Читать книгу Sunnyside Gardens - Jeffrey A. Kroessler - Страница 18

Howard and his associates had to wait until after the First World War to embark on Welwyn, their second undertaking. As he initiated that venture, he remarked, “A city will arise as superior in its beauty and magnificence to our first crude attempt as the finished canvas of a great artist to the rough and untaught attempts of a schoolboy.”¹⁵ In 1919, he took it upon himself to purchase about 2,400 acres twenty miles north of the King’s Cross Station; Letchworth was another thirteen miles distant along the same rail line.

The board of this new enterprise intended that their work would provide “a convincing demonstration of the garden city principle of town development … in time to influence the national housing programme.…” In 1918, Frederic Osborn, who was involved with Second Garden City from the start, published New Towns After the War, arguing for the building of one hundred towns, each with a population of 40,000 to 50,000. That was not to be, but in 1946, after the Second World War, Britain passed the New Towns Act. By 1950, fourteen new towns were under construction, and by 1968, nearly a million people were living in twenty-two postwar new towns designed around garden city lines.¹⁶

Welwyn would be a true garden city. The statement of purpose explained that “healthy and well-equipped factories will be grouped in scientific relation to transport facilities, and will be equally accessible from the new houses of the workers.” This would be “a self-contained town, with a vigorous life of its own independent of London.” In terms of management, the company would retain “the freehold of the estate … (except in so far as parts thereof may be required for public purposes) in trust for the future community.” But the plan was as concerned with aesthetic issues as with social and economic matters, stating that “preservation of the beauty of the district, and the securing of architectural harmony in the new buildings, will be among the first considerations of the Company.”¹⁷

Construction began almost at once, with architect Louis de Soissons preparing the plans. Like Letchworth, Welwyn would fit the existing topography rather than being randomly imposed upon it. The houses were grouped around curving roads, greens, and cul-de-sacs. The infrastructure was in place—gas, electricity, water, sewerage—and there were shops, churches, and a theater. Building a garden city required a great deal of capital up front, and only with rapid construction could the developers hope to recoup their investment. Within twelve years, a community of 9,000 inhabitants occupying 2,500 homes arose, and forty industries had opened. Still, it grew slowly and was never fully built out. Planned for 50,000 residents, by 1948 its population was only 18,000.¹⁸

Welwyn Garden City, 2012. (Author’s photograph.)

Mumford was rather more impressed by Welwyn than Letchworth, perhaps because “the Georgian revival was in full swing, and the planner, Louis de Soissons, achieved greater charm and coherence.” Even so, he thought Welwyn seemed to lack the social mission that he believed essential in a planned community. The scale was too sprawling, privileging “private functions and traditional forms and ample greenery” rather than a focus “on association and intercourse, on public functions, on focal meeting places and social intermixture, all of which call for the pedestrian scale and a more close-textured design.”¹⁹

Ultimately, both Letchworth and Welwyn fell short of Howard’s garden city ideal. Alexander Garvin suggests that while Letchworth and Welwyn may have been planned under garden city principles, there was little to distinguish them from other “less-ambitious dormitory suburbs” built around greater London at the same time. Even Mumford thought the design “uninspired.” He understood that mechanically applying Howard’s idea was impractical and inadvisable, but “in leaning backward to avoid the stark simplicity of Howard’s diagrams, the planners managed to avoid any positive visual expression of the idea itself. And though much of the domestic architecture was more fresh and vigorous than anything of comparable cost being built at the time … the total architectural effect was mediocre, and as far as the idea went, esthetically unconvincing. Neither the plan nor the structures articulated the differentiated but balanced structure of the new city. Visually, the garden displaced the city.”²⁰ Such a judgment is too harsh. Both Letchworth and Welwyn exude considerable charm and provide significantly more green space and a more generous public realm than typical suburbs.

However inspired the public may have been by Ebenezer Howard’s ideas, his two garden cities were only modest successes. His idea “soon became an anachronism, resting as it did on notions of a transformed society” based on the union of town and country and communitarian principles. “Even at Letchworth and Welwyn … the social aspects [were] almost completely ignored.”²¹

The planning principles and design elements Unwin, Parker, and de Soissons applied were increasingly in evidence in suburban developments on both sides of the Atlantic. However short they may have fallen from Howard’s vision, Letchworth and Welwyn inspired a generation of American planners, and none more so than the architects of Sunnyside Gardens.