The Time Traveller’s Guide to Letchworth Garden City
Jane Francesca Fae
1
1894. A solitary traveller drives a cart slowly up the Icknield Way past fields now harvested and
empty. The late autumn sun is doing its best: but the air is chill, and last night's rains have called out
the mud, cloying mud, so characteristic of this place. He stops, a little east of Wilbury Hill: unloads a
strange contraption, all cogs and levers. Then, one last check to make sure he is not observed, he
settles in and, with the dying of the day, vanishes.
Oh? Did you imagine that Traveller, whose exploits are so meticulously chronicled by Herbert
George Wells, would risk his Time Machine to the prying eyes of his Richmond neighbours? No.
Twas here in the emptiness before Letchworth was Letchworth that he made his first tentative
voyages. Back into the primeval ooze and mud. Then forward and forward again to the nightmare of
eloi and morlock: the vegan, effete, outwardly privileged class, subject to nasty, brutish, cannibal
inhabitants of a dark underworld.
A gentler touch on the levers might have provided less drama, greater insight. For scarce ten years
into his future the empty fields are suddenly awash with pioneers of a very different sort, building
their very own utopia. The turn of the 19th century was full of contrasts: change and optimism and
danger in equal measure. The Empire was at the height of its power: Victoria, whose name had
become synonymous with British dominion of the globe had occupied the throne for almost 70 years.
That assertiveness persisted into the 20th century. Truly it was “grand to be an Englishman in 1910.
King Edward's on the throne: it's the age of Men”.1
Grand indeed for the wealthy and the rapidly expanding middle classes, grown sophisticated and
complacent on the back of great wealth. On the political stage, the Conservative party reigned
supreme. Overwhelming victory in 1900 provided seemingly unassailable parliamentary dominance.
1
The Life I Lead, composed by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, 1964
2
Socialism, in the form of a fledgling Labour party was taking its first uncertain steps into parliament.
Outside was division and growling resentment: Irish Nationalism, anarchist bombs; an increasingly
militant campaign for women's suffrage.
Then, unexpectedly, one of the great reverses of the 20th century. The Conservatives split – over free
trade! – and the Liberals swept to power: the great Liberal landslide of 1906 heralded an era of
progressive possibility.
Yet there was great poverty too: some feared popular unrest; others - philanthropists such as
Ebenezer Howard – believed it should be tackled because that was the right thing to do. For life in
the slums and tenements of our big cities was ever more unbearable. Not just the poverty, the
insanitary conditions and the sheer oppressiveness of life, but the precariousness of it. One slip – an
accident, a job lost, a family member suddenly unable to work – and an entire family could all too
quickly be on the way down.
Wells knew all about precarity, was a fully paid-up member of the “precariat”, that class of people
who lived life on a knife edge. His father edged a modest living as shopkeeper and cricketer, not
especially successful at either. When accident ended the latter career, H G took up an apprenticeship.
For a while, he learnt or rather failed to learn about drapery: though 13 hour days and sharing a dorm
with other apprentices taught him much about hardship and the unequal distribution of wealth,
lessons he later used in his writing.2
Economic necessity also split his family: forced to take up a job as a lady's maid, his mother was not
allowed living space for her husband and children. It was a story that Howard would have
2
Kipps, H G Wells, 1905 and The Wheels of Chance, H G Wells, 1895
3
understood well: for while he later gained a position of some responsibility, as the son of a baker, he
too came from relatively precarious origins. Looking for solutions to the plight of the urban poor and
influenced by utopian writers, Howard published To-morrow: A peaceful path to Real Reform in
1898. This was to be a key milestone on the road to Letchworth and beyond.
Howard is frequently misrepresented as an advocate for improving the lot of the poor through
enlightened town planning and little else. Certainly, mindful of 19th century experiments with Village
Associations, he wrote of laying out a Garden City so that “as it grows, the free gifts of Nature fresh air, sunlight, breathing room and playing room - shall be still retained in all needed
abundance".3 This, though, was privileged ideal, available only for the few: the countryside as
romantic retreat from town. Howard went well beyond this.
He argued for dispersal of population to satellite towns, located within agricultural areas not merely
as aesthetic ideal, but to foment town-country interdependence. “Nonsense!” riposted Wells,
believing the rise of the car would make commuting desirable.4 Howard was adamant that residents
should have access to good affordable accommodation. The late 19th century was littered with wellmeaning projects by equally well-meaning philanthropists. Thus, London's first council housing at
Boundary St saw negligible take-up from the slum-dwellers it was designed for, because no-one
actually asked potential residents what they needed.5 Above all, the land must be held in perpetuity
in trust for the residents: the increase in value of land held on behalf of the community – the
landlords' profits - would feed back into that community through a mechanism known as the raterent.
3
Garden Cities of To-morrow, E Howard, 1902
Utopianisms, H G Wells, Daily Mail, 18 March 1905
5
The Victorian Slum – 1890's, BBC TV, 2016
4
4
This focus on land value, obscure today, was then well understood. Today, the towering political
thinker of the 19th century was Karl Marx, who, situating society's problems in the exploitation of
labour, proposed socialism as remedy. Largely forgotten today, but equally influential - perhaps
more - was Henry George, who believed that the real problem was the exploitation of land: that the
root causes of inequality lay in the unearned profits gained by landlords through the increase in land
values – and that the solution lay in redistributing the economic value derived from land equally to
all members of society.6
This was a theme close to the heart of the Liberal Party. Their key policy of Site Value Rating was
echoed by their battle hymn The Land, in its day every bit as important and well known as the Red
Flag.
Why should we be beggars
With the ballot in our hand?
God gave the land to the people.
Chorus from the Land Song, 1887
In the “peoples' budget” of 1909, Chancellor Lloyd George sought to tax the unearned incremental
value of land.
Howard and Wells had much in common, including shared membership of the socialist Fabian
society. Both drew heavily on Henry George's economic treatise, Progress and Poverty.8 Wells later
cited Henry George approvingly, predicting that Land Value Taxation would become a fundamental
cornerstone of a saner future world system.9 Yet differences were already emerging. Wells, the
6
An Introduction to Georgist Philosophy & Activity, Council of Georgist Organizations http://www.cgocouncil.org/cwho.html
7 The Liberal “Land” song, Uncredited, 1887 http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/the-land-song/
8
Urban Land Rent: Singapore as a Property State, A Haila, Wiley, 2015
9
The Shape of Things to Come, H G Wells, 1933
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theoretician, advocated the replacement of a "social system, based on private ownership" with one
based on the "spirit of service”, as more productive and more just.10 A lifelong socialist, Wells
regarded his beliefs as having more in common with religion than politics: a living growing theory
that “springs out of the common sanity of mankind."11
Howard was somewhat more pragmatic. His prospectus, The Times rated "an ingenious and rather
entertaining attempt”, adding acidly: “the only difficulty is to create it."12 Howard's response: "the
mind of the public should not be confused, or the efforts of organisers wasted in a premature attempt
to accomplish this work on a national scale, but that great thought and attention shall be first
concentrated on a single movement yet one sufficiently large to be at once attractive and
resourceful;..."13 Translation: let's roll up our sleeves and get going!
What followed is well-documented elsewhere: from the formation of the Garden City Association, to
garner support and lay the theoretical ground to creation of a company, to the establishment of First
Garden City Ltd on 1 September 1903 was scarce four years.14 On 9th October15, the Earl Grey cut
the first sod in a muddy field not far from what would later be Muddy Lane – a not altogether
propitious harbinger of things to come. Later residents cursed the ungardenable Garden City soil.
Commuters changed shoes at the station before leaving for London, changed back again on return,
while pedestrians bemoaned their ruined skirts and trousers. In the background, his machine bogged
down in unforgiving mud, our temporal traveller kicks and swears!
Much debate there was over the right corporate vehicle for the project. The answer, in the end, was a
10
New Worlds for Old, H G Wells, 1908
New Worlds for Old, H G Wells, 1908
12
The Times, 10 October 1898
13
Garden Cities of To-morrow, E Howard, 1902
14
Letchworth Garden City Through Time, J Tidy, Amberley Publishing Ltd, 2015
15
There is some debate as to whether the date of this event is 1 September, 9 October or 11 October. The decision to cite 9 October
follows discussion with Letchworth historian, Josh Tidy
11
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new and unproven hybrid: a private company with capped dividends to carry out a project for the
public good: a trust without equity. Think crowdfunding. This proved ultimately a flawed model,
allowing, in 1961, private interests to attempt to take over an enterprise set up to benefit the
inhabitants of Letchworth, and take the growth in land values to themselves. That, though is
altogether another story.
Support came from the great and the good. The board, unpaid until 1920, included prominent
politicians, lawyers and business people: the list of backers reads like a roll call of Liberal England,
including, as Vice-President in 1902, Wells, also a Garden City shareholder16, and H Rider Haggard.
The wife of Barry Parker, architect to the project, later claimed Howard's ideals were fundamentally
fulfilled.17 Certainly, Howard successfully created a town based on new, worker friendly styles of
accommodation. From the outset though, Letchworth diverged from plan. Despite the A-list support,
it raised insufficient money to kick-start the enterprise at the scale required: under-investment and
lower than anticipated growth quickly forced it to swap idealism for cold economic reality. It needed
to attract traditional businesses, who were less than impressed by new economic models intended to
be the test bed for radical social change, and equally troubled by the wilder ends of Liberal artistic
elite who flocked to the city.
Later analysis claimed significant divergences in “methods of raising capital, administration,
ownership of the sites and public services, land tenure, the size of the estate, the proportion reserved
for agriculture, restrictions on growth, layout, and the system of distribution”.18
Jettisoned early were Georgist ideals of 100% common ownership. Howard also lost another area
16
Architectural And Social History Of Cooperative Living, L F Pearson and P White, Palgrave, 1988
David's Book of Letchworth, R Harrison with D Walker
18
From Garden Cities to New Towns, D Hardy, Chapman & Hall, 1991
17
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innovation dear to his heart. Collective kitchens (and laundry and daycare) were promoted by early
feminist, Charlotte Perkins Gillman to liberate women in the home, solving simultaneously both the
“servant problem” and the “woman problem”. Wells too, was a passionate supporter of this idea. He
wrote: “The Ordinary Utopian would no more think about a special private kitchen for his dinners
than he would think of a private flour mill or dairy farm”.19 Financial backers, who wanted
traditional houses, hated this idea. Taunted by Wells, Howard eventually created Homegarth, a cooperative quadrangle in Letchworth containing 32 kitchenless apartments.
“Affordable” workers cottages initially turned out to be nothing of the sort. Instead they were twee,
Marie Antoinette, projects: “pretty” as Wells caustically observed.20 Then here, at least, the tide
turned with a 1905 scheme, demonstrating that cottages could be built at rents the average workman
could afford: 4s 3d per week or 6s 6d with a parlour!
Raymond Unwin, joint architect of the early Letchworth, later observed that the over-riding factor
was affordability: "The idea of the promoters of the Garden City was not to build an artistic town.
We must first see that our citizens are decently housed." However, the difficulty of getting
speculative builders to build in Letchworth at all meant other ideals, such as a defined style or rigid
planning must be jettisoned. He wrote: “So far as aesthetics were concerned the directors had no
policy whatever."21
In the absence of absolute style guide, there was an approach that directly reflected Howard's
original intention: "That every house should have its garden and should be so placed and planned
that all its rooms should be flooded with light and sunshine, unblocked by other houses or by its own
19
A Modern Utopia, H G Wells, 1908
Utopianisms, H G Wells, Daily Mail, 18 March 1905
21
The Garden City: A Study of the Development of a Modern Town, C B Purdom, J M Dent & Sons, London, 1913
20
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projections, were the main ideals. It was necessary to break away from the customary type of street
with its endless rows of houses, cramped in frontage, hideous in appearance from the street, and
squalid in the congestion of its back projections and its yards”.
WC's should be inside: no outbuildings. The preference was for "inward-looking" cul-de-sacs and
cottages collected around "natural" greens. Narrow, informal winding roads: avenues of trees.
Unwin and Parker might propose grand plans, but there was virtue to adaptation. Howard argued:
".... this absence of plan avoids the dangers of stagnation...".
For some, this lack of plan had other advantages. Unwin, again, comparing the untidiness of
Letchworth and the presence of “unquestionably ugly” houses to the “fearful exactness, the almost
painful sense of tidiness, and the self-conscious aestheticism that are experiences in the new suburb
at Hampstead" argued that “the actual Garden City is less perfect than the ideal, but, we may hope,
more human...”22
And so they came to Letchworth. From all over the country, from Leeds, from the Midlands, from
Dublin and beyond: a major contingent in the early days were Belgian refugees, fleeing the German
advance in WWI.
There were professionals: builders, architects, solicitors, estate agents. Shopkeepers too, and as the
town grew, manual labourers and artisans, as well as the workforce to sustain new industries:
significant manufacturers such as Marmet, Shelvoake, Spirella, Krin and Lay, the British Tabulating
Machine Company.
22
The Garden City: A Study of the Development of a Modern Town, C B Purdom, J M Dent & Sons, London, 1913
9
On foot, on bike, they came for work and a better life: one walked from Hounslow for a job as
dustman; one chronic asthma sufferer finally found cure in Letchworth, where he then played cello in
the local orchestra.
Above all, there came “Freethinkers, writers, artists, crafts people, Quakers, Theosophists and
socialists all drawn to the project”. Vegetarians. Creative, privileged, the eloi of their day: there were
so many literary, artistic and creative societies that everyone doubled up.23 Many bought into
Howard's ideals of a town in which exploitation by landowners and the ugliness and slums of the old
towns were not to exist.24
Easy to caricature, much was written of Letchworth citizens scandalising common decency with their
sandal-wearing smockish, hatless habits, not to mention their penchant for open relationships!
One local newspaper published cartoons of “Letchworth Cranks”, ridiculing them and the
respectable settlers who, spying the former, would exclaim “Suffragists Freelovers Socialists. This is
no place for me”.25
Certainly, Letchworth never lacked quirky individuals: Mr Ironside, a “simple lifer” put on loin cloth
sandals and crook to walk along Rushby Mead; early animal rights activist, Captain McMichael
attempted to free lions from a local circus. There was Miss Black, who owned two houses, one for
her, one for her cats; and there was a woman who danced near naked on the Common in the
mornings.
23
Personal commentary in this and subsequent paragraphs is drawn from the Garden City Collection, and/or Letchworth
Recollections, H Elliott and J Sanderson, Egon Publishers Ltd, 1995
24
Life Over Again (autobiography), C B Purdom, J M Dent & Sons Ltd, 1951
25
Regaining Paradise: Englishness and the Early Garden City Movement, S Meacham, Yale University Press, 1999
10
The truth though, is perhaps less sensational. Tales abound of children running about barefoot,
including one pretty story of a concerned outsider giving out pairs of shoes. Yet, one resident
recollected many years later: there were “always a few weirdos”, but they had no actual memory of
sandal-wearing.
Letchworth had its more serious radical side. Annie Lawrence, a woman's suffrage campaigner and
supporter of co-education, which likely added force to rumours of early permissiveness, set up the
Cloisters open-air school in 1906 to promote alternative lifestyles and radical thought.26 This was
followed in 1915 by progressive, vegetarian St Christopher's, where – scandal! - open-necked shirts
were the order of the day.
Letchworth also drew conscientious objectors during WWI, many of whom hid on the Common. The
police replied by putting up gates, which one local resident promptly broke down because, he
claimed, it was not lawful to close off the Common. Equally notorious was Letchworth's pub-free
status from its beginnings until 1958, though this was never Howard's plan – he favoured moderate
drinking – but a product of popular vote administered by the LGC Ltd. Difference begat disapproval:
the Rural District Council was unimpressed. One resident evokes the “snarling contempt” of locals.
Hitchin people were said to be horrified. 27
The threat to established order from Letchworth was perhaps more imagined than real, as depicted in
“Biggleswick” a thinly-veiled post-war parody that positioned Letchworth as intense, idealistic but
misguided and mostly harmless.28 Or, as Wells put it, Howard’s success might be because he was “a
simpler man than Plato, and nearer the mental level of those in whose hands funds are to be
26
Garden City Collection, and/or Letchworth Recollections
Garden City Collection, and/or Letchworth Recollections
28
Mr Standfast, J Buchan, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1919
27
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found”29, Letchworth was quirky experiment marred by unsound theory: outmoded outdated social
engineering. He was not alone in this. Letchworth was never handed over to elected (citizen)
representatives. Key decisions were made with one eye on how they would play within the business
community: from the earliest days, there was a marked lack of sympathy between the company that
ran Letchworth, and its residents.
A board re-shuffle in 1906 handed the enterprise to W H Gaunt, a blunt Mancunian with little
sympathy for the project. Later caricatured as “Letchworth's Traffic Dictator”, and described as “a
typical hard headed North country businessman”, he would “demonstrate to all and sundry that town
was intended to be all that could be expected in any town not called a garden city.
“The nonsense of the idealists was to be squashed”.30 Revelling in his role as company enforcer, he
attempted to discard what few architectural principles there were, as, for instance, his unsuccessful
attempt to replace red tiled roofs, so much a hallmark of Letchworth housing with grey Welsh slate.
Disliked and distrusted by the locals, Gaunt eventually went native: but sadly not before scaring
away architect Raymond Unwin, who left and never returned.
Yet there was camaraderie and excitement: a general feeling of helpfulness, friendliness; “no dukes
nor dustmen” One family camped in Letchworth while waiting for their house to be built.
Unemployed labourers stayed in wooden sheds and worked side by side with professionals to build
their new Jerusalem. Letchworth citizens became “good companions”: everyone knew everyone else
and shared one another's happiness and sorrow. Working together by day, by night people constantly
visited one another's homes. Later community celebrations became more elaborate: bonfire night
processions and fireworks on the common; Arbor Day and May Queen.
29
Modernish Nowheres: Politics and Utopia in Early Modernist Writing, 1900-1920, N Waddell, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 /
Utopianisms, H G Wells, Daily Mail, 18 March 1905
30
Life Over Again (autobiography), C B Purdom, J M Dent & Sons Ltd, 1951
12
If that early spark soon burnt out, it lit a light for the future. For some families, Letchworth offered
the first opportunity to live in a house by themselves. Businesses experimented with new approaches
to bosses and labour working together: ever supportive of co-operative enterprise, for many years
Letchworth had its own worker-founded independent newspaper, The Citizen. Letchworth also
provided practical support for women's rights, with progressive woman-friendly companies such as
Spirella providing new opportunities for employment, as well as boasting one of the first practices
with a woman GP.
A feather’s worth of extra pressure on his lever and our Traveller would have found not the
familiarity of 1906, but the strangeness of 2016: cars and planes and internet and weapons of mass
destruction.
So different. So same.
On the political agenda once more are questions of poverty and precarity. Housing too: Georgism
may be no more but the battle between landlord and tenant persists. Likewise, whether property is to
be community asset or source of individual enrichment. Are bureaucrats necessary evil, or simply
evil? Lines from the 1911 panto could only have been penned by one of the LGC's loathed officials.
Noting the democratic posturing of the people of Letchworth, he ends:
For they wobbled and shirked and they hedged every one
And they failed to stand up for their rights at all
The Garden City Pantomime, 1911
13
Is it possible to impose high-minded ideals from above? Will business needs always undercut
reformist initiatives? Wells' leftward journey gave ready answer: revolution betrayed, humanity
divided into a binary world of privileged and down-trodden, the latter controlled by oppression and
impoverishment, manipulated by technology and provision of pleasure.31 It is an easy, seductive
analysis, at odds with the ambiguity contained in the Time Traveller's narrative. For who are the eloi
really? They have much in common with Letchworth's early inhabitants, being simultaneously
privileged and victim.
Which conjures yet another very modern debate around intersectionality, the idea that privilege is
neither absolute nor one-dimensional and queer politics / identity politics / alternative politics:
modern “cranks” broadly united behind a motley assortment of minorities. In London today, there is
tension between vibrancy and commercial value. What makes Soho or Camden different, and
simultaneously lends both aura of disrepute and commercial desirability is the presence of
alternative, artistic, queer types who must be ejected in order to realise monetary gain.
And who are the morlocks? Were they alive today, I imagine Howard and Wells toing and froing on
Twitter: Wells arguing that revolution, when it comes, must be from below, red in tooth and claw;
the dispossessed tearing down the privileged; Howard responding, ever courteous, that life is more
complicated, and simple binary analysis is insufficient.
The only constant, as our temporal Traveller informed Wells, is mud. In the beginning. At the end.
In between, a brief 21st century respite – from mud at least – but otherwise the same old, same old.
Subtract the Edwardian garb and extravagant facial hair and Letchworth offers the same mix of
31
The sleeper awakes, H G Wells, 1910
14
contradictions, of contrarians, from the eccentric Miss Black to the dedicated Mr Ironside,
recognisable today. The difference: we believe that modern is better, we are wiser, our alternatives
more radical. The Traveller might tell us different: but he is gone, never, according to Wells, to
return. So let us celebrate the now and the then. Let us celebrate clean shoes, and made up roads.
November 2016
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