Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T18:53:44.041Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

An English Paradise to Regain? Ebenezer Howard, the Town and Country Planning Association and English Ruralism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Stephen Heathorn
Stephen Heathorn
Affiliation:
Department of History, Indiana University, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Although not a figure now widely known, Sir Ebenezer Howard has had a profound influence on British and, indirectly, on European and American urban planners. The historian Robert Fishman noted in 1978 that while Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright had become legendary as visionary architects and urban planners, Howard, probably more influential in the evolution of urban planning than either of them, has remained relatively obscure. Howard, like his more famous contemporaries, has always been characterized as Utopian by some because he imagined that city planning could aid in the creation of an entirely new society. For Howard, this society was to be one in which social divisions would be eliminated and the standards of living of all citizens would be raised through participatory social democracy organized at the city level. Howard attempted to realize this new society through building experimental communities to serve as models to be emulated elsewhere.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , April 2000 , pp. 113 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. I wish to thank Russell T. McCutcheon, Annie Gilbert Coleman, Bob Barrows, Philip Scarpino, Liz Bellamy and the two Rural History referees for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

2. Fishman, Robert, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier (New York, 1978), p. 23.Google Scholar

3. For the world-wide influence of elements of Garden City ideas, see Ward, Stephen V., ed., The Garden City: Past, Present and Future (London, 1992).Google Scholar

4. In July of 1997, a newly formed lobby group, the Countryside Alliance, staged a rally in London's Hyde Park to call on the new Labour government to defend ‘rural values’ from town dwellers. According to the Guardian newspaper, the loudest applause from the 250,000 people at the rally was reserved for the speech of farmer Willie Poole, who cried, ‘Stop letting these townie buggers grind us down.’

5. Hall, Peter and Ward, Colin, Sociable Cities: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard (New York, 1998)Google Scholar, and Meacham, Standish, Regaining Paradise: Englishness and the Early Garden City Movement (New Haven, CT, 1999).Google Scholar

6. Rodwin, Lloyd, The British New Towns Policy (Cambridge, MA, 1956).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Saint, Andrew, ‘The New Towns’, The Cambridge Cultural History of Britain, Volume 9: Modern Britain, edited by Boris, Ford (Cambridge, 1992), p. 152.Google Scholar

8. Hall, and Ward, , Sociable Cities, pp. 55, 67–9, 103–7.Google Scholar

9. Howard, Ebenezer, Garden Cities of To-morrow (Reprinted by MIT Press, 1965), pp. 50–4, 142.Google Scholar

10. Howard, , Garden Cities, pp. 58–88.Google Scholar

11. Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (1904), Cd. 2175, Vol. I. Report and Appendix.Google Scholar

12. Meacham, , Regaining Paradise, pp. 11–43.Google Scholar

13. Champion, A. and Atkins, D., The Counterurbanisation Cascade: An Analysis of the Census Special Migration Statistics for Great Britain (Newcastle, 1996)Google Scholar, quoted in Hall, and Ward, , Sociable Cities, p. 106.Google Scholar

14. Beevers, Robert, The Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard (London, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buder, Stanley, Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community (Oxford, 1990).Google Scholar

15. Osborn, F. J., ‘Sir Ebenezer Howard: The Evolution of his Ideas,’ Town Planning Review, Vol. XXI, No. 3 (Oct. 1950), pp. 225–6.Google Scholar

16. Fishman, , Urban Utopias, pp. 38–9.Google Scholar

17. Beevers, , Garden City Utopia, p. 40.Google Scholar

18. Buder, , Visionaries and Planners, pp. 59–60.Google Scholar

19. Howard, , Garden Cities, pp. 46–8.Google Scholar

20. Howard, , ‘Commonsense Socialism,’Google Scholar quoted in Beevers, , Garden City Utopia, p. 31.Google Scholar

21. Gervais, David, Literary Englands: Versions of Englishness in Modern Writing (Cambridge, 1993), p. 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. Hollinghurst, David, The Spell (London, 1998)Google Scholar, Barnes, Julian, England, England (London, 1998).Google Scholar

23. See Lowenthal, David, ‘British National Identity and the English Landscape’, Rural History, 2 (1991), 205–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Howkins, Alun, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Robert, Colls and Philip, Dodd, eds., Englishness: Politics and Culture (London, 1986), pp. 62–88.Google Scholar

24. Hobsbawm, E. J., Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 170.Google Scholar

25. Howkins, , ‘Discovery of Rural England’, pp. 65–6.Google Scholar

26. Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (London, 1973), p. 248.Google Scholar

27. Wiener, Martin, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 46–7.Google Scholar

28. Howkins, , ‘Discovery of Rural England’, pp. 64, 82–3.Google Scholar

29. Gervais, , Literary Englands, p. 74.Google Scholar

30. Chesterton, G. K. quoted by Lowenthal, David, ‘British National Identity and the English Landscape’, p. 215.Google Scholar

31. Gervais, , Literary Englands, p. 2.Google Scholar

32. Masterman, quoted by Wiener, , English Culture, pp. 50–1.Google Scholar

33. See Williamson, Tom and Bellamy, Liz, Property and Landscape: A Social History of Landownership and the English Countryside (London, 1987).Google Scholar

34. Wiener, , English Culture, pp. 49–63 (quotation, p. 63).Google Scholar

35. Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975).Google Scholar

36. Butterfield, Hubert, The Englishman and his History (Cambridge, 1945), p. 2Google Scholar; Orwell, George, The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) in his England, Your England, and Other Essays (London, 1954), pp. 193–4.Google Scholar

37. For the influence of this view over much of the twentieth century see Ahier, John, Industry, Children and the Nation (Brighton, 1988).Google Scholar

38. For a detailed discussion of these issues see Heathorn, Stephen, For Home, Country and Race: Constructing Gender, Class and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880–1914 (University of Toronto Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Gammon, V., ‘Folk song collecting in Sussex and Surrey’, History Workshop Journal, (Autumn 1980), p. 80.Google Scholar

40. Foss, Herbert, Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Study (London, 1950).Google Scholar

41. Meacham, , Regaining Paradise, pp. 70–95.Google Scholar

42. Meacham, , Regaining Paradise, p. 82.Google Scholar

43. Unwin, R. and Parker, B., ‘The Art of Building a Home’ (1901), reprinted in Crees, Walter L., ed., The Legacy of Raymond Unwin (Cambridge MA, 1967), p. 51.Google Scholar

44. Meacham, , Regaining Paradise, p. 85.Google Scholar

45. Miller, M., Letchworth: The First Garden City, (Chichester, 1989), pp. 88–111.Google Scholar

46. Buder, , Visionaries and Planners, pp. 79–83.Google Scholar

47. Macfadyen, Dugald, Sir Ebenezer Howard and the Town Planning Movement (Manchester, 1933), p. 31.Google Scholar

48. Meacham, , Regaining Paradise, p. 146–77.Google Scholar

49. Ward, Stephen, ‘The Garden City Introduced,’ in Ward, , ed., Garden City, pp. 8.Google Scholar

50. Ostrowski, W., ‘Sir Ebenezer Howard in Poland,’ Town and Country Planning, Vol. XXXIV, no. 11 (Nov. 1966), pp. 511–12.Google Scholar

51. Hall, and Ward, , Sociable Cities, pp. 198–203.Google Scholar

52. Neville, Ralph, ‘The Divorce of Man from Nature,’ Garden Cities and Town Planning, Vol. IV, No. 34 (August 1909), p. 227.Google Scholar

53. Arlens, Frederick H. A., ‘English Origins’ in Ward, , ed., Garden City, pp. 37–9.Google Scholar

54. Jones, Gareth Stedman, Outcast London (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 128–30.Google Scholar

55. Jones, Greta, Social Hygiene in Twentieth Century Britain (New York, 1986), p. 29.Google Scholar

56. Buder, , Visionaries and Planners, p. 66.Google Scholar