Howard’s diagram built: a circular town in six wards round a central garden, with its public buildings, Central Park, glass arcade, Grand Avenue of schools and churches, rings of Arts and Crafts cottages at twelve to the acre, a factory ring on the circular railway and a permanent agricultural belt.
Ebenezer Howard proposed in 1898, and again in 1902, that the choice between the crowded town and the empty country was false: a new kind of settlement could have the advantages of both. His garden city would be built on land bought cheaply by a trust, so that the rising value would belong to the community; it would stop growing at about 32,000 people and set up its next colony beyond a belt of farmland that could never be built on. He drew it as a diagram (six boulevards dividing concentric rings into six wards) and warned that a real town must follow its site.
At the centre lies a garden, ringed by the town hall, concert hall, theatre, library, museum, gallery and hospital; beyond them the Central Park, enclosed by the “Crystal Palace”, a glass arcade of shops and winter garden. Then come the rings of houses, broken by the Grand Avenue, a park 420 feet wide in which every ward has its school and its churches; and on the outer ring the factories, warehouses and yards, served by a circular railway. The dimensions here are compressed to about a third of Howard’s so that the whole plan fits the view.
The houses are those of Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, who planned the first garden city at Letchworth in 1903: roughcast cottages in groups under long tiled roofs, with gables, tall chimneys and wide casements, set back behind front gardens with long gardens behind. They stand twelve to the acre, the density Unwin defended in Nothing Gained by Overcrowding! (1912). Click a building for its rule.