Letchworth
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Letchworth Garden City | |
|
  |
|
| Population | 33,600 |
|---|---|
| OS grid reference | |
| District | North Hertfordshire |
| Shire county | Hertfordshire |
| Region | East |
| Constituent country | England |
| Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
| Post town | LETCHWORTH GARDEN CITY |
| Postcode district | SG6 |
| Dial code | 01462 |
| Police | Hertfordshire |
| Fire | Hertfordshire |
| Ambulance | East of England |
| UK Parliament | North East Hertfordshire |
| European Parliament | East of England |
| List of places: UK • England • Hertfordshire | |
Letchworth Garden City, more commonly Letchworth, is a town in Hertfordshire, England. The town's name is taken from one of the three villages it surrounded (the other two being Willian and Norton) - all of which featured in the Domesday Book. The land used was first purchased by Quakers who had intended to farm the area and build a Quaker community.[citation needed] They very quickly discovered the soil to be chalky and of poor agricultural use.
The Garden City was founded in 1903 by Ebenezer Howard, was one of the first new towns, and is the world's first Garden City. Its development inspired another Garden City project at Welwyn Garden City, as well as many other smaller projects worldwide (Canberra, the Australian capital was influenced by its design concepts), and had great influence on future town planning and the New Towns movement. Today it has a population of around 33,600.
Contents |
[edit] The town's development
[edit] The early days
In 1898, the social reformer Ebenezer Howard wrote a book entitled Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (later republished as Garden Cities of Tomorrow), in which he advocated the construction of a new kind of town, summed up in his Three Magnets diagram as combining the advantages of 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. His ideas were mocked in the press but struck a chord with many, especially members of the Arts and Crafts movement and the Quakers.
A competition was held to find a town design which could translate Howard's ideas into reality, and within a few years the company "First Garden City Ltd." was formed, Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin were appointed architects, and 16 km² of land outside Hitchin were purchased for building. In keeping with the ideals only one tree was felled during the entire initial contruction phase of the town, and an arrea devoted to agriculture surrounding the town was included in the plan - the first "Green Belt".
In 1905, and again in 1907, the company held the Cheap Cottages Exhibitions, contests to build inexpensive housing, which attracted some 60,000 visitors and had a significant effect on planning and urban design in the UK, pioneering and popularisin such concepts as pre-fabrication, the use of new building materials, and front and back gardens. The Exhibitions were sponsored by the Daily Mail, and their popularity was significant in the development that newspaper's launching of the Ideal Home Exhibition (which has more recently become the Ideal Home Show) - the first of which took place the year after the second Cheap Cottages Exhibition.
Railway companies often ran excursions to the town, bringing people to marvel at the social experiment and sometimes to mock it: 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 did not stop the town having a "pub" however - the Skittles Inn or the "pub with no beer" which opened as early as 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 continued - including the Three Horseshoes in Norton, The George IV on the borders with Baldock, 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 was just outside the town's border.
This ban was finally lifted after a referendum in 1958, which resulted in the the Broadway Hotel becoming the first public house in the centre of the Garden City. Several other pubs have opened since 1958, but to this day the town centre has less than half-a-dozen pubs - a remarkably low number of a town if its size. One effect of this is that the centre of the town is normally a noticably quiet and peaceful place in the evenings!
One of the most prominent industries to arrive in the town in the early years was the manufacture of corsets: the Spirella Company began building a large factory in 1912, close to the middle of town and the railway station that opened the next year. The Spirella building, completed in 1920, blends in despite its central position through being disguised as a large country house, complete with towers and a ballroom. During the Second World War, the factory was also involved in producing parachutes and decoding machinery. Because corsets fell out of fashion, the factory closed in the 1980s, and was eventually refurbished and converted into offices. Another significant employer in the town was Shelvoke and Drewry, a manufacturer of dustcarts and fire engines which existed from 1922 until 1990; as was Hands (Letchworth), James Drewry joining them in 1935, who manufactured axles, brakes and Hands Trailers. Letchworth had a very diverse light industry, including K & L Steel Foundry, often a target for German bombers in World War II, the Letchworth Parachute Factory, J M Dent and Son (also known as The Aldine Press, Garden City Press, and the biggest employer British Tabulating, later to become Hollerith, then ICT and finally ICL (International Computers Limited).
At one time the "tab" as it was known had occupancy of over 30 factories in Icknield Way (the original Roman Road, Works Road and finally in Blackhorse Road. Blackhorse Road was built on what was the continuation of the original Roman road the "Icknield Way". Upon building the new ICL building the remains of a large Roman camp was found, many articles being found and saved for display in the Letchworth Museum. In WWII a number of early computers were built in what became known as the ICL 1.1 plant.
[edit] Civic History
One of Letchworth Garden City's founding principles, unlike any previous British attempt at new town design, was that land should be held in common for the good of all. First Garden City Ltd owned the entire estate, but leased plots to citizens for building houses, to farmers for growing crops, and so on. The rents would provide income for the company, which would then invest the money back into the community. All citizens were shareholders, so all money was invested for the common good, and developments which the citizens disliked (tower blocks, for example) could be restricted as they pleased.
This arrangement began to go wrong and many residents in the town would often remark about the town being run by the "forty thieves" which in 1961 came to a head when Amy Rose and a company named Hotel York Ltd realised that if it bought enough of the shares from the citizens it could have a controlling interest in the town's estate, with no guarantee that the money would be used for the common good. To remedy this, the then Member of Parliament, Martin Madden sponsored a bill in Parliament, and Parliament passed the Letchworth Garden City Act 1962, which created a public body, the Letchworth Garden City Corporation, to take on the business of First Garden City Ltd; as a statutory corporation it could not be bought. The Corporation's officers were appointed by the Crown; later, the Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation Act 1995 replaced the Corporation with a charity, the Foundation, whose officers were appointed by local residents.
Many of the original ground leases were written to last for nine hundred and ninety-nine years, but some ran for only ninety-nine; around 2001 many of these shorter leases began to expire, whereupon the Foundation sold the freehold of the land to the houseowners.
The civic local government of Letchworth has always been separate from the Company, Corporation or Foundation. It was formerly the responsibility of the Letchworth Urban District Council. After that body's abolition in 1974, local government became the responsibility of the North Hertfordshire District Council.
In 2003/2004 the closure of a Norton School, the threatened closure of the outdoor swimming pool and problems with planning in the town (planning applications need to be cleared by both the District Council and the Foundation) saw campaigners agitate for a separate town council. A petition was duly raised and presented to the District Council. In response to this the District Council held a referendum in December 2003, the results showed 60% in favour of creating a town council. Elections to the new body were held in late May 2005. Though the political parties all put up candidates for all seats, a group of independent candidates, citing Ebenezer Howard and the principles of the Garden City as a motivators won all the seats. It was described the following day as 'not so much a landslide, more so a revolution in local government'.
[edit] Letchworth today
Several housing estates have been added to Letchworth since its inception.
To the north of the town The Grange began construction in 1947 and to the south east Jackmans [1] was built from 1961. These were council/municipal housing estates with many residents originally coming from the London "overspill". Two more prosperous (and private) estates - Lordship Farm and Manor Park - were built from in 1971 to the south west.
Smaller areas of in-fill housing also appeared in the 1990s, particularly on land adjacent to Jackmans on the sites of a former creamery and the Willian Secondary School, which had closed in the late 1980s when school rolls in the town had begun to fall.
Willian School, along with two primary schools (Lannock and Radburn) had been built as part of the Jackmans Estate, which was constructed with not only its own schools, but also shops, library, community centre, sheltered housing, and public house. Bordered by major roads this almost self-contained community developed a reputation as being slightly cut-off from the rest of the town and tends to be overlooked in most studies of Garden City development.
This is an unfortunate oversight as the plan of the estate (based on the "Radburn principle" pioneered in Radburn, New Jersey - a town whose design was itself inspired by the original Garden City) was an impressive and largely successful addition to the town, and matched most Garden City principles. Certainly for a period that has a reputation for poor town and residential planning it is remarkably well executed piece of urban design.
Almost all residential housing on Jackmans is in a series of cul-de-sacs with access off a single feeder road - appropriately called Radburn Way - which in turn is crossed by a series of underpasses.
The effect is to largely separate pedestrians from motor traffic. Most houses do not open onto streets with passing traffic, but onto pedestian squares, green areas, and children's playgrounds. The estate is crossed by a series of footpaths. The idea is not unique to Jackmans, and has been tried in New Towns elsewhere, but rarely so successfully.
In some cases the housing itself 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 large amounts of internal space, but of variable build quality (particularly, it is alleged, for houses whose panels were contructed on Friday afternoons). Other parts of the estate used more traditional methods.
Over time increased mobility and changing age profiles has reduced the need for the estate to have its own facilities. As well as the loss of its secondary school, the public house closed in the late 1990s, and the public library in 2006. The two primary schools on the estate are both running at under 50% capacity and will be reviewed, along with the provision of primary education generally in the town, in 2007-8.
The Garden City estate began to turn a profit in the 1970s, leading to investment in a number of town amenities: a working farm, Standalone Farm, in 1980, a leisure centre and a theatre named Plinston Hall in 1982, a free hospital (the Ernest Gardiner Day Hospital) in 1984, and major refurbishment of the town's cinema and shopping centre in 1996 and 1997. The Foundation celebrated the town's centenary in 2003 by building a landscaped path for walkers and cyclists. The path, known as the Greenway, forms a 20km loop around the town.
[edit] Town Twinning
Letchworth is twinned with:
Chagny, France;
Wissen, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany;
Kristiansand, Norway.
[edit] Schools
Letchworth hosts a mixture of both private and state schools. State schools include "The Highfield School", a Specialist Science Status school, and "Fearnhill", a Maths and Computing Specialist Status school. "Fearnhill" had formally been been town's grammar school until comprehensive schools were introduced in the 1960. "Letchworth Grammar School" has originally occupied promient buildings in the centre of the town which are now used by various local authority services, but which are still known as the "Grammar School buildings" and which still displays the former school's name over its doors.
The private schools in Letchworth are "St. Christopher School" and single-sex girls' school "St Francis's College". St. Christopher is arguably the most famous school in Letchworth, it is vegetarian and has a strong Quaker ethos. It originally occupied the St Francis College site, where some of its original buildings remain - including some of the "open air" classrooms - remain in use to this day (all be it adapte slightly). Both schools admit both borders and day-pupils.
"Knight's Templar" is another local school, although in the neighbouring town of Baldock, many children from Letchworth are taught there, especially following the closure of "Norton School" in 2002 which, for its final year of operation was called "Knights Templar (Letchworth)". Teacher shortages at the school had lead to significant numbers of temporary staff, with the quality of teaching by some staff deemed unsatisfactory by an Ofsted report. It was the second of Letchworth's original four secondary schools to close, following the former "Willian School" which closed in 1988.
[edit] Black squirrels
Letchworth Garden City is home to one of the UK's largest colonies of "black squirrels", thought by some to be a genetic mutation of the common North American Grey squirrel, but in fact a rare but not unique example of Melanism. Sightings of black squirrels originally appeared in the area of Norton Common and later the centre of the town from the 1950s, and possibly before, and have since gradually spread, becoming common on the Jackmans estate by the 1980s and Lordship in the 1990s. Reports of black squirrels in the neighbouring town of Hitchin started to appear in the local press around 2005.
[edit] Roundabouts
During January 2005 "Sollershot Circus" (to give it its formal name) in Letchworth Garden City was recognised as having the first roundabout on a public road in the United Kingdom, dating from circa 1909. This was probably inspired by the traffic system at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, a city which was familiar to the designers of Letchworth.
When first built traffic could circulate around the central island in both directions. The more familiar rules of the road for roundabouts were not adopted until the 1920s.
Roundabouts remain a feature of the Garden City's road network, which has few traffic lights other than those on pedestrian crossings.
[edit] Famous Residents
Simon West, Director of films such as 'Con Air' and 'Lara Croft: Tomb Raider' was born in Letchworth. He also lived at 2 Lordship Lane and attended Fearnhill School before progressing onto his film-making career.
Michael Winner, film producer. Attended St Christopher School before going on to Cambridge University.
Patrick Taylor, well-respected 90s rap DJ, was born in Letchworth, and attended the local Highfield School.
Author Vera Britten.
Actor Laurence Olivier
Actress Una Stubbs
Cricketer Sir John Berry Hobbs (better known as "Jack Hobbs") - who scored more centuries than any other player in cricket history - played for Letchworth after his retirement from first class cricket, scoring his final century in all cricket for the club. For a period he opened the batting for Letchworth with The Reverend Thomas Killick ("Tom Killick")- who had also previously opened for England.
Scientist Magnus Pyke.
Scientist James Lovelock, proponent of the Gaia hypothesis, was born in Letchworth.
[edit] See also
- British Tabulating Machine Company (based at Letchworth)
- The Spirella Building
[edit] The town's government
- Letchworth tourist guide
- Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation
- Hansard debate on the Heritage Foundation bill
- NHDC's page about the proposed Letchworth Town Council
- Campaign in favour of creating Letchworth Town Council
- Website for the new Letchworth town council
[edit] Facilities
[edit] Sport
[edit] Photographs
- Letchworth from the air
- Photographs of buildings in the town
- A photographic tour of the town
- Photographs from Geograph British Isles
- Flickr Letchworth Garden City photo group
[edit] Other
- Hertbeat FMLocal radio station for the town on 106.7 and 106.9
- A Guardian article about the history of the town
