Letchworth: the First Garden City. . - A Greenfield Site - book review

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2003 by Colin Ward

By Mervyn Miller. Chichester: Phillimore. 2002. [pounds sterling]25.00

In 2003, Letchworth, the first of the two towns founded by Ebenezer Howard to bring his the-ones to life, reaches its centenary, and a revised version of Mervyn Miller's handsomely illustrated book has been timed to celebrate the event. The town was poorly funded, but there were compensations. One was that its architect-planners were Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, masters of domestic design, another was the ingenuity of its Cheap Cottages Exhibitions, attracting experiment and publicity, and a third was the sheer enthusiasm of the pioneers. Half a century later, First Garden City Limited was actually in profit, and a group of speculators, watching for plums in the property market ripe for exploitation, managed to buy enough shares to win control.

Miller tells the complex story of the Letchworth Garden City Corporation Act of 1962, designed to ensure that dividends remained limited and that any further income was to be spent for the benefit of the inhabitants. The story is important. Letchworth is not immune from general trends. Miller finds that, last year, it was the seventh most popular place to live in the country. He explains that investors were buying houses to rent them out, and that 'first-time buyers had practically been priced out'.