The Hertfordshire town of Letchworth entered my vocabulary in 1971. I was twelve years old and my father thought it would be a good idea to send me to boarding school – either to one in the United States, which was his first choice, or to one in the UK, a three hour drive from where we lived in Folkestone. Massachusetts seemed a long way to go but I was intrigued by the idea of St. Christopher in Letchworth. My mother was strongly against my going to boarding school in either country and so, after much debate, I stayed home and became a day pupil at Ashford School for Girls.
St. Christopher School, founded in 1915, was inspired by the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti, an Indian mystic and philosopher whose book, Education as Service, was published in 1912. Krishnamurti believed that man “could only find truth through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection.”
In The Angry Island, Hunting the English, the writer and journalist, A.A. Gill, describes his alma mater as ”hippy-alternative, non-competitive, vegetarian and organic before ecology was a word”. He was a student at St. Christopher in the 1960s and describes it as “a weird and unconventional place with a high proportion of Quakers, many of whom wore sandals all year round and one of whom wouldn’t speak on Wednesdays in memory of those killed in Hiroshima.”
In 2000 we decided to send our own daughters to the school. Polly and Lucy’s years at St. Chris were pretty much how I had imagined my own might have been. They enjoyed their schooldays and made lasting friendships.
Once they left to go to university, however, we debated whether to move somewhere else – back to London or the south coast. My husband, Dan however, is from Chicago, and Letchworth, he says, reminds him of where he grew up. We decided to buy a house, put down roots and, twenty-three years later, this is the town we call ‘home’.
When I told other parents, who like me, had moved to Letchworth to avoid boarding the children, they were confounded. “What … you’re not going back to London?! But what will you do here?”
I had moved around a lot in my life and I was looking to settle, plus Dan had a point: why start a new life elsewhere when we had a fine one right here in the Garden City?. It’s a 30 minute journey into London and Cambridge on the train; we can meet friends, have dinner, see a play and be home before midnight.
Letchworth is the World’s First Garden City and, according to A.A. Gill, this makes it “one of the most important and influential places ever built – as inspired as Wren and Hooke’s plans for post-inferno London or Haussmann’s Paris, as revolutionary as Niemeyer’s Brasilia and more practical and longer-lasting than a Frank Lloyd Wright millionaire’s weekend home.”
The town was founded in 1903, not by a town planner or a wealthy industrialist, but by Ebenezer Howard, a middle-aged shorthand clerk from London. At the age of 21, he went to the United States to start a farm in Nebraska. When his venture failed, he moved to Chicago and found work as a stenographer.
In 1871, the year Ebenezer Howard arrived in the United States, The Great Chicago Fire ignited on the west side of the city. It burned for two days and destroyed more than 17,000 buildings. Howard was living in the city during its reconstruction and reformation and Chicago’s motto, ‘urbs in horto’ (city in a garden) was to influence his ideas around the creation of a Garden City.
Ebenezer returned to London four years later and took a job as a parliamentary reporter in the House of Commons. Over the next twenty years he developed a strong interest in social issues that stemmed from, what he believed to be, over-crowding, urban poverty and poor city design.
In 1898, at the age of 48, Ebenezer Howard published To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform in which he advocated the creation of a Garden City movement. The book was translated into French, German, Russian and Japanese.
His idea was to offer an alternative to urban living in the form of inexpensive, yet attractively–built homes and workplaces that would combine with green spaces in new communities. Unlike the new industrial towns, Port Sunlight and Bournville, which were built by factory owners for their workers, the garden cities were to be self-governing and run for the benefit of all.
In 1903, his dream was realised when the Garden City Association founded Letchworth, the World’s First Garden city. Brothers-in-law Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, who had a reputation for designing good quality working-class homes, were appointed as the town’s planners and architects.
Howard decided to learn Esperanto as a way of promoting international understanding through a universal language. “Esperanto and the Garden City” he said, “are both bringing about new and better conditions of peace and agreement.”
His close neighbour and friend, George Bernard Shaw, described Ebenezer as “one of those heroic simpletons who do big things whilst our prominent worldings are explaining why they are Utopian and impossible.”
In 1905 the Cheap Cottages Exhibition showcased 125 cottages of different shapes and sizes, each one built for a maximum of one hundred and fifty pounds. Over a three-month period 60,000 people visited Letchworth to see the exhibition.
The architecture of the Garden City was strongly influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement which focussed as much on social reform as on the aesthetics of design. “The root of all reform lies in the individual, and the life of the individual is shaped mainly by home and surrounding.” wrote Gustav Stickley in The Craftsman Home in 1909.
Houses were built of plain brick, pebble-dashed and white-washed, with gables and sweeping, steeply-pitched terracotta rooflines. The open-plan living areas offered both space and sunlight. Attention was paid to small details such as hinges and door handles.
The town planners incorporated allotments and spinneys (extended areas of woodland bordering back gardens) and residents were encouraged to grow their own fruit and vegetables and raise chickens. Letchworth was the first town in England to have a green belt and 100,000 trees were planted with a different species chosen for each street, including oak, elm, locust and staghorn sumach.
It is the Broadway, a wide boulevard, framed by mature trees, that reminds my husband of Chicago, specifically the Midway, a one-mile stretch of parkland on the south side of the city. Dan grew up in the western suburbs, near Oak Park, home to the world’s largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright-designed private residences. The Arts and Crafts style homes mirror many of the architectural features of Letchworth Garden City.
In 1910, the Spirella Corset Company, founded in Pennsylvania in 1909, established its first overseas operation in Letchworth. The Spirella motto was ‘Healthy Happy Workers are the World’s Best’. The factory had large windows, good ventilation and a garden setting. Workers were offered baths, a library, free eye tests and a bicycle repair department (for those who suffered punctures on their way to work). The company paid 50% of its employees’ medical bills and subsidized their dental treatment.
Sir Laurence Olivier, who spent his childhood in Letchworth, used corsets produced at Spirella in his 1957 production of The Prince and the Showgirl, starring Marilyn Monroe.
The Garden City became a magnet for artists, including potters, weavers and furniture designers. It also attracted socialists, suffragettes, vegetarians and teetotallers (there were no pubs in the town until 1974). Men wore embroidered smocks, knickerbockers and sandals and women wore tea dresses – the most radical refused to wear corsets, hats and even shoes.
George Orwell, who lived in neighbouring Wallington, mocked Letchworth in The Road to Wigan Pier, describing its citizens as “that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.”
Day-trippers visited from London and two German ladies declared, on leaving, that they were “… awfully disappointed. We were assured that the people at Garden City were only half-clothed and that they all went bare headed and wore sandals, and we have not seen one person of that sort.”
Early pioneers of the town were undaunted by the critical and ill-mannered remarks. Hope Rea, a leading Theosophist, moved to Letchworth in 1907 and established the Garden City Theosophical School (now St. Christopher).
Annie Lawrence, born into a wealthy London family, was inspired to build an ‘open-air’ school in Letchworth, dedicated to “stimulating and encouraging young people to think for themselves as to the meaning of life and what their attitude to it should be.” She commissioned the building of The Cloisters, a grey stone structure, reminiscent of a medieval castle with turrets, battlements, fountains and a campanile staircase. Students slept in canvas hammocks, slung from the vaulting and classes included boot and sandal-making, weaving, bookbinding and carpentry. Annie also offered lectures, conferences and summer schools, as well as theatrical performances and organ recitals.
The town’s spirit of inclusivity attracted people of different faiths, including Liberal Catholic, Orthodox Jewish, Congregationalist, Pentacostalist, Spiritualist and Quaker. Today there are also Buddhist and Sikh temples and an Islamic Society.
A second Garden City in Welwyn, 14 miles south of Letchworth, was built in 1920 and the Garden City movement spread across Europe, North America, Australia and South Africa.
In 2003, John Prescott, secretary of state for transport, announced plans for a new town in Barking Reach on the Thames, prompting Guardian journalist, Jonathan Glancey to write “They don’t make them like they used to … Letchworth had good homes, churches, libraries and a corset factory. Today’s new towns don’t even get a railway.”
More recently, in an interview for the podcast Reasons to be Cheerful and titled Reasons to be Letchworth, Katy Lock, Director of Communities at The Town and Country Planning Association, said that flourishing lives must be integral to democracy. “We have lost the vision in both planning and policy. We have lost the positive view of how we want to live together and how to make the places we design sustainable and stand the test of time. The current development model is creating the slums of the future.”
So what remains of the early Garden City philosophy? In terms of bricks and mortar the answer is – ‘a lot.’ 121 of the 125 Exhibition cottages exist as residential properties across the town. In 2006, each one, including our own, was issued with a plaque in recognition of its historical significance. The Cloisters has been occupied by the Freemasons since 1948 and the factory floor at Spirella is now a concert and lecture venue. The Art Deco cinema, the Lido and the Library (all built in the 1930s) form an integral part of the local community.
Apart from its kerb appeal, Letchworth is, admittedly, a little short on things that are important to some people – gift shops, gourmet restaurants and boutique hotels. For these you need to travel 5 miles south to the market town of Hitchin.
During the years Polly and Lucy were at St. Christopher School there was an annual ‘Rice Day’. Lunch was a bowl of rice and the money saved on feeding the 350 pupils was donated to a local charity. There were also sponsored ‘Sleep Outs’ on campus to focus on the problems of homelessness. One year, Lucy’s class was studying the effects of climate change on the Arctic. A pupil, dressed in a polar bear suit, walked into the local supermarket and asked to buy a fish as a way of highlighting lost habitat and access to food sources.
In 2006, William Armitage, a governor at St. Chris, and one of the founders of David’s Books and Music (1963) on Leys Avenue, was given an MBE for services to the community. In 2018, David’s was voted runner-up in the UK Independent Bookshop of the Year Award.
Vutie Beets, a vegan cafe in town, offers supper club charity nights using rescued food from The Best Before Cafe. It also provides family support through free cooking lessons and hosts community clean up.
In June 2020, the year of the pandemic, The Letchworth Settlement, a centre of learning and creativity since 1920, announced it was closing. As the centre received no grants, the situation looked hopeless. Within days, however, a ‘Save the Settlement’ appeal was launched and the citizens of Letchworth raised £28,000. Government grants followed and the 100 year old Settlement was saved.
Ebenezer Howard would have been proud. The people of Letchworth, it seems, still have the ability to “do big things” as opposed to “explaining why they are impossible.”
Reference:
A-Z of Letchworth Garden City by Josh Tidy
Arts and Crafts in Letchworth by Josh Tidy and Aimee Flack
Related Article:
In the Footsteps of a Thousand Years by Una Suseli O’Connell, May 21st, 2023