The Garden City Movement

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The Garden City Movement
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• What were the principles on which The Garden City
  Movement were founded?
• To what extent did those principles become
  applied in practice?
• In what ways was the Garden City Movement
  formative?

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Ebenezer Howard 1850 - 1928

• Son of trades people
• Was quite well educated
• Expected to become a rural worker
• Became a shorthand writer for parliament
• Travelled to America Nebraska and Chicago

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What provoked Howards ideas?

• Rapid unplanned urban growth
• Anti Urbanism
• Improve living conditions for the working class
• George Cadbury
• Lord Leverhulme
• Joseph Rowntree
• Land ownership
• Create a city that provides the people within the
  city with what they need

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The Garden City Proposal

• 6000 acres
• 5000 for agriculture and 2000 people
• 1000 in the city for 30,000 people
• Low rent on land - Agricultural
• Dividends on the land would be paid out
• Create a place that combines city life and rural
  life
• Eliminate slums

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• His garden cities were envisaged with much
  higher residential densities than the kind of
  urban expansion along traffic routes that became
  known as suburban sprawl. They were conceived
  as a cluster, separated by a green belt, around a
  central city providing those facilities that
  individual towns could not supply, in a
  poly-nucleated settlement pattern of city
  regions.
• Ward, C. (1993) New Town, Home Town, the lessons
  of experience, London Calouste Gulbenkian
  Foundation

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Garden City Association

• Founded by Ebenezer Howard 1899
• Alfred Russell Wallace
• Ralph Neville
• George Cadbury
• Lord Leverhulme
• He wanted to push forward his Garden City Idea
• Is now the Town and Country Planning Association

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Unwin and Parker

• Employed as architects because no action was
  being taken
• Commissioned to prepare a plan of Letchworth
  based on their interpretation of Howards Proposals

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Letchworth

• Low population
• 1905 population was 1400
• 1907 population was 2800
• 1908 population was 5600
• Slow growth until munitions factory was built
  there in 1914
• Means the housing increases in value

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Did Letchworth follow Howards proposals?

• 3800 acres
• Less green space
• Industry was on the outskirts
• Not part of a network but still a start
• The British towns of the postwar period
  incorporated some garden city features but were
  nevertheless far removed from Howards original
  proposals
• Ward, S.V (1992) 1st ed. The Garden City, Past,
  Present and future. London Chapman and Hall.

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• There was never a network created
• 1917 manifesto written by the Garden Cities
  Association to get 100 more garden cities built
• 1918 Howard brought his own land and appointed
  Louis de Soissons to create the plan Welwyn

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The Barnetts

• Canon Leonard and Henrietta Barnett
• Saw the evils of poverty
• Garden suburbs were a result of the Garden City
  Movement
• Hampstead garden Suburb 1906
• Unwin and Parker were appointed architects.
• Suburbs werent seen to solve unemployment
  problems there for was a betrayal of the garden
  city ideal

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Unwin and Parker.

• Cul-de-sacs
• Revived cottage style
• architecture
• Wanted to encourage
• a sense of community

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Satellite Towns

• Residential areas without obvious local
  employment
• Based around garden city proposals
• Helped with the suburbanization of London
• Unwins housing work for the Ministry of Health
  who was still reinforcing the idea of the garden
  suburb
• Unwin was appointed chief advisor to the Greater
  London Regional planning committee

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Satellite towns

• To be developed within a 12 mile radius of London
• Helped with decentralization
• Socially and economically self contained towns
• Influenced by Howards theories

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Ideas maintained today.

• Low density housing
• Cheaper due to lower road costs and sewer system
  costs
• Block planning instead of street planning
• Combining urban and rural housing

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Summary

• Ebenezer Howard proposes a new garden city to
  improve living conditions for the working class.
• Unwin and Parker are appointed architects.
• Letchworth and Welwyn were built
• didnt match the original proposal but were
  inspired by it
• The Barnetts created the Garden Suburb.
• This lead to the development of Satellite towns.

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References

• Beevers, Robert, (1988) The garden city utopia
  a critical biography of Ebenezer Howard London
  Macmillan
• Ward, S.V (1992) 1st ed. The Garden City, Past,
  Present and future. London Chapman and Hall.
• Ward, C. (1993) New Town, Home Town, the lessons
  of experience, London Calouste Gulbenkian
  Foundation
• Suburbs Or Satellite Towns The British Medical
  Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3417 (Jul. 3, 1926), pp.
  27-28
• www.lgc.amolad.net/heritage/index-3.htm
• www.geog.ed.ac.uk/homes/tslater/Anit-Urbanism.pdf