Regaining Paradise: Englishness and the Early Garden City Movement (review)

Regaining Paradise: Englishness and the Early Garden City Movement, by Standish Meacham; pp. viii + 210. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999, $35.00, £25.00.

Standish Meacham's elegantly written monograph tells two stories: that of the English "garden city" movement from the late-nineteenth century until the First World War, and that of the concomitant construction of "Englishness" that he believes continued to resonate through the interwar period and beyond. He argues that the original concept of the garden city as outlined by its progenitor, Ebenezer Howard, was radical, eschewing custom and convention in its vision of a planned city created in the bosom of the healthful countryside, with communal property ownership as well as self-government by members of all social classes. In its implementation, however, this vision was attenuated by late-Victorian social reformers. They drew their own inspiration for the creation of new cities from a mythical English past characterized by quaint rural villages harmoniously inhabited by deferential plebeians and benevolent patricians, all of whom shared a fondness for gardening and other rustic pursuits.

Such qualities, associated with the rural, hierarchical, domestic past of Master and Man, became enshrined as "Englishness" at the moment when they seemed most threatened by modernity. To ease into the future, social reformers believed, it was necessary to learn from the past and adapt its salient qualities to the present. Alongside this conservative strand of Englishness, Meacham identifies a more progressive strand: the liberal acceptance of greater state intervention in social welfare. But this was not as prominent as the conservative strand of Englishness that dominated the history of the garden city movement through 1914. Indeed, Meacham goes further: he argues that the conservative strand of Englishness permeated the history of England through the interwar period at least. The early garden city movement is for him a sharp illustration of a much more pervasive cultural condition of modern English history.

For Meacham, those who did not embrace the conservative, anti-modern construction of Englishness were anomalies. Thus Howard, who spent time in Chicago during the rebuilding of the city in the 1870s, is characterized as being more "American" than English in his vision of a planned urban environment in the countryside that would correct the ills of both city and village, and that would challenge class hierarchy by entrusting landownership to the community. Howard was sufficiently atypical in his rejection of traditional assumptions and values, Meacham believes, that the enthusiasm that greeted his utopian schemes at the turn of the century was "remarkable" (56).

To explain why Howard's plans were at once welcomed and compromised by Victorian social reformers, Meacham provides a brief history of late-nineteenth-century antecedents to Howard's garden cities, the factory villages created by the industrialists George Cadbury at Bournville and William Lever at Port Sunlight. These factory villages were, like Howard's vision of garden cities, planned communities that aimed to provide a healthy and spiritually harmonious environment for their workers, in deliberate contrast to the unhealthy living conditions and antagonistic class relations found within contemporary cities. Unlike Howard's radical vision, however, both factory villages embodied their founders' belief in a mythical English past in which workers deferred to the benevolent oversight of their landlords. Neither Cadbury nor Lever thought of themselves as paternalists; but such was the invisible power of the English patrician-plebeian ideal that Lever could tell his working-class residents that while he and they were partners, "unless you appreciate my point of view, we are doomed to failure" (33). Workers had very little say over their living conditions in these factory villages, and Meacham demonstrates that they were not to have much more say in the garden cities.

Certainly Howard's dream of reconciling the classes was echoed by the social reformers, but when they created their garden cities there were no teeth behind the lip- service given to this utopian goal. The...