Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, January 2017 - from distinctive to ordinary?

My paternal grandparents were Letchworth pioneers, moving to the town in 1915 only 12 years after the turf had been cut for the creation of the first ‘Garden City’ in the world.  My family has been proud of its connection to Letchworth, and in a way so am I.  It was significant that my ancestors were in at the beginning of a town planning movement that has had its effects in many other parts of the world.  But even so, as a teenager I thought Letchworth a very boring place – particularly on a Sunday afternoon when the only thing to do seemed to be to go for a walk: I wasn’t allowed to go to the outdoor swimming pool, or the cinema, or to the park.  I will explain why not shortly.

Letchworth was the brainchild of Ebenezer Howard. I have two copies (in different editions) of his book ‘Garden Cities of Tomorrow’, first published in 1902 and itself a reworking of an earlier volume entitled ‘Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform’.  Howard’s vision was of the bringing together of the best of urban and of rural life, to create a new type of town.  And as with all planning, there was an element of social engineering involved since the expectation was that people would create a different sort of society in such a place. 

I have just been in Letchworth again to visit an exhibition about the early days there.  Howard had written of garden cities as being places of freedom, co-operation, with ‘bright homes and gardens’, ‘plenty to do’, scope for enterprise, and social opportunity.  Some people saw the first residents (‘citizens’ was a word strongly associated with Letchworth, with ‘The Citizen’ as the name taken by the local newspaper) as cranks.  As the exhibition in the Broadway Gallery showed, there were strong interests in socialism, communal activities, theosophy and various alternative religions, the wearing of ‘rational dress’, vegetarianism, the promulgation of Esperanto as a universal language, and the revival of seasonal folk traditions such as maypole dancing. 

My grandfather was far from being a crank.  A printer, he was attracted to Letchworth to work for the Garden City Press which printed the ‘Everyman’ series of books – a series for autodidacts of which he was very proud.  But he was also a Methodist local preacher and a strong trade unionist, and he served on the board of the local cottage hospital.  He was a lifelong socialist.  He was a devoted keeper of the Sabbath (hence, to me, the boring Sunday afternoons), and an equally devoted teetotaller.  As  a child I was taken to a neighbour’s house (we didn’t have television at the time) to watch my grandfather being interviewed for ‘Panorama’ on the proposal that a first licence to sell alcohol should be granted in Letchworth: needless to say my grandfather was against it.  For over 45 years no alcohol could be sold in what was by the early 1960s a town of around 20,000 inhabitants.  (But there were pubs in the villages round about!).  

What of Letchworth today?  A first impression is that the architectural style developed in the town by its initial architects, Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, is very much intact in many of the older areas, and creates a distinctive ‘Arts and Crafts’ or cottage-style atmosphere to the built environment.  In these original neighbourhoods, subject to conservation orders, the houses are all painted cream, and there is uniformity in external decoration, doors and the like.  It is  a very pleasant and attractive feel.

But the newer areas, added from the 1960s onwards, are little different from similar estates in towns all over England.  The spacious layout, mature trees, wide verges and plentiful grass areas of the early parts of the town are replaced here by standard estate architecture and street planning that has clearly been influenced by the town’s origins but which have a watered-down feel to them.

The industrial area is still, rightly, separated from the residences – in a planning feature that has since been repeated in so many places around the world, from Stevenage and other post-war new towns to the socialist estates built around East Berlin.

There is still a profusion of small halls and premises for community-based activities – although whether the Esperantists and the theosophists are today as active as a century ago is unknown.  However, some of these buildings seem to be falling into disuse.

But where the current state of Letchworth surprises me today is in the commercial centre.  On a Friday lunchtime the main shopping street is almost deserted.  And I notice that there are many empty shops throughout the town centre.  The co-op where my grandmother proudly held share number 3 is now a pizzeria, and there is a pawnbroker’s nearly opposite.  Talking later to old friends who own a corner shop towards the outskirts of the town, I hear that Letchworth is declining rapidly as a self-contained retail centre.  24 hour superstores in Baldock (2 miles away) and Stevenage have taken over Letchworth customers.  Corner shops with post offices attached are themselves threatened as more and more activities traditionally carried out at post offices move online.

Leys Avenue, Letchworth, at midday on a Friday

 

Ebenezer Howard expected his garden cities to be largely self-contained, providing within themselves almost everything the citizens could need for everyday living.  But it isn’t just retail activities that lead residents away.  Letchworth’s autonomy in employment has gone.   The fastest trains to London now take only 32 minutes to Kings Cross and because the arts-and-crafts-style Letchworth station has inadequate parking, many residents now commute into London from neighbouring stations.    So Letchworth has in many ways become a commuter town – like so many scattered around London.

Letchworth takes its place in all the standard texts on the history of town planning, and many aspects of its development have been echoed elsewhere – or in diluted form.  For example, little of Letchworth’s original plan was purely geometric in nature, with gently curving roads – replaced in newer developments, such as many of the council housing estates built after the First World War, by straight lines and perfect circles.  Visually Letchworth remains distinctive and attractive, and fulfils Howard’s aims of blending aspects of urban and rural environments. 

However the self-sufficiency and many aspects of the social development of his garden city are not as Howard would have expected.  The town centre, in particular, has gone down-market since I was a child and has a rather sad air.   But although my grandfather was very happy in, and proud of, Letchworth, there was one respect in which he disagreed with its founder.  Whilst my grandfather preached temperance throughout his life, Ebenezer Howard, in his writings, was not in favour of his garden city being alcohol-free. He was frightened of discouraging what he called ‘the very large and increasing class of moderate drinkers’ from settling there.  And he also felt that community pressure in his utopian town would encourage ‘healthful influences’ in those who needed them.  Howard would perhaps approve of the public house that now stands half way up the main shopping street – it is named ‘The Three Magnets’ after a famous diagram he created illustrating his views on the merits of the country, the city, and the garden city.