ALAN CASH - web pages
Collection of books on Welwyn Garden City
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ALAN CASH - web pages Collection of books on Welwyn Garden City |
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* The first edition of the book was published in 1918 and the "War" referred to in the title was the Great War. The book reviewed here is the new "revised and reissued" edition of 1942, my copy being from the 1943 reprint of this.
The 1942 book is considerably altered from the original because it has frequent references to Welwyn Garden City which, of course, was not in existence in 1918.
The most interesting part is the 10-page preface to the new edition. The main body of the book consists of an argument for the building of new industrial towns, surrounded by country belts, as part of the reconstruction programme after WW-I, and bemoans the pre-war policy of expanding a few great cities resulting in overcrowding and slums, and the poor state of agricultural housing in the countryside.
Osborn sums up the garden city idea in the following brief formula:
" (a) A town should be of a population large enough to allow of efficient industrial organization and full social activity; but no larger. The urban area should be limited to a size requisite to house this population well, and should be surrounded by a zone of open land large enough to possess a distinctively rural and agricultural character.
"(b) The whole of the land, including the urban area and the rural
zone, should be owned and administered in the interest of the community."
The quotes below are at length from the preface (of the 1942 edition):
"I wrote the first edition of this little book in 1918 in consultation with Ebenezer Howard, C. B. Purdom, and W. G. Taylor.
"...there was sufficient response [to the publication] to encourage the four of us to start a New Towns Group, and Purdom and I wrote articles in popular papers, lobbied political parties, and toured mayoral parlours in an endeavour to get the Government and the great municipalities to translate our very practical proposals into action. I must add that Ebenezer Howard, while delighted at our youthful yet realistic statements of his ideas, showed a doubt about our strategy which puzzled me at the time. He used to send me off on my missionary tours with comforting words like these: 'My dear boy, I hope you have a pleasant trip; but you are wasting your time. If you wait for the authorities to build new towns you will be older than Methuselah before they start. The only way to get anything done is to do it yourself.'
"... My instinct was to go on badgering everybody until either they did what we suggested, or some principal secretary or speculative builder put a bullet through me.
"Whether this instinct was right or wrong I don't know, and I shall never find out. For one day in 1919, when I came back from lecturing in the north, Howard met me at a London terminus with news that brought me down with a bump to solid earth - four square miles of it. ... Very briefly, Howard, then a man of seventy-one, had grown tired of our pathetic pleadings to authority to act imaginatively on a large scale; and without consultation with the younger three-quarters of the New Towns Group had been off to an auction sale and bought a large part of the site for a second garden city off his own bat ! I was not present when he broke this story to Purdom and Taylor, but I can remember my own reactions very clearly; I was speechless with admiration and baffled rage.... rage because I knew that the initiation of another garden city by private enterprise was just the get-out that the authorities, slightly bothered by the public response to our propaganda, would jump at. (And they did.)
"... The most extraordinary feature of his exploit is that he had bought the land without enough money to pay even the deposit of ten per cent to the auctioneer who sold it. ... he seemed to have no difficulty in persuading the agent [Mr Norman Savill] who bought it for him at the sale to fork out the deficiency...
"That was the beginning of the history of Welwyn Garden City..."
The book is illustrated with 12 photographs, some of which are below.
(click on the images for a better view)
Terrace houses with open front gardens (Hennell & James)
Within five minutes of the factory area
Factory by Prof. O. R. Salvisberg.
Factory (Shredded Wheat) by de Soissons & Kenyon.
Municipal offices (Elsom & Stone)
The Stores (de Soissons).
All photos by Studio Lisa (I think the second one is the Sheridan family in the garden of their house on The Parkway).