Episode 38. Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City

SYNOPSIS

Born into a hardworking family of London confectioners and leaving school at fifteen to work as a City clerk, Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) was an unlikely candidate for the founding of a visionary movement. Yet the new garden cities at Letchworth (1903) and at Welwyn (1920) would not have been founded without the inspiring leadership, diplomatic skills and selflessness of Howard, whom a friend the dramatist, George Bernard Shaw, once termed an ‘heroic simpleton’. 

Republished as Garden Cities of To-morrow in 1902,  Howard’s influential book set out his business case, including the now-famous Three Magnets diagram, for a new type of settlement. Its purpose was to relocate dwellers from overcrowded, industrial cities and to also remedy rural depopulation and agricultural depression by providing job, services and good housing whilst retaining the character of the countryside.  Howard’s employment as a parliamentary shorthand writer brought him into fruitful contact with many public figures who were wrestling with this same problem. 

The interview covers the many influences upon Howard from his life-long Congregationalism to his youthful experimentation as a homesteader in America, espousal of spiritualism, participation in the progressive debating circles of London, and his astute deployment of trade unionists, industrialists, newspaper magnates, landowners, economists, philanthropists and architects in support of ‘the gospel of the garden city’.  Driven by frequent spiritual epiphanies, Howard lived to see realized his plans to build a New Jerusalem in the Hertfordshire countryside .  

GUEST

Frances Knight is Emeritus Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Nottingham and an authority on Anglicanism in such works as The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society (CUP, 1995).  When moving to Nottingham her attention turned to the culture of English religion in the period between 1885 and 1901 culminating in Victorian Christianity at the Fin de Siècle (I.B.Taurus, 2016).   

When he was dying, Ebenezer Howard urged any prospective biographer to remember that the ‘spiritual dimension’ had always been central to his life and work.  Professor Knight’s Ebenezer Howard: Inventor of the Garden City (OUP, 2023) is the first biography to comply with those wishes, placing Howard squarely amid the cultural ferment of the fin de siècle., where new and utopian solutions to the problems of British society were discussed and implemented. 

Frances’s interview with Simon Machin was recorded online on 9 November 2023.