George Osborne: Socialist?

In announcing plans to build a garden city in Ebbsfleet, Kent, George Osborne has resurrected a long dormant town-planning ideal. The term sounds like an appealing solution to the country’s housing shortage, evoking images of tree-lined boulevards lined with Tudor revivals. Yet given the social reformist origins of the idea, Osborne’s assertion that Ebbsfleet “will be a proper garden city” seems a bit surprising. What would a “proper” garden city actually look like?

The garden city concept was developed at the turn of the 20th century by stenographer and utopian visionary Ebenezer Howard. At a time when the social ills of the Victorian Era were becoming increasingly stark, Howard envisaged a new magnet of population settlement. Combining the previously separate poles of “town” and “country,” the garden city would “restore people to the land,” as he wrote in 1902.

Howard’s prescribed mix of city and nature extended outward from a central park, which would house civic institutions and shops. The city would be surrounded by a publicly owned green belt to prevent its expansion. Industrial development within its perimeter would make the city self-sufficient.

It is this reposeful vision of Garden cities that politicians have returned to throughout the past century to describe successive waves in urban development in the UK. But in doing so, they have taken the pleasant-sounding term “garden city” and discarded its philosophical substance.

Howard was, after all, more a social visionary than a town planner (the latter discipline was, in fact, developed only later by one of Howard’s acolytes, Raymond Unwin). As part of the late 19^th century movement of social reformers, Howard was influenced by socialist thinkers such as Edward Bellamy and William Morris.

But Howard did not wholly subscribe to socialism himself. The garden city was designed as a “social city,” meant to bridge the divide between socialism and individualism. Land was to be collectively purchased by the community, with land rents re-invested into community development. As a self-governing and self-funded entity, the garden city was to be free from central government control.

Comprising a mixed-income population of no more than 30,000 people, the garden city idea was underpinned by a spirit of strong community cohesion. Neighbourhoods, evoking medieval cooperative living, would be organised around quadrangles of 30 households, with communal dining rooms, child crèches and laundries.

It is therefore no coincidence that Soviet planners enthusiastically took up the garden city idea. And it wasn’t just the Soviets. In the US, Howard’s concept was influential in the development of neighbourhoods as the primary building blocks of cities, and urban planners in countries from France to Japan were inspired by his vision. Back at home, the garden city brand soon caught on. Yet UK developments—like those abroad—quickly lost sight of Howard’s original principles.

Letchworth and Welwyn, founded in 1903 and 1920, respectively, were perhaps the closest the UK came to “proper” Garden Cities. But, as urbanist Peter Hall notes, within the first two years of its formal opening Letchworth attracted only 1,000 “idealist, artistic” residents. At Letchworth’s residential college, residents slept on hammocks and “grew wheat according to what were thought to be Kropotkinesque principles, each grain getting individual attention; the result was mainly weeds and thistles.”

But even Letchworth and Welwyn came to cast off the principles of communalism and self-sufficiency that Howard imagined. Fearing collapse and loss of investment (and noting, perhaps, the first residents’ ill-fated attempts at agriculture), the directors of the first garden city company never transferred authority to the citizens of these communities. Today these garden cities are largely middle class commuter towns.

In the period after the Second World War, the garden city served as the premise for the New Towns programme, embraced by the Attlee government. But, again, despite the appropriation of the garden city model, these developments had little in common with Howard’s original intentions. Financed by the Exchequer and products of top-down central planning, New Towns fundamentally contradicted Howard’s emphasis on autonomous governance. Urban planning, founded upon utopian visions of social reform, survived only as a set of functional planning guidelines.

Now George Osborne has picked up the garden city torch. But while Ebbsfleet seems like a good location for new housing development, building a “proper” Garden City entails more than implementing a pleasant city layout. Surely, the plan to develop Ebbsfleet within 19 minutes of London and by means of an urban development corporation undermines its original anarchic utopian doctrine. Whether he is aware of them or not, Osborne would likely prefer to stay away from such ideological connotations.