Garden Cities of To-morrow

A parliamentary stenographer’s proposal for a new kind of town, owned by its community, combining the advantages of town and country: 32,000 people on 1,000 acres in the middle of a permanent agricultural belt of 5,000 more, laid out in rings round a central garden.

Howard first published the book in 1898 as To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform; the revised edition of 1902 took the title by which it is known. His famous diagram of the “Three Magnets” asks where people will go: the town offers work, wages and society but foul air and high rents; the country offers beauty and fresh air but no work or company; the third magnet, “Town-Country”, offers both.

The garden city is described in the first chapter as a diagram, with the warning that the real plan must follow the site. A circular town of about 1,240 yards radius is crossed by six boulevards 120 feet wide that divide it into six wards. At its centre is a garden of five and a half acres, ringed by the large public buildings (town hall, concert and lecture hall, theatre, library, museum, picture gallery and hospital), and beyond them a Central Park of 145 acres, enclosed by a glass arcade, the “Crystal Palace”. Rings of houses follow, broken by a Grand Avenue 420 feet wide, itself a park, holding the schools and churches. On the outer ring stand factories, warehouses and yards beside a circular railway, and beyond the town lies the agricultural belt, never to be built over. When the town is full, a new one is started beyond the belt.

The book led directly to the First Garden City at Letchworth (1903), planned by Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, and to Welwyn Garden City (1920), and through them to the British New Towns after 1946.

The book, part by part