Upon the publication in October 1898 of To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform by Ebenezer Howard, The Times accorded it the modest tribute of a short notice on its book review page. The reviewer was clearly interested, even entertained, as he put it; but equally clearly he placed the garden city in the category of visionary schemes which, however attractive, are impossible of realisation. ‘Mr. Howard’, he wrote, ‘is not content with half measures; like Sir Thomas More, he builds a Utopia — a charming “Garden City” of 32,000 people in the midst of a little territory, all owned, planned, built and generally directed by the community itself. The details of administration, taxation, etc., work out to perfection, and it is quite evident that if Mr. Howard could be made town clerk of such a city he would carry it on to everybody’s satisfaction. The only difficulty is to create it; but that is a small matter to Utopians.’1
When Howard returned to London in 1876 the country was entering ‘The Great Depression’. The phrase reveals the sense of shock and bewilderment on the part of contemporaries at the loss of that mid-Victorian stability which had seemed as secure as the monarchy itself. Not that they were unfamiliar with periodic fluctuations in the otherwise steady progress of the economy; but the depression of industrial profits and agricultural production, which lasted intermittently until nearly the end of the century, was of a different order. It was an outward symptom of a profound underlying change in the nature of British capitalism marking the onset of that long decline which, in the course of a century, was to reduce the once leading industrial and imperial nation to a second level power.
If he were to adopt Spence’s scheme of land reform, Howard was still left with the fundamental problem: how was he to implement it, not in some imaginary ideal country but here in England? Spence himself was no help for, as Howard pointed out, he had assumed that the people would by fiat dispossess the existing landowners and establish the system immediately throughout the country, which seemed to imply the revolutionary course that Howard had already rejected. He overcame this impediment, or rather circumvented it, by an imaginative adaptation of the idea of colonisation as planned migration. He first encountered the idea in J. S. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, which he probably read in the ‘People’s Edition’ published in 1880. There Mill argued the case for capital investment in British colonies overseas as a way of realising greater profits than could be attained in the mother country. To be effective, however, the process of colonisation must be planned, and Mill went on to commend suggestions as to how that might be done which had been put forward by Edward Gibbon Wakefield some forty years earlier. In particular, Wakefield argued that land usage in new colonies should be controlled so that each would develop with a balance of town and country, industry and agriculture. It was the marriage of town and country that Howard had already envisaged, but in far off lands.
At first Howard thought of using ’The Master Key’ as the title of his book and, like many an author before and since, he drafted a title page bearing his own name above a diagram illustrating the key and its functions. ‘I have ventured to call my book the Master Key’, he explained, ‘and my justification of this title may perhaps not unfittingly take the form of a diagram representing a key which is designed to open many locks and to thus reveal many modern treasures.’ This diagram and its accompanying text1 reveal more explicitly than any other surviving document the philosophy underlying the garden city and Howard’s mechanistic approach to its realisation.
Howard’s article for the Contemporary Review was effectively a summary of his book; if he added anything thereafter it was no more than an expansion or clarification of passages in a virtually complete manuscript. Indeed, the demands of his profession and the needs of the family can have left him little time for more than revision of that kind. Lizzie’s health was deteriorating and ‘sea air’ appears to have been the only prescription that afforded her any relief from a debility the precise cause of which was, it seems, never diagnosed. In the August of 1896 she and the younger children took lodgings in Southend and the house in London was shut; Howard probably moved in with his elderly parents who lived nearby. In a poignant letter, written before Lizzie returned home at the end of the month, he urged her to travel first class on the railway and arranged to meet her with a carriage at Liverpool Street station. He was engaged on a lengthy case at the Law Courts and had recently been appointed official reporter to the London County Council. ‘Besides that I have a back order on which I shall make a fiver. So I shall be able to take you when you have rested awhile for a really splendid holiday. I feel such joy in my solicitations for you all, I mean to be a really good house-band … [sic]’1 But the holiday together never materialised.
Howard was realistically aware that resolute and tireless effort would be required of him if his scheme for a garden city as a first step on the path to social reform were to become anything more than an ephemeral entertainment for reviewers. He had already revealed some talent as a lobbyist of individuals and small groups; now he had to mount a public campaign. That he could summon from within himself the energy to face such a challenge and, in little more than six months, succeed in gathering around him a body of influential people organised together in an association dedicated to the realisation of his ideals was an astonishing achievement. He approached his task in the manner of the great Puritan evangelists with whom he identified himself in spirit. Like them he was sustained by a deep inner conviction that the truth he proclaimed would be perceived because, he believed, it ‘touched life at every point’.
Shaw had good reason to be sceptical as to the capacity of many of those who had attached themselves to the garden city movement to undertake any activity requiring hard-headed realism, let alone one as massive as the building of a new city. ‘You are surrounded by enthusiastic sectaries and party politicians’, he warned Neville, ‘who will want … to achieve the end of their own sects and societies and parties whether that end be Socialism, Co-operation, Teetotalism, Social Option, Single Tax, or some form of religion.’ By the time Howard’s book was reissued in a revised edition towards the end of 1902 the Garden City Association had gathered a membership of over 1300 of whom no less than 101 were listed as Vice-Presidents. (There was as yet no President.) The list was headed by Frances, Countess of Warwick, whose recent conversion to socialism under the influence of Robert Blatchford had hardly served to obscure the notoriety she had acquired by her association with Edward VII and the Marlborough House set in her younger days. There followed two Peers, three Bishops including the Bishop of London, several other clergy of various denominations, 23 members of parliament, a scatter of academics of whom Alfred Marshall was the most distinguished, and half a dozen industrialists, notably George Cadbury, Joseph Rowntree and W. H. Lever, the soap manufacturer of Port Sunlight.
The first public event after the formation of the Company was the formal opening of the Letchworth estate on 9 October 1903, when over a thousand guests were entertained to luncheon in a marquee to hear speeches by Earl Grey and members of the Board. (A special train was commissioned to take them from London to a temporary station erected by the Great Northern Railway in anticipation of future business.)1 Howard had prepared a speech but was not called to present it, an omission he attributed to the fact that the programme had to be curtailed because of bad weather. But the chief purpose of the meeting was to publicise the Company’s recent share issue, and his fellow Directors may well have decided that Howard’s emphasis on investment in Garden City as an act of philanthropy was hardly likely to advance it. Had he spoken he would have tried, rather artlessly perhaps, to emphasise the material advantages a move to the new city would offer to employers. He had clearly been pricked by his colleagues’ criticism. ‘Yes, at the risk of being thought impractical, I say that the first and the greatest advantage we can offer is the securing — so far as environment can secure it — the health and happiness of the people of Garden City.What an asset that will be for all employers and organisers of labour….’2
Housing reform, though by no means the primary objective of Howard’s garden city, was nevertheless an integral part of his broader scheme of social and economic reform; and he was well aware that the success of the whole enterprise would be judged by the outside world, no less than by the inhabitants, by the quality of its housing rather than any other criterion. Essentially, the prescription he offered the consultant architects was made up of the concept of the ward, or neighbourhood, and a guideline as regards housing density. Howard’s average building plot with a frontage of 20 feet and a depth of 130 was, however, by no means generous especially since he assumed that the house would have to accommodate a family of five or six. The population density per residential acre that this implied would be regarded as fairly high by present day standards; and indeed, if Howard’s minimum plot of 16 feet by 125 were to be adopted, the one hundred and twenty-five persons per acre so provided for might well regard themselves as overcrowded.‘ As Lewis Mumford has pointed out, Howard’s proposals with regard to housing density were on the conservative side; he seems to have adopted uncritically traditional dimensions handed down from mediaeval times.’
With its tiny population dispersed over a considerable area, the garden city in its early years must indeed have looked not unlike a community of Middle Western homesteaders such as Howard had encountered in Nebraska. By the end of 1905 the resident population was less than two thousand and, although it expanded steadily year by year, at the outbreak of war it was still under nine thousand. The likeness Howard had in mind, however, was not primarily environmental but social, and more particularly one of attitude of mind. The early residents, said Purdom, who was one of the first, ‘were, for the most part, the enthusiasts who had been looking forward for years to the founding of the town. They came to it in a spirit of adventure, they discovered it as though it were a new land. That they were not lacking in enterprise is evident from the risk they took in becoming pioneers. They did truly look upon the land with an eye of faith, and it was no wonder that, coming to build their homes under such novel conditions, they should expect to see arise not merely a new city but a new civilisation. They hoped to revise all, or nearly all, social institutions; they discussed, as middle-class people will discuss, the reform of religion, art, and social polity, and the application of what they call the best modern knowledge to education and all the affairs of life. They left nothing alone.’1
Raymond Unwin’s departure from Letchworth to design Hampstead Garden Suburb symbolised the submergence of Howard’s dream of ‘real reform’ under a welter of housing improvement schemes that happily annexed the phrase he had coined whilst jettisoning its substance. Whether or not Unwin was himself an apostate has been a matter of debate;’ certainly his action and the prestige Hampstead was to bring to the idea of the garden suburb helped to obscure for nearly two decades the true character of a garden city. Not that Unwin initiated the process: its origins can be traced back at least to Port Sunlight and to Bourneville both of which were built before Howard’s book was published. And the accession of both Lever and Cadbury to the Garden Cities Association emphasises the fact that there were from the beginning powerful protagonists of the idea of ameliorating the condition of the masses by housing them better, within the garden city movement itself.
Both Purdom and Osborn were born into the same social stratum as that of Howard himself — the lower middle class with Nonconformist affiliations — and each in his different way eventually abandoned the sectarian Christianity of his youth. Both, too, were born in south London where Howard had spent much of his adult life, though as boys in their early ‘teens when To-morrow was published they were too young to have met him or even know of his ideas. Purdom, whose family was somewhat the more affluent, had a better education than Osborn, who left his London Board school at fifteen. Later, when they worked together at Letchworth, Osborn profited from Purdom’s guidance in his assiduous efforts to overcome the limitations of his schooling; and it was Purdom, as much if not more than Howard, who taught Osborn the real meaning of the garden city as a socioeconomic idea. The association of these two men, both then in their thirties, was to have a decisive effect on the course of events within the garden city movement in the second decade of the twentieth century. And the subsequent breach between them may well have affected the future of that movement no less importantly.
One Sunday in the early October of 1918 the New Townsmen went for a country walk, at Howard’s suggestion. W. G. Taylor did not join the party, but Howard was no doubt quite happy to have only Purdom and Osborn for it was them, the dedicated campaigners, that he intended to influence. They met at Hatfield station on the Great Northern Railway from King’s Cross to Edinburgh. It was a line they regularly travelled on their ways to and from Letchworth which lay some twelve miles to the north; and they had often admired the rich, rolling countryside from the vantage point of the magnificent viaduct built by Lewis Cubitt over the Digswell Valley leading up to the village of Welwyn on the Great North Road. But Howard saw it rather differently, for he had already marked it out as the site of the second garden city. To the south lay Hatfield House and Park, the seat of the Earls of Salisbury, and the ground they walked as they headed north from Hatfield towards Welwyn formed part of the estate of the 4th Marquis who, as it so happened, was President of the Garden Cities Association. At a point mid-way between Hatfield and Welwyn an open stretch of land sloped gently down to the river Lea.
When he founded the Second Garden City Company, Howard’s career as a shorthand writer had effectively come to an end; his main source of income thereafter was his fees as a Director of the Company and its successor. The sums he received were hardly generous — no more than £300 in the first year1 — but with his Civil List pension and occasional lecture fees his standard of living, though modest, was as high as he had known for most of his adult life. Towards the end of 1920 he gave up his bachelor apartment at Homesgarth and set up house again with his wife at Welwyn. They occupied one of a group of fifty houses built by a public utility company formed by the Welwyn Garden City Company to take advantage of the Housing Act of 1919. The houses were intended for working men employed by the company and were let at subsidised rents which, for a man with a family, could be as low as 2s. 6d. a week. After two or three years there Howard moved again, and for the last time, into rather more spacious accommodation at number 5 Guessens Road in the town centre. This improvement in his domestic circumstances was made possible only by the generosity of an old friend, a wealthy businessman who had been chairman of the Board of Directors of the Spirella corset factory at Letchworth and had shared Howard’s apartment there for a few months during the war.2
