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  To understand the genesis of new towns like Harlow, and the ways many existing cities set about solving the problem of overcrowding, we must look to the work of an extraordinary man with no planning training: Quaker, Hansard clerk and fluent Esperanto speaker Ebenezer Howard. In 1898 he had written a groundbreaking book, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, more famously reprinted in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow. It was these garden cities, whose construction was overseen by Howard from 1903 until his death in 1928, that became the direct inspiration for the postwar new towns programme. Like many engaged citizens of the late Victorian era, Howard was repulsed by the quality of life in the industrialised cities, particularly for the poor. Pollution and overcrowded slum housing had ensured the spread of diseases such as cholera, tuberculosis and rickets. Between 1848 and 1872 the child mortality rate for boys in Britain was a staggering 36,000 per million of the population, and children had only a 50 percent chance of surviving their first year. In response, a number of philanthropic employers, such as William Lever in Liverpool and George Cadbury in Birmingham, created healthy ‘model’ villages for their workers to live in at Port Sunlight and Bournville, along the lines of New Lanark, built on the banks of the Clyde for millworkers in the late eighteenth century. Ebenezer Howard envisaged a world where the menace of overcrowding would be relieved by decanting a significant portion of the population to new settlements beyond the boundaries of the city: healthy, spacious, self-contained towns that were part rural, part urban. ‘There are in reality not only, as it is so constantly assumed, two alternatives – town life and country life,’ wrote Howard, ‘but a third alternative, in which all the advantages of the most energetic and active town life, with all the beauty and delight of the country, may be secured in perfect combination.’4 He named this ideal hybrid settlement a garden city, and such a phenomenon was his book that by 1902 he’d set about securing funding to actually build one of these towns in Hertfordshire: Letchworth.

  Howard conceived the garden cities as functional towns, each housing 32,000 people, and, crucially, self-supporting, rather than mere commuter hubs for the nearest big city, as so many suburbs were. Partly to ensure this, they would be separated from the city by a ‘green belt’ of land, and the plans allocated generous space for light and air within the garden cities themselves. Howard went so far as to envisage a ring of six of these towns, connected by road and rail to form one huge, leafy garden city of nearly 200,000 inhabitants. Being a practical man, over half of Garden Cities of To-morrow was concerned with the funding and management of such a project – more a how-to guide than an abstract treatise. Although raising the money to build Letchworth was almost as hard as actually building the place, Howard managed it and the resulting town became something of a sensation among town planners and architects around the world.

  Miniature versions of garden cities sprang up all over the country as garden suburbs and garden villages in the early years of the twentieth century. One such was Rhiwbina, begun just before the outbreak of the First World War and finished shortly after the cessation of hostilities. Rhiwbina was built to the north of Cardiff, largely because the local train company, Cardiff Railway, had been encouraged to create a stop there in 1911. The houses were white-rendered Arts and Crafts detached, semi-detached and terraced cottages with steep pitched roofs and totemic chimneys, set back from the road behind broad grass verges.

  Once derided for its cultish devotion to the garden city ethos, this suburb has now become one of the most desirable places to live in Cardiff. I spoke to two residents, Jim and Jo Griffiths, who have lived there since the seventies. ‘I still feel slightly like a newcomer here,’ said Jo. ‘These houses were rented through the maternal line. If your mother rented one you could put your name down to rent one in the garden village. But then in ’68 or whatever, they got sold off to sitting tenants.’ This was how they had managed to move there in the first place, from the new town of Cwmbran. ‘It was different coming here because it was very established and you had to be very careful that you didn’t contravene any of the unwritten rules and regulations.’

  ‘About parking and keep your hedges trimmed, for example,’ said Jim. He pointed out the street layout, the generous green spaces, the gently curving roads, the large gardens front and back – typical both of early garden city design and the more established anti-industrial Arts and Crafts movement, championed by William Morris. Rhiwbina was designed by Arts and Crafts architect Richard Parker and Ebenezer Howard acolyte Raymond Unwin, whose careers neatly track the rapid evolution of planning ideas: the pair had previously built a Victorian-style ‘model village’ for Joseph Rowntree’s workers near York, planned Hampstead Garden Village in London, and worked on Letchworth.

  Such was the success of Letchworth that, immediately after the First World War, Ebenezer Howard bought further land in Hertfordshire to build another: Welwyn Garden City. I spent a day driving round it with comedy writer Mark O’Sullivan, a former resident, offering a darkly subversive running commentary of all we saw. The original western part of the town was beautifully maintained in all its interwar glory: big brown brick cottages with steeply sloping roofs and elaborate chimneys, exhaustively planted gardens pining for rosettes and highly commendeds, tree-lined roads bordered by immaculate grass verges. The centre was low-wattage triumphal: grand vistas at right-angles formed by broad, straight ribbons of neatly mown and planted park and a Versailles-style fountain splitting the two sides of the high street 200 feet apart. The low-lying brick neo-Georgian shop units peeped modestly over the hedges at each other. As Mark pointed out as we strolled down the high street, there were very few young people about. In fact, most were over 70. The longer we were there, the more I was struck that there was something uncanny about the immaculate nature of it all, the careful ordering of nature, the broad, quiet pavements, the folk clipping hedges. They all gave Mark a friendly wave between clips (it turned out he was somewhat of a local celebrity). It was a little spooky, like the perfect families waving to camera in the opening moments of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

  Welwyn’s grand, yet also remarkably low energy, vista.

  ‘It always felt quite quiet as a child,’ was Mark’s recollection as we stood by the fountain on the central reservation looking back to the town centre.

  ‘It’s so spacious it’s almost soporific,’ I remarked.

  Mark laughed. ‘We will not have people over-stimulated in our town! I imagine a lot of that comes from that Quaker ideology of not overloading the senses, of giving people space.’

  We talk for a while about the population-calming effects of all this order and room. Mark felt it had created a very definite risk-averse mindset among the population here.

  ‘What’s that Woody Allen quote? “In the event of a war, I’m a hostage.” I think you could say that for most of the people in Welwyn Garden.’

  This is the Britain of bucolic railway posters, those mythmaking images where the latest locomotives were seamlessly blended into the rolling landscape, as if they had always been there. Yet those posters also represented something the garden city visionaries, and later the postwar town planners, were keen to put a stop to – the sprawl of metroland. During the interwar period a lack of planning controls and a housing shortage had led private developers and building contractors to create vast new settlements along the railway and road network. A ribbon of suburban semis chased the arterial roads out of every major city, and the town planners’ horror at the Victorian slums was quickly matched by their disgust at the cavalier way that developers were eating up the countryside with what was disparagingly termed ‘subtopia’. Ebenezer Howard had forseen the consequences of the endless city, and had suggested enforcing a green belt around cities as the solution: an idea eagerly adopted by the postwar planners.

  Garden City cottages, deluxe cousins to the plain red-brick houses in New Addington.

  It struck me that this older part of Welwyn could be viewed as the prewar estate at New Addington
on a big budget. The brick was the same, but we didn’t have any of the pretty Arts and Crafts finishes these cottages had been given, from huge ornate chimneys to curving roofs and porches. I recognised the green spaces too, but these ones had lush planting and fountains, not just mown grass and broken saplings. We pulled up at one of the smaller parades of shops, and it seemed strangely familiar. Could it even have been the actual model for New Addington’s Central Parade? The difference was, this row of shops was meant to serve just one small neighbourhood in Welwyn’s population of 43,000; in New Addington it was all there was for all 22,000 of us. I suddenly saw Charles Boot’s activities in Croydon in a new light: he had been trying to create a private garden village of his own, on a hill, surrounded by trees. But it was a garden city on a squeezed budget, with none of the comforts or attention to detail that Howard had put into Welwyn. For the first time, I saw where I’d grown up in some kind of larger context. We were the bargain-basement model of a garden city, lacking even the basic facilities Howard had seen fit to provide for his citizens.

  By the twenties, apart from his two cities, and the limited application of his ideas in garden suburbs like Rhiwbina and cheap housing estates along the lines of New Addington, Howard’s crusade was coming to an end. Funding was a large part of the problem, and Howard bankrupted himself in the attempt to secure the future of Welwyn Garden City. He died in 1928, the town unfinished. He hadn’t won the green belt argument, nor had he stemmed the rapid development of metroland, with its endless, unplanned ribbons of semi-detached houses eating up the countryside. And the slums in the big cities remained.

  Yet the Second World War was to change things dramatically on the planning front. By its outbreak, the government was beginning to publish reports on the neglected area of town planning. As Welwyn Garden City staggered to a halt, Howard’s agenda seemed for the first time to be seriously on the government’s mind. By 1943 a Ministry of Town and Country Planning had been set up, and Patrick Abercrombie, a professor of town planning, had been asked to produce plans for the postwar rebuilding of London and Plymouth. There was optimism even amidst all the rubble. ‘City dwellers saw new vistas,’ wrote Howard’s planner Frederic Osborn. ‘They were astonished at the amount of sky that existed … the “urban blinkers” were dislodged from many eyes. What would replace the former crowded buildings if and when we won the war? Might we not have much better homes and workplaces and retain this new sense of light and openness?’5

  One of the biggest conversions was undergone by Lewis Silkin, who’d been deeply sceptical of garden city principles when he’d been leader of the London County Council’s planning committee back in the twenties. Like many city planners in positions of authority in the first half of the twentieth century, he’d been in favour of high-density cities that, as far as possible, maintained the existing social structures (and, importantly for a successful politician, the electorate they contained). Yet the prewar planning reports were paving the way for a policy that spread people and industry more evenly across the country, and the creation of satellite towns was a key recommendation of Patrick Abercrombie and John Henry Forshaw’s County of London Plan. A committee was formed to look into it, chaired by the newly ennobled Lord Reith, autocratic founder of the BBC. Reith was the great public service ‘doer’ of the age – and its irritant in equal measure, which was partly why by the end of the war this former Minister for Information had been left twiddling his thumbs. Reith’s whirlwind stewardship saw the genesis of the New Towns Act 1946, and Silkin, now Minister for the newly created Ministry of Town and Country Planning found that instead of the four towns he’d been expecting to approve, 20 were ready to go from the off. He referred to the resulting Act as ‘a leap into the unknown’, and the first four new towns to be approved were all around London: Stevenage, Crawley, Hemel Hempstead and Harlow. Once behind the project, Silkin quickly became evangelical. Looking back in the late sixties he proudly described the challenge: ‘They set out to show that we in Britain could do something better than soulless suburbia, ribbon development, single-industry towns, and one-class housing estates of the thirties.’6 Yet the only recent examples of building entirely self-contained new towns, as opposed to the many vast, under-supported estates, remained the two garden cities of Letchworth and Welwyn.

  One of the most striking interviews held in the Museum of Harlow’s oral history archive is that with former local Labour councillor Jim Desormeaux, who described life in London as a demobbed soldier before he and his wife moved out to Harlow.

  ‘I found myself one of a family of six living in one room, The house was a four-room house plus a scullery. Each room was occupied by a separate family. There was one cold water tap for the whole of the four families, and one outside toilet. Conditions such as those were quite common to many thousands of people.’

  The task of rescuing millions from the city slums had become critical. Even 20 years later, though the overcrowding had eased, city life was still tough for parents raising young children. Jo Griffiths, who I’d interviewed in Rhiwbina alongside her husband Jim, recalled life in Islington in the late sixties:

  ‘One of the reasons that convinced us to move, I remember, was one day taking Lucy in the pushchair up Chapel Market, and getting home her face was covered in little black specks of carbon monoxide or whatever it was. I remember thinking, if it’s like that there, what are her lungs like? And also I was brought up where you could play on the street and you could go down the road and see your mates, and I thought it was really a natural thing for kids to be able to do, to play out in the street. It wasn’t going to happen in Islington, was it? It’s nice to think we could go somewhere where you could open the door and the garden gate and the kids could play out in the street. All that traffic noise and all that angst of crossing every road …’

  ‘When Parliament passed the New Towns Act,’ reported the Harlow Citizen in its first edition in May 1953, ‘it decided that the new towns, like children, should be given a decent start in life, and not left, as so many places were left in the past, to make their own way in the world.’7 Reith drew on his experience of setting up the BBC, so that the building of each new town was managed by a corporation. Funded by the treasury through loans repayable over 60 years, and run by a part-time board appointed by the Ministry of Town and Country Planning – or the Scottish Office in Scotland – it was these development corporations, rather than central government, who were responsible for buying the land to build the towns. Harlow’s general manager described the corporation as a developer with a conscience. The idealistic desire to ‘do right’ by the people who would live there, would be one of the driving forces behind these towns, but it was a daunting challenge. ‘Despite the pioneering work of Ebenezer Howard and his colleagues, we had no real knowledge of the organisation and finance required, nor could we readily see the social problems that might emerge’ wrote Silkin.8 Yet despite all of these worries, and with the confident, can-do attitude left over from the war, on 25 March 1947 he designated Harlow a new town for 60,000 people.

  In fact, Stevenage was the first new town to be designated. Mass Observation carried out surveys on the streets of the village of Old Stevenage in April 1946, a place that 36 years before had been the setting for E. M. Forster’s celebrated novel Howards End. The area earmarked for the new town was already home to over 6,000 people, whose opinions of the scheme were largely optimistic (57 percent of the sample thought that the new town would be good for Stevenage). ‘It’s time this town was woken up,’ said a 45-year-old signwriter. ‘It’s far too sleepy. We need a little life in the place … They still do things here because their grandfathers did them … I’ve recently come out of the Forces and I notice it.’ Practical considerations were frequently voiced: ‘Perhaps my husband will be able to get a job here then, instead of having to go out of the district to work,’ said a 25-year-old woman. Not everyone was so keen: ‘I don’t like to see the beauty spots being violated,’ said a 60-year-old car park attendant.
‘I shouldn’t like to see the beauty taken away.’ The unhappiest response recorded by Mass Observation was that of Mrs M. H. Tetley, owner of The Priory. ‘We’ve been advised that the government will very probably compel us to sell this house and land,’ she lamented. ‘It’s certain that we shall be hemmed-in by new houses and buildings of one sort and another – which is exactly what we moved here to avoid.’

  When the designation was announced there was immediate uproar, which Silkin’s visit to the village to sell the project did little to quell. Through a barrage of cries of ‘Dictator!’ and ‘Gestapo!’ he attempted to paint a picture of how important this project would be. Stevenage, he declared to a hostile public audience, ‘will in a short time become world famous [laughter]. People from all over the world will come to see how we here in this country are building for a new way of life.’9 For his pains, his car received a dose of sand in its petrol tank and its tyres were let down. In a photo-op worthy of UK Uncut, the protest group even renamed the station Silkingrad and called on E. M. Forster to become involved, who obliged with the observation that the new town would ‘fall out of a blue sky like a meteorite upon the ancient and delicate scenery of Hertfordshire’.10 A local enquiry followed, which found the designation to be quite lawful. This decision was then challenged in the courts, moving on to the Court of Appeal, and finally to the House of Lords, where the protesters had to finally admit they were beaten.

  Protests greeted the designation of most new towns, but such was the energy and belief in them that the first tranche, from 1946–51, were all waved through. There were Harlow, Stevenage, Hemel Hempstead, Crawley, Basildon, Bracknell, Hatfield and even the unfinished Welwyn Garden City: all intended to ease the overcrowding in London. In the Midlands, Corby was built to house steelworkers, and two small mining towns were conceived in County Durham: Peterlee and Newton Aycliffe. Wales was granted just the one, Cwmbran, between Cardiff and Newport. Scotland had two: East Kilbride, to deal with overspill from Glasgow, and Glenrothes, a mining town in Fife. Some, like Stevenage, Welwyn, Corby and Hatfield, were already home to many thousands of people, while Cwmbran and the two Durham towns were largely unpopulated.