Ebenezer Howard: inventor of the garden city

Ebenezer Howard: inventor of the garden city, Frances Knight, Oxford University Press, 2023, 240 pages, hardback.

One night in 1914 an idea came to Ebenezer Howard in a dream. He would write a message to the German people, go up in a plane (yes, in 1914) and scatter pacifist leaflets (1,200,000 of them, he calculated) over Germany. His message would warn of the danger of nations being plunged into slaughter by the decisions of tyrannical rulers. Arbitration at the Hague would enable ‘humanity and civilisation [to] triumph over brutality and barbarism.’

Howard’s friend, the playwright George Bernard Shaw, told him that the idea was ‘entirely impractical’ and that he should ‘sit quietly at home.’

The man often described as the father of modern town planning, and a person of notable modesty, Howard certainly had a high degree of self-confidence. Having founded Letchworth Garden City in 1903, by 1919 he was disappointed by its financial difficulties and lack of progress. So he decided to found another garden city. Without the support of his colleagues in the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, he went to an auction and bid for the land on which to build Welwyn Garden City. Lacking the necessary funding, he somehow persuaded the auctioneer to lend him the balance of the deposit.

After his death Shaw described Howard as ‘one of those heroic simpletons who do big things while our prominent worldlings are explaining why they are Utopian and impossible.’

The subtitle of Frances Knight’s biography ‘Ebenezer Howard: inventor of the garden city’ is well chosen. Howard was an inveterate inventor of mechanical devices (most of which failed), and the garden city was also an invention. None of its elements was new: Howard reviewed a wide range of ideas of 19th-century visionaries, adopting only those that he thought would complement each other and, crucially, promote social and economic cooperation.

His boldest idea of all was that the freehold of each garden city would be collectively owned, enabling the rise in land values brought about by the creation of the city to be retained as part of the community’s wealth, rather than being siphoned off by developers and speculators. The present Labour government is trying to work out how that principle can be applied to urban development today.

Frances Knight is emeritus professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Nottingham. Her book is in a series called ‘Spiritual Lives’, featuring biographies of prominent men and woman whose eminence was not primarily based on a specifically religious contribution. Religion was central to Ebenezer Howard’s life: ‘the Garden City movement was designed to solve a spiritual, as much as an economic problem,’ Knight writes, ‘and Howard believed that it had arisen as a result of his being the recipient of divine inspiration.’

As well as being a committed nonconformist Christian, Howard believed in spiritualism, making determined efforts to contact his first wife after her early death. One of the fascinating themes in Knight’s book is, as she describes it, ‘the syncretic relationship between Protestant orthodoxy and the spirit world in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries’.

The son of a baker, Howard earned his living for most of his career as a shorthand-writer in Parliament and the courts. Frances Knight has done a superb job of researching and telling the story of how Shaw’s ‘heroic simpleton’ founded two garden cities, inspired the town-planning movement and earned a knighthood.

This article originally appeared as ‘Heroic simpleton’ in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 181, published in December 2024. It was written by Rob Cowan, editor of Context.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation