Letchworth Garden City: the first true garden city

The first Garden City to be developed was at Letchworth where from 1903 onwards a new town was created with a town centre near the train station and a central green axis with the main amenities around it. Beyond this formal area the residential streets are winding and often follow the naturally undulating terrain. The post-war housing estates are less attractive than the pre-war estates directly around the centre.

Even in bad weather Letchworth is worth a visit. The town centre comprises of these low blocks with shops, offices  and other business premises on the ground floor. This part of Letchworth emulates historic market towns with an irregular square near the station and five streets running of it. Most of these streets are curved, except for the straight main avenue that end in a roundabout and forms the central axis of the town.

The Broadway is the name of this central axis. It is modelled after a Pall Mall as long strip of green between two flanking streets. The design is very formal with a central path emphasising the axis towards a public garden. This design recalls a baroque Vue de Vert.

The Broadway Gardens are situated on the central axis with a large water feature with water jets at the halfway point between the start and end of this key feature. Topiary, paths and beds with planting enforce the symmetry of this axis. As such a formal feature is central to the layout of this first Garden City.

Around the Broadway Gardens the main buildings are grouped together in a loose placement. These buildings include churches, schools, offices, public library, museum and a cinema (left) and a town hall (right). A central garden square surrounded by public buildings is very much in the style of 19th-century urban planning.

The Broadway continues in a straight line with two double rows of lime trees on each side. The street thus emulates a formal French Chassé (an avenue in a hunting forest radiating from a single point as a star).

The Broadway ends in a roundabout. This might not be something very special nowadays, but this is the very first roundabout built in England. This circular junction dates from 1909. It was not uncommon for a formal axis to end in a round point, rotunda or semicircle (of trees) in baroque gardens.

Around the formal central ensemble the housing is designed in Arts and Crafts style and the placement is Unwinesque. Here an example of two blocks angled away from the street to create small greens in grass. The houses are designed in a typical vernacular style with a ground floor in brick and a lighter rendered upper floor underneath a roof with red clay tiles.

Letchworth is famous for its colony of black squirrels. I saw several when I visited, but they are very difficult to photograph as they are very fast. This is not a different species but a melanistic form of the grey squirrel (the normal pigments replaced with black pigment). The Cloisters (on the right) are an eclectic complex of buildings, built in 1905 by Quaker Annie Jane Lawrence as an open air school. The institution was dedicated to psychology and skills relating to the Arts and Crafts Movement. It was also a centre for Theosophy. It became a masonic centre in 1951.

The streets in Letchworth garden city are semirural in character. This character was not prescribed in Ebenezer Howards book, but was inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement and German examples of what is known as a Gartensiedlung. Here a typical street of short terraces with wide green verges on both sides planted with small trees, walk ways on either side and small front gardens edged by privet hedges.

These semidetached houses are set in ample gardens around them. This often lead to visitors thinking that Garden City means city made up of houses with front and back gardens. Again these blocks are examples of vernacular design with the very sculptural high Mansard roofs with a chimney stack at the corners of the ridge.

More sculptural chimney stacks in this building in the Howard Park. This complex was built as a memorial to Ebenezer Howard’s first wife, Elizabeth Ann Bills, who had died shortly before moving to the new Garden City. The building was designed by Parker and Unwin as a sprawling ornamental farm. The Mrs Howard Memorial Hall (1905) was the first public building in Letchworth and quickly became the literary, music and social hub of the fledgling Garden City.

Vernacular inspired Arts and Crafts architecture became to be almost synonymous with the Garden City Movement, especially in Britain. This type of architecture is also the focus of Hermann Muthesius book on the English House. The buildings are often an eclectic mix of historic design elements assembled for visual effect. Characteristically such buildings have hanging tiles, composite roofs, porches, protruding section, hanging elevations, rendered facades in combination with brick and wood (as weatherboarding, posts or timber frame).

One of the characteristics of Sitte-esque urban design is the placement of buildings in spatial clusters separate from the streets. There are several examples in Letchworth where groups of houses are set back from the road, either on a close or around a communal garden or green. Here an example of the latter. This spatial set up is reminiscent of almshouses and Courts Beguinage.

In several places in Letchworth the houses built for the Cheap Cottages Exhibitions of 1905 and 1907 can be seen lining the streets. Almost all of the exhibition cottages are still standing (124 and 57, respectively). Most can be found east of the station, conveniently within walking distance for the many visitors. Here some examples along Nevells Road.

The Garden City was always conceived as a complete settlement, so not merely a commuter town or dormitory village (which is what most New Towns effectively are). Along the railway parcels of land were set aside for industrial use. A very prominent building  directly west of the station is the Spirella Building a former corset factory now converted to a business centre. The complex was originally built in three stages between 1912 and 1920.