Lasting legacy of social ideas : Socialist concepts that lie behind Letchworth Garden City’s successful 100-year history
Morning Star: November 27, 2003: Alan Spence
Reproduced here by kind permission of Morning Star.
Letchworth Garden City, which lies 30 odd miles from London, is 100 years old. The 5,500 acres originally home to hamlets of a few hundred people has been built into a modern minicity of 36,000 inhabitants.
There’s nothing strange about this, except that the land is owned in common and rent, from uses as varied as farming to industrial premises, is used to improve the infrastructure of the city and the charitable needs of its inhabitants in their many and different organised forms.
To celebrate Letchworth’s centenary, the 1902-published book that prompted its building, Garden Cities of Tomorrow by Ebenezer Howard, has been reissued in its original format and under its 1898 title, Tomorrow A Peaceful Path to Real Reform.
Howard’s book was written as a response to Edward Bellamy’s utopian romance, Looking Backward, which told of a socialist society as seen by a Rip van Winkle who awakes after years of sleep and discovers a manuscript explaining how it came about.
William Morris also read Bellamy. He wrote News from Nowhere in response to its message.
Both Howard and Morris objected to the centralised, authoritarian character of the socialist society as described by Bellamy.
Each of their books centred around federations of small self-governing communities, in which the benefits of both town and country living could be realised.
However, while Morris’s book is visionary, Howard’s is a textbook for how such a society could be built.
In 1903, architects Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, both of whom were members of the Socialist League, started to build Letchworth on Howard’s principles on land which he and the Garden City Association, which he had formed, had bought.
Letchworth was built with its public buildings and shops in its centre, with industry separated from dwellings and the whole urban area surrounded by horticulture and farming activities.
Its population was planned at 30,000 living in conjoined neighbourhoods, with this minicity forming part of a constellation of such cities, which in turn, were to be known as a social city totalling 250,000 inhabitants.
Land was to be owned in common, with ground and building rents paying back the capital borrowed for its construction before funding municipal expenses and the social welfare of its population.
Within 10 years of its foundation, Letchworth’s account books showed it to be a financial success, as did the growth of industry, public building, and housing and population.
It was during this early building phase in 1907 that Lenin stayed there as a guest of religious minister, Bruce Wallace, the man who rented his Brotherhood Church in London to the fifth congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).
Associated with this phase of Letchworth was Vladimir Semyonov. He was a Russian architect who fled with his wife to London only steps ahead of the tsar’s secret police, who were chasing her for revolutionary activity as a member of the RSDLP.
Settling in Britain in 1901, Semyonov, after a brief spell in South Africa helping the Boers in their rebellion against British imperialism, practised as an architect, but, most importantly, made a special study of Howard and the garden city as it developed.
Returning to Russia in 1912, he persuaded a railway co-operative to allow him to build a village on garden city principles for its workforce at Prozorovka, near Moscow. Unfortunately, World War 1 put a stop to the project.
After 1917, Semyonov and other supporters of the garden city movement occupied key positions in the new organisations formed to build a socialist society in Russia.
The industrial city of Stalingrad was built in 1928 by Semyonov and his colleagues, largely on garden city principles. City ownership of land, however, with its democratically controlled revenue based on co-operative principles, was excluded as the centralist command structure became operative throughout Soviet society.
Before Semyonov and his team went to build the new industrial cities beyond the Urals, he redesigned Moscow for a maximum population of 2 million people, again on garden city lines.
Not that this lasted long. Giantism was the order of the day during those years. After that time, the essential communal core of garden cities was lost – although the form of garden city layout characterised hundreds of cities built before and after 1945.
Sharing a similar fate, due to the anarchy of the free market, was Patrick Abercrombie’s 1944 plan for London.
Like Semyonov’s, it was based on Howard’s town planning principles. Although supported by the 1945 Labour government, it didn’t fit with the profiteering ideals of the 1951 and successive Conservative governments.
Abercrombie, however, was sent by the Labour government to replan Hong Kong following its recapture from the Japanese. Here, he found that the land was owned, as a result of the influence of 19th century land reformer John Stuart Mill, by the colony, which issued leases to the highest bidder.
The colonialists in charge had no time for Abercrombie’s plan and shelved it. However, the huge influx of refugees from China following the 1949 revolution forced a rethink and the planners and architects sent from Britain were products of post-1945 radicalism and imbued with Howard’s principles.
Eight new cities were built to house a population and workforce which has increased from 1.5 million in 1950 to 6.5 million today. Ground rent from land ownership and revenue from rates and other ownerships enabled Hong Kong to top the GDP per person of Britain prior to its return to mainland China in 1997.
Its accumulated reserves meant that it was able to beat off a speculative attack on its currency during the Asian economic meltdown.
Using its massive financial reserves, it bought shares, deliberately forced down by hedge-funders, until it owned 9% of Hong Kong’s share capital. This, with financial controls, forced speculators from the market – with them having lost a lot of money in the process.
Both of these examples provide an extra dimension that is omitted from all the various commentators’ views on the reissue of Howard’s book.
Howard – and the book that he wrote – expressed a century of theoretical and practical attempts by the working class and its supporters to find a healthy alternative city and social form to replace capitalist slums, building sprawl and disease-generating industrialisation, with its rigid domination by landowners and industrial capitalists.
Robert Owen used the example of New Lanark in Scotland to design model co-operative villages and Tom Spence’s The Real Rights of Man showed how to expropriate land from the ruling class and put it to community use.
These, along with Frederick Engels’s Conditions of the English Working Class formed the background to some of the core measures for change in the Communist Manifesto, which called fro the “abolition of property in land and all rents of land to public purposes”, the “combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries”, “gradual abolition of distinction between town and country” and “a more equitable distribution of the population over the country”. These measures are the bedrock of garden city principles.
It was the post-war Labour government’s proposal to build new towns
on Howard’s principles and nationalise land usage that galvanised
change in Britain and interest throughout international planning circles.
But it was not until Abercrombie’s use of the peculiarities of Hong
Kong’s historical ownership of land by the state and the realisation
and maturing of his plan for a constellation of industrial cities that the
supremacy of garden cities as a new urban form could be seen.
The left has been slow to pick up on this superiority as a campaigning issue.
Not so the landed gentry and speculators.
Letchworth Garden City Trust has downplayed the part of ground rent in the financial success of the city today and almost totally excluded Howard and his principles during the centenary celebrations.
In the 1960s, a revolt by the citizens of Letchworth against carpet-baggers’ attempts to buy out the company forced the Conservative government to turn it into a public company to protect its assets.
The danger of a population unaware of the real significance of Howard’s aim for the total reconstruction of society on community ownership of land, co-operative working partnerships and constellation of social cities is that Letchworth may today fall easy prey to speculators offering cash for a buyout.
This would complete the task set by the Thatcher regime when it sold off the 32 new towns built after 1945.
The need now is to renew the spark of Howard’s radical campaigning tradition, which led to Letchworth, followed by Welwyn Garden City, the New Towns Act and a comprehensive town and country planning system introduced by the 1945 Labour government.
All the socially beneficial parts of these Acts are now under immediate
threat from new Labour, with its ideological submission to transnational
capitalism.
Another generation of activists must pick up the baton. It can do this knowing
that the activities of two centuries of pioneers is corroborated by the
successes of Letchworth and Hong Kong.
These can be seen as markers in the construction of socialism as a universal system of liberation from the existing and growing impoverishment of the working populations of the world.