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Letchworth history

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Before the Garden City: Old Letchworth

The name is derived from the Old English “lycce weorth”, meaning a farm inside a fence or enclosure. It appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as “Leceworde”, when it was described as having nine households of villagers, four cottagers, one slave and one priest. By the time of the Norman Conquest, Letchworth was established as a village.

The early days of the Garden City

In 1898, the social reformer Ebenezer Howard wrote a book entitled To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (later republished in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow), in which he advocated the construction of a new kind of town, summed up in a diagram called “The Three Magnets”, showing how the mixed advantages and disadvantages of town or country living could be combined into a third option, labelled “Town-Country”, offering the advantages of both cities and the countryside while eliminating their disadvantages. Industry would be kept separate from residential areas—such zoning was a new idea at the time—and trees and open spaces would prevail everywhere. According to the book the term “garden city” derived from the image of a city being in a belt of open countryside, which would contribute significantly to food production for the population. Howard saw this surrounding band of countryside an integral part of the garden city concept, providing land not just for agriculture, but also for children’s homes, asylums, new forests and brickfields. The agricultural belt formed part of the total land area that needed to be purchased in order to deliver the garden city as a whole. Echoes of this idea of a protected rural belt were later taken up more generally in town planning in Britain from the mid-twentieth century as the Green Belt. The concept outlined in the book is not simply one of urban planning, but also incorporated a system of community management. Howard proposed that the Garden City project would be financed through a system he called “Rate-Rent”, which combined financing for community services (rates) with a return for those who had invested in the development of the city (rent). The 1898 edition of Howard’s book included a diagram (omitted from the 1902 edition) called “The Vanishing Point of Landlord’s Rent”, illustrating how as the town matured the money originally borrowed would be repaid and the amount available to spend for the benefit of the town would increase. The book also advocated a rudimentary form of competitive tendering, whereby the municipality would purchase services, such as water, fuel, waste disposal, etc., from (often local) commercial providers. These systems were never fully implemented in Letchworth, nor in the later Welwyn Garden City or their numerous imitators. Howard’s ideas were mocked in some sections of the press but struck a chord with many, especially members of the Arts and Crafts movement and the Quakers. After examining several possible locations for establishing a garden city, the garden city pioneers settled on Letchworth as the chosen site. The Letchworth Hall estate had come up for sale, and whilst it alone was too small, secret negotiations with fourteen adjoining landowners allowed an estate of 3,818 acres (1,545 hectares) to be assembled and purchased for £155,587. A company called First Garden City Limited was established on 1 September 1903 to purchase the land and begin building the garden city. A competition was held to find a town design which could translate Howard’s ideas into reality. The winning layout was prepared by Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker. The company adopted the layout plan on 11 February 1904, and the following month Unwin and Parker were appointed as consulting architects. In keeping with the garden concept, most of the pre-existing trees and hedgerows were preserved in the layout. Unwin took the alignment of the town’s main avenue (Broadway) from three old oak trees which stood on the central plateau of the estate and were incorporated into the central square (Broadway Gardens). A temporary railway halt was built in 1903 on the Great Northern Railway’s Hitchin, Royston and Cambridge branch line, which crosses the middle of the Garden City estate. Initially services were irregular special trains for excursions and construction workers. A more substantial (but still temporary) wooden station was opened in 1905 with a regular passenger service. The current railway station was built in 1912 a little to the east of the wooden station, in a prominent location at the end of Broadway, the town’s main avenue. The first new houses were occupied in July 1904. The following month First Garden City Limited held a vote amongst shareholders and residents on what name the new garden city should take. Several options were proposed, including “Garden City”, “Homeworth” and “Alseopolis”. The chosen name was “Letchworth (Garden City)”. The company adopted this as its name for the town, but adoption of the name was not universal. The legal name of the civil parish and (after 1919) urban district remained simply “Letchworth”. First Garden City Limited also gradually dropped the “(Garden City)” suffix from the name, partly reflecting common usage, and partly taking the view that as the town matured it should not permanently be seen as an experiment. Similarly, the town’s railway station was initially called “Letchworth (Garden City)”, but was renamed “Letchworth” in 1937. Ebenezer Howard’s wife, Lizzie (Eliza Ann Bills), died in November 1904 in London, shortly before she had been due to move to a new house on Norton Way South in Letchworth with her husband. As a memorial to her a public hall was built, paid for by public subscriptions. The Mrs Howard Memorial Hall opened in 1906 and was one of the town’s first public buildings. In 1905, and again in 1907, the company held “Cheap Cottages Exhibitions”, which were contests for architects and builders to demonstrate innovations in inexpensive housing. The 1905 exhibition attracted some 60,000 visitors. The exhibitions had a significant effect on planning and urban design in the UK, pioneering and popularising such concepts as pre-fabrication, the use of new building materials, and front and back gardens. The popularity of the exhibitions was significant in leading the Daily Mail to launch the Ideal Home Exhibition (which later became the Ideal Home Show), in 1908. One possible visitor to the fledgling town was Lenin, who was reputed to have visited during May 1907 whilst attending the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London. Contemporary evidence confirming the visit is lacking, but the claim was published in the Daily Mail and the Daily Sketch in November 1916 as part of articles accusing the town of being a haven for communists and conscientious objectors—claims which the town denied. For the first few years the new town’s Anglicans had to travel out to the old parish churches at Letchworth village, Willian or Norton on the edges of the estate. Many of the town’s pioneers had non-conformist leanings, in keeping with the radical spirit of the early town. The first new place of worship to be built was the Free Church, built in 1905 (later rebuilt in 1923). It was followed in 1907 by ‘Howgills’, the Meeting House for the Society of Friends. Letchworth’s founding citizens, attracted by the promise of a better life, were often caricatured by outsiders as idealistic and otherworldly. John Betjeman in his poems Group Life: Letchworth and Huxley Hall painted Letchworth people as earnest health freaks. One commonly-cited example of this is the ban, most unusual for a British town, on selling alcohol in public premises. This was initially decided by a public vote in June 1907, in which 54% voted against allowing a licensed public house. This did not stop the town having a “pub” however – the Skittles Inn or the “pub with no beer” which opened in March 1907. Despite the ban it is not entirely true to say that there were no pubs in the Garden City. Pubs that had existed from before the foundation of the Garden City—including the Three Horseshoes in Norton, and the Three Horseshoes and the Fox in Willian—continued to operate (as they do to this day), and undoubtedly benefited from the lack of alcohol to be had in the centre of the town, as did the pubs in neighbouring Hitchin and Baldock. New inns also sprang up on the borders of the town, one such example being the Wilbury Hotel which opened in 1940 just outside the town’s border. The ban was finally lifted after a referendum in 1957, which led to the opening of the Broadway Hotel in 1962 as the first public house in the centre of the Garden City. Several other public houses have opened since then, but to this day the town centre has only about half-a-dozen pubs, a remarkably low number for a town of its size.

Industry

The town attracted and developed a diverse range of industries in the early years. The biggest employer for a number of years was the British Tabulating Machine Company, which moved from London to Letchworth in 1920. Evidence for extensive Neolithic and Iron Age occupation was found by John Moss-Eccardt of North Hertfordshire Museum.

Housing

Early housing development in Letchworth largely followed Unwin and Parker’s masterplan. Much of the town’s early development was contained between two pre-garden city east-west roads across the estate: Norton Road / Wilbury Road in the north and Hitchin Road / Baldock Road in the south (which became the A601 when roads were numbered in 1923, and was reclassified as the A505 in 1935). The first houses built after the founding of the garden city were a group of six houses called “Alpha Cottages” at 22–32 Baldock Road, where the first residents moved in during July 1904. The Cheap Cottages Exhibitions of 1905 and 1907 saw many individually-designed and often experimental homes built. The 1905 exhibition was mostly held in the area between the railway and Norton Common, along a road called Exhibition Road (later renamed Nevells Road) and the adjoining roads. The 1907 exhibition was mostly to the south of the town in the area around Lytton Avenue and Souberie Avenue. Prior to the First World War much of the town’s other housing development was to the north-east and east of the nascent town centre, within walking distance of, but separated from, the main industrial area on the eastern edge of the town. To the north-east of the town was an area which had been known as Glebe Fields, stretching up to the edge of Norton village. This area was developed from 1905 onwards, mostly with modest workers’ cottages, with the focal point for the new community here being Common View and Cromwell Green, which were laid out in 1907. To the east of the town centre was another area of modest housing around Hillshott, Rushby Mead and Ridge Road, laid out between 1906 and 1914. Much of this area was built by the Howard Cottage Society in an informal Arts and Crafts style, with many of the houses being finished with cream painted rough-cast render, green doors and drainpipes, and red clay-tiled roofs. To the south-west of the town centre was an area of larger individually-designed houses along Broadway and Sollershott towards Letchworth village, which were mostly built for the upper middle classes and were furthest away from the industrial area. In the interwar period housing was built to the east of the town in the Pixmore area (taking its name from the moor of the Pix Brook, the main watercourse in the town), the Westbury area to the west of the town, and the Wilbury area to the north-west of the town along Bedford Road, taking its name from the Bronze Age hill fort. After the Second World War the focus for new development was on large council estates. To the north of the town work began on the Grange estate in 1947. The estate included its own primary schools, recreation ground, public house and a neighbourhood shopping centre on Southfields. The land for the estate was compulsorily purchased from First Garden City Limited by Letchworth Urban District Council. In 1959 an area to the south-east of the town was also compulsorily purchased by Letchworth Urban District Council from First Garden City Limited, with funding provided by London County Council as the area was to accommodate London overspill. This became the Jackmans estate, taking its name from an old wood called Jackmans Plantation which had already lent its name to the nearby street of Jackmans Place, built in the 1920s. The Jackmans estate was developed on the “Radburn principle” which had been pioneered in Radburn, New Jersey, a town which was itself inspired by the garden city movement. The main road on the Jackmans estate is called Radburn Way in acknowledgement of its inspiration. The idea was to minimise the impact of traffic by having houses face onto pedestrian-only green lanes and open spaces, with parking and servicing provided in garage courts behind the houses. The estate included two primary schools, a secondary school called Willian School (this area had been in Willian parish prior to boundary changes in 1908), and a neighbourhood centre at Ivel Court with shops, a community centre, a public house and a library. In some cases the housing on the Jackmans estate varied in quality as—perhaps harking back to the Cheap Cottages Exhibition 60 years before—various different construction methods were tried, including the pre-fabrication of some houses at a shipyard in Sunderland. This resulted in dwellings with relatively generous internal space, influenced by the Parker Morris standards, but of variable build quality. Other parts of the estate used more traditional construction methods. Over time, increased mobility and changing age profiles reduced the need for the Jackmans estate to have its own facilities. The shops and community centre remain, but Willian secondary school closed in 1991, the public house (initially called the Carousel, later the Gatehouse, finally the Sportsman) closed in 1998, and the public library closed in 2006. By 2007 the two primary schools on the estate were both running at under 50% capacity, and so the county council closed Lannock, the smaller of the two, in July 2009. The other, Radburn primary school, remained open but was renamed the Garden City Academy in 2012. Private housing resumed more slowly after the Second World War, partly due to the tight controls on building materials and licences which were imposed and remained in force until 1954. As these restrictions eased work was able to resume on developments which had been started before the war but halted for the duration, such as the area around Bowershott, to the south of the town. Nearby, Howard Drive and the adjoining streets were built through the 1950s and 1960s. This area south of the town was significantly enlarged by the Lordship estate, begun in 1971, which took its name from the old farm in Willian to which the fields had belonged. The Lordship estate included a small parade of shops and a primary school. The nearby Manor Park Estate, to the south-west of the town adjoining Letchworth village, was also begun in 1971. Following the completion of these developments in the 1980s, most new housing in the town has been on previously-developed land, as sites vacated by closed schools and businesses have been redeveloped.

Letchworth today

A hostile takeover of First Garden City Limited in 1960 led to the creation of a public body, the Letchworth Garden City Corporation, which took over the estate in 1963 to protect the original ethos of the garden city. A campaign to change the name officially from Letchwworth to ‘Letchworth’ was successful, with the name of the railway station being changed in 1999 and the SG6 post town changing from ‘Garden City’ in 2003. In 2011 and again in 2012 a George Orwell Festival was held in the nearby village where Orwell lived.

  

Letchworth map & travel guide with history & landmarks to explore

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Tourist Guide to Letchworth Map

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