Garden cities and the urban exodus

Joseph Rowntree's high-minded son, the meticulous social researcher Seebohm Rowntree, was shocked to discover in his native city of York that, as the new century dawned, a large minority still lived in deep hardship, even starvation. The reality of poverty, squalor and disease drove new forms of town planning that were supposed to overcome the endemic problems of urban poverty. One Utopian model of urban and housing planning was developed in the early 20th century with real enthusiasm and exported all over the world. The Garden City movement managed to combine enterprise and cooperation, houses and gardens with public and social amenities, in a totally new form of philanthropic endeavour that was eventually to capture the imagination of governments. It was intensely public-spirited and yet intensely independent of the state in its founding structure and funding. The model villages that we described earlier, particularly New Earswick in York, helped inspire Ebenezer Howard, the founder and utopian visionary of the garden city movement.

In 1898 Howard published a riveting booklet Tomorrow: A peaceful path to real reform. In it, Howard set out his social vision of garden cities: self-contained, self-financing havens of peace and prosperity, built outside the main cities but connected to them by major rail links, where people of all incomes and all walks of life would share its benefits. All profits were to be reinvested for the common good of the garden city itself. His utopian vision echoed Robert Owen's earlier cooperative ideals but at city scale.