Page 33 - History 2020

The other great name in late Victorian housing improvement is Ebenezer Howard.

The son of shopkeepers, he became a shorthand clerk. In 1871, aged 21, he and two
friends headed off to the American west. Howard, short-sighted and with a small
moustache, opted for the log-cabin life of a frontiersman. One winter was enough to
drive him off the land to Chicago. Massive rebuilding was taking place after a fire and
Howard gained a lasting admiration for its planned parks and open spaces. After 5
years away he returned to England, married, got a job as a clerk in the Houses of
Parliament and began thinking about a new form of civilisation linking town and
country. In 1898 he published Tomorrow! A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. It was later

retitled Garden Cities of Tomorrow. He quoted Blake, Tolstoy, Goethe and of course
Ruskin.

th
Howard was deeply influenced by the 19 century American philosophy of
Transcendentalism. This put great faith in the inherent goodness of the individual
th
which is only corrupted by society and its institutions. This echoes the great 18
century Swiss philosopher Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What grounds

Ebenezer Howard in the late Victorian age is his belief that this could be remedied by
combining the vision of England as a garden with strict adherence to his principles of
a new sort of town planning. Put the two together and you get the Garden City. Here,
as conceived by Howard, “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.”

Utopias are usually criticised for lacking detail. Howard’s was too detailed; it

depended too much on rigidly following his blueprint; it wasn’t a broad vision to
inspire disciples, rather a series of detailed instructions to be followed to the letter.
This was its downfall. The land – 6,000 acres - must be bought at £40 per acre with a
4% mortgage. The central 1,000 acres must be circular with a three-quarter mile
circumference. The maximum population must be 30,000, houses In 5,500 lots 20’ x
130 ‘ in size. The surrounding 5,000 acres would be an agricultural green belt with

reformatories and convalescent homes, housing 2,000 more people. “Six magnificent
boulevards – each 120 feet wide traverse the city from centre to circumference
dividing it into six equal wards. In the centre is a circular 5 ½ acres laid out as a
beautiful and well-watered garden, and surrounding it, each in its own ample
grounds, the larger public buildings – town hall, principal concert and lecture hall,
theatre, library, museum, picture gallery and hospital.” The centre was called
“Central Park”; the boulevards “First Venue” etc., the shopping arcade “The Crystal
Palace.” Streets were tree-lined, gardens large, and houses individually designed.
Industry would be electric-powered and separated by a circular railway from the

surrounding agricultural zone.