OUGD603 - Guidebook - History of Letchworth Garden City

"A Garden City is a town designed for industry and healthy living; of a size that makes possible for a full measure of social life, but not larger; surrounded by a permanent belt of rural land; the whole of the land being in public ownership or held in the trust for the community". 
- C.B. Purdom (1919).

Letchworth is the world's first garden city (situated in Hertfordshire, United Kingdom), created as a solution to the squalor and poverty of urban life in Britain in the late 19th Century. Founded in 1903 by social reformer, Ebenezer Howard, the town's development was based on his ideas published in his 1898 book entitled 'To-morrow: A Peaceful Path To Real Reform' in which he suggested that out of a marriage of town and country would spring "a new hope, a new life, a new civilisation". Summed up in his three magnets diagram, the town was described as combining the advantages of cities and the countryside while eliminating their disadvantages. Industry would be kept separate from residential areas (an idea called zoning), and trees and open spaces would prevail everywhere. Only one tree was felled during the entire initial construction phase of the town, and the term 'garden city' derived from an image of the city being situated within a belt of countryside, known as the 'green belt'.

Tourist Information Centre Leaflet: A Brief History of Letchworth Garden City
1903 - 2003.

The Three Magnets:

The three magnets diagram summarises the political, economic, and social contexts underlying Howard's utopian vision for the future of British settlement. One magnet lists the advantages and disadvantages of town life, and another is accompanied by the positives and negatives of country life. The third magnet communicates Howard's proposal of a town-country. In the centre features 'the people' as a response to the Victorian workers at the time torn between inner-city slum conditions and a lack of opportunities afforded by more rural settings.