UK. Within each of these countries a huge disruption of the normal peacetime economy took place as production was redirected toward military requirements. In the UK, the substantial workforce that house-building required was either absorbed by the armed forces or built factories and barracks instead. As a result, very little new housing was completed for the next five years. Exceptions were made, though, for the wartime Ministry of Munitions who commissioned Raymond Unwin to design neat garden-city-type schemes at Gretna and Eastriggs in 1916-1917 to house the influx of employees needed for their factories in both locations. A larger version of these, the Progress Estate, was provided to accommodate the extra workers required by the Woolwich Arsenal. Containing 1,086 houses and 212 flats it took only 12 months to build and closely followed the specifications laid out by Unwin and Parker in their work at Letchworth and elsewhere.(19)
In Letchworth, John Buchan arrived, taking up residence there whilst working for Lord Beaverbrook as Director of Information, and using the town as the setting for his Richard Hannay novel Mr Standfast. Another arrival was Herbert Morrison, at that point Secretary of the London Labour Party, who was sent there to do civilian work, having declared himself a conscientious objector. Frederic Osborn, though, disappeared. Like Morrison a conscientious objector, he left to live quietly in London when conscription was introduced in early 1916. Here, supported by his wife he went to and from the British Museum Library, “studying the history of community projects” and succeeded in avoiding military service, or any other kind of service, for the remainder of the war. The fruits of his research appeared in 1918 when J M Dent published his book New Towns After the War. One suspects this was a “done deal” given that Dent’s printing and binding works was located in Letchworth, one of the few notable businesses to have done so. They published the enormously popular and influential Everyman Library, meaning that the appearance of Osborn’s book automatically placed him amongst the likes of Rousseau, Adam Smith, Conrad, GK Chesterton, Wordsworth, Sir Arthur Eddington, Tolstoy and many others. It isn’t clear what the sales figures were for New Towns After the War, but it proved an influential work. In it, Osborn very gently distanced himself from Howard, stating “… He used to see me off on my missionary tours with comforting words like these: ‘My dear boy, I hope you have a pleasant trip; but you are wasting your time. If you wait for the authorities to build new towns you will be older than Methuselah before they start. The only way to get anything done is to do it yourself.’ To the rest of us this was unacceptable advice. We had all taken minor parts in building the First Garden City founded by Howard at Letchworth. We considered that the practicability of building new towns had been shown — as indeed it had, beyond all cavil. We did not think another mere demonstration, another trial model, was necessary. We wanted the idea applied in all the regions of Britain as a national policy…”(20)Howard and Osborn remained close, though, despite this difference in approach and emphasis. The same was not true of Howard and Culpin, whom Howard outmanoeuvred at this time, replacing him as Secretary of the Garden City Association with Charles Purdom.(21)
For Osborn, it was simple. Instead of getting the great and good (and the very wealthy) to join together, profess lofty aims and build whatever they could whenever they could, he argued instead that the State should provide £500m (£92.5 bn in 2021, far more than is now spent on housing and equal to 10% of current government expenditure), which would be disbursed by loans covering up to 90% of the development cost of the 100 new towns he proposed, all of which would be developed on garden city principles, with the plans approved by “government experts”. When complete these would be transferred to local authorities. This approach was immediately supported by Herbert Morrison and a National Garden Cities Committee was set up in London with GDH Cole, Professor Patrick Abercrombie and Charles Purdom. Whilst it began the long, serious business of getting political support for such a radical departure from traditional government policy, Ebenezer Howard, and a group of his friends and supporters went for a long walk one Sunday in October 1918 and selected the site for their second garden city: Welwyn.
Notes
1. The event at Bourneville was actually co-chaired by Neville with Earl Grey, who would later be involved in the creation of Hampstead Garden Suburb. The programme for the Bournville event can be viewed at https://media.stridetreglown.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/17145250/Bournville-GCA-Conference-1901.pdf
2. Now the most select street of all, and much favoured by oligarchs.
3. See https://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/229130/302436-0
4. Stewart emigrated to the US from Lisburn, Antrim in 1818. He opened the largest retail premises in the world on Broadway in 1846, and later owned the Grand Union Hotel, the Metropolitan Hotel, the Globe Theater, and Niblo’s Garden, all well-known New York landmarks of the time. He sent aid to the people of Chicago in 1871 after the disastrous city fire, so Howard may have known of him for that reason.
5. New Earswick was built as a suburb of York and is just over 2 miles north of the city. At the time it was served by a station on the York-Market Weighton-Hull railway. However, this route closed in 1964.
6. Development was slow – only 175 houses had been built by 1915. Today the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust own and manage over 1,000 homes on the site.
7. Unwin was also involved with the Brentham Garden Suburb – known as the Pioneer Co-Partnership Suburb – which consisted of 680 houses built mainly between 1901 and 1915 though infill development continued through to the 1950s. The Howard Cottage Society still exists today as First Garden City Homes, having merged with Welwyn Garden City Housing Association in 2020.
8. Henrietta Barnett started her involvement in housing and philanthropic work as one of the women trained by Octavia Hill. On Wylde’s Farm, see: https://www.hgstrust.org/documents/hampstead-trust.pdf
9. See https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/2e073f30-263b-488a-92a1-66a7f5cf23d4 Only 243 acres were built on, 80 set aside to form an extension to Hampstead Heath. The land value therefore was £576 per acre (then) or £224,000 per acre (now) an astronomical sum for agricultural land.
10. In later years Unwin and Parker did the initial planning for Wythenshawe. Five miles south-west of Manchester, this was identified by Patrick Abercrombie in 1920 as an area where a garden city covering 2,500 acres could be laid out. Little of this was done, however, and, following boundary charges in 1931, most of the housing there took the form of traditional council estates built by Manchester Corporation.
11. Named after a proposed scheme in Ohio that was much remarked upon but never built.
12. Mention should also be made of the Sutton Garden Suburb, proposed from 1912 by Thomas Wall, of sausages and ice cream fame. Originally intended to provide 1,000 homes only 134 had been completed by 1915 when building stopped. Post-war the undeveloped land was sold off to local builders who abandoned attempts to develop it as a coherent whole. Wall’s company was acquired by Lever brothers in 1922.
13. Back-to-back housing meant sharing a communal wash-house and lavatories. As such it was similar to the early 1844 scheme built by the Society for Improving the Condition of the Working Classes in Lower Road, Pentonville. Despite the restrictions imposed by the 1909 Act, Leeds City Council continued building variations of the back-to-back house until 1937.
14. The increase in average income per person has been used to calculate these figures: what has become clear in recent years is that inflation in house prices has lifted property values far beyond where they ought to be had they remained linked to wage inflation, leading to real issues regarding the definition of “affordability”.
15. Totterdown had 32 houses per acre, and works well as a scheme. Raphael stipulated no more than 6 per acre. Port Sunlight was 8.
16. The Three Nuns Hotel was a large imposing tavern, restaurant and hotel directly adjoining Aldgate Station. Luxemburg’s account of her journey to find it indicates how little London had changed since the time of Dickens and underscores, despite 50 years of relative progress, why Ruskin, Morris and others wanted to escape Victorian/Edwardian cities: “I travelled through the endless stations of the Dark Underground and emerged both depressed and lost in a strange and wild part of the city. It’s dark and dirty here. A dim streetlight is flickering and is reflected in puddles and pools. (It’s been raining the whole day.) To the left and right in the darkness the brightly coloured restaurants and bars give off an eerie glow. Groups of drunken people stagger with wild noise and shouting down the middle of the street, newspaper boys are also shouting, flower girls on the street corners, looking frightfully ugly and even depraved.” Quoted at https://rosaluxemburgblog.wordpress.com/2012/05/13/on-this-day-13-may-1907/
17. On the claims made by Purdom and Osborn about Lenin see https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b01r9r3x The 1907 congress at the Brotherhood Church was a great triumph for the Bolsheviks, who emerged as the largest group within the Russian political movement in exile. Stalin kept a set of minutes of the event, in which he diligently recorded the names of those speaking and voting against Bolshevik candidates and resolutions. This can be viewed at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1907/06/20_2.htm
18. By way of contrast, WB Yeats was awarded £150 the same year.
19. The War Office sold the estate in 1925 to a subsidiary of the Royal Arsenal Co-Operative Society. Tenants were able to purchase their homes from 1967, and many did so. In 1980, the remainder of the tenanted properties passed into the ownership of Hyde Housing Association.
20. Recorded in the 1942 reprint of the same. See http://cashewnut.me.uk/WGCbooks/web-WGC-books-1942-1.php
21. A search of the Howard archive records almost nothing about Culpin at all. The only file available (D/EHo F24), and promisingly titled “Howard-Culpin correspondence” turns out to be about the organising of a banquet on 19 March 1912 to celebrate the publishing of Cecil Harmsworth’s A Man and his Book: The Triumph of the Garden City Idea. Held at the Holborn Restaurant, 129 Kingsway, this brought together Earl Grey, Lord Robert Cecil, Sir William Lever, Sir Ralph Neville and many other luminaries to celebrate Howard’s career. Culpin’s role appears to have been to arrange the seating plan.