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Welwyn Garden City

Welwyn Garden City: A Town Designed for Healthy Living

Author: Maurice de Soissons

Published: 1988 by Publications for Companies

Format: Paperback 9" by 8" with 258 pages

This is a remarkable book with an enormous amount of detail and numerous illustrations. Starting from the ancient history of the site the book describes fully and in detail the development of Welwyn Garden City up to the present (1988). There are 158 black and white images (mostly photographs of street scenes and buildings in WGC - many pre-war - but also including maps and plans) and 43 colour images. The images are mostly of good quality especially the b/w ones but not very large, most occupy about 1/4 to 1/3 page in size. This book will have great nostalgia value to anyone living there in the pre-war or post-war eras (as I did from 1945 onwards).

Sir Ebenezer Howard's second garden city holds a pivotal place in the development of Britain's New Towns. Begun soon after the First World War, Welwyn Garden City now has a world reputation as a planned complete town of reasonable size housing 42,000 people in 17,000 houses of which 60 per cent are owner-occupied. It is indeed a "town designed for healthy living," as Howard termed it, a good place in which to live, work and raise a family. Its master plan embodied ideas from earlier planned towns and villages, especially Letchworth, the first garden city. Those precepts were developed, enriched, and combined into flexible planning principles within a logical framework. They have since provided the basis and the inspiration for many new towns in many lands.

Nearly 70 years ago Howard formed a company and gathered round him a group of men to build a new town on farmland in mid-Hertfordshire. In a climate of derision and indifference Welwyn Garden City Ltd began building a compact yet open town where citizens could walk or bicycle to work, school or the shops, and were close to the countryside: a city in a garden and a city of gardens. The company brought its town through many vicissitudes — shortages of money, materials and labour, an economic depression and a world war — to provide in some measure the springboard for the 1946 New Towns Act. Designated a New Town itself in 1948, the garden city continued to grow largely to its original concepts under a development corporation until 1966, and latterly the Commission for the New Towns, followed by the present Welwyn Hatfield District Council. Indeed, from its beginnings it was aided by watchful and concerned local authorities. Population increases in the South-East, smaller family units, high land prices, and ever-increasing numbers of cars, have all induced changes in later development that have caused heart-searching and criticism. Today Welwyn Garden City is fighting to preserve its garden city ideals, tempered by necessity, as it moves towards the 21st century.

This book chronicles the political, economic and social life of an exceptional new town, and details its architectural and landscape heritage. Above all it tells of its citizens over almost 70 years, who have collectively created the garden city and now have the responsibility to ensure that it keeps its very special qualities for future generations.

There are 151 black and white and 43 colour pictures, maps (Figures), and full appendices with an index.

Plates 28, 29, 89, 90, 93, 94, 133, 134 provide detailed studies of selected housing areas.
Plates 99-108 are landscape studies.
Plates 121-129 provide architectural detailing.
Plates 148-151 are industrial studies.
 

* The house depicted in the advertisement is my childhood family house, 36 Digswell Road,
which my parents moved to in the War, and in which I lived until 1963 [A.C.]