A Z Of Letchworth Garden City

Explore Letchworth Garden City in this fully illustrated A-Z guide to its history, people and places.

Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) is famous worldwide for founding the Garden City movement, and he continues to be frequently cited by planners and theorists. When he was dying, he urged his prospective biographer to remember that 'the spiritual dimension' had always been central to his life and work. He wanted this to be prominently brought out in any biography. Almost a century after his death, Ebenezer Howard: Inventor of the Garden City is the first book that does justice to that wish. Frances Knight has written a very readable biography, the first since the 1980s, with a properly contextualized analysis of Howard's religious views. Shaped in the world of London Congregationalism, he became a keen seeker after unity and peace. He grafted new religious ideas, particularly from spiritualism, and later from Theosophy, into his biblically-informed, Protestant faith. Prone to spiritual epiphanies, he believed that he had been raised up to preach the 'gospel of the garden city' and to tackle the housing crisis by beginning to build the New Jerusalem in the Hertfordshire countryside. Although he sometimes appeared naïve, he was astute, and highly skilled at combining different, and sometimes conflicting, ideas in a way that built consensus and gained support from people across the social and political spectrum. As well as explaining the remarkable sequence of events that led from the publication of his ideas to the foundation of Letchworth as the world's first garden city, just five years later, this book investigates other neglected aspects of Howard's life including: the years he spent in America, his career as a shorthand writer, and his relationship with his first wife Lizzie - herself an important garden city pioneer. Howard wanted his garden cities to be places of spiritual exploration, and as this book shows, early Letchworth certainly lived up to those expectations.

Pamela Shields's new book, a compendium of fascinating Hertfordshire facts, is an introduction to the county aimed at residents, visitors and tourists. Home to many 'firsts', such as the English Pope, the Garden City and the New Town, Hertfordshire was also home to many famous people, from King Offa to Laurence Olivier, George Orwell, Graham Greene and Henry Moore - all of whom are featured here. This is where England's crown was surrendered to WIlliam the Conqueror and where a Frenchwoman and a Welshman started the Tudor dynasty. Among the county's geniuses are Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, Sir Jon Sulston and Sir Stephen Hawking. Peculiar survivals such as the Herfordshire Spike and Herfordshire Puddingstone are included, as are urban myths, local legends and much more.

London cabbies train for years and the London A-Z is their bible. This highly detailed city atlas is found in every car in the country. It shows all the streets, lanes and courtyards, as well as train stations, gardens, parks and points of interest. 40,000 thoroughfares are indexed. All-color maps for easy reading. Don't go to London without this book.

Extensively researched and authoritatively and enthusiastically written, entries describe in detail the history of each particular company and of course the models for which they are famous.

The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century Urban Design is a fully illustrated descriptive and explanatory history of the development of urban design ideas and paradigms of the past 150 years. The ideas and projects, hypothetical and built, range in scale from the city to the urban block level. The focus is on where the generic ideas originated, the projects that were designed following their precepts, the functions they address and/or afford, and what we can learn from them. The morphology of a city—its built environment—evolves unselfconsciously as private and governmental investors self-consciously erect buildings and infrastructure in a pragmatic, piecemeal manner to meet their own ends. Philosophers, novelists, architects, and social scientists have produced myriad ideas about the nature of the built environment that they consider to be superior to those forms resulting from a laissez-faire attitude to urban development. Rationalist theorists dream of ideal futures based on assumptions about what is good; empiricists draw inspirations from what they perceive to be working well in existing situations. Both groups have presented their advocacies in manifestoes and often in the form of generic solutions or illustrative designs. This book traces the history of these ideas and will become a standard reference for scholars and students interested in the history of urban spaces, including architects, planners, urban historians, urban geographers, and urban morphologists.