Lawrence Hurley
Severe overcrowding in urban centers across Britain meant that working-class families often crammed into tenements where privvies were scarce and disease rampant. Even if conditions in the big cities improved, many reformers believed, they bred a social inequality that was profound and intractable.
But there was an antidote to the moral and physical degradations of the metropolis, a new urban model that would be healthier for body and soul: the Garden City. This would be a self-contained community of 32,000 set amid farmland, far from metropolitan smoke and grit.
Ebenezer Howard, the Garden City’s “inventor” (his preferred word), had a public relations exercise in mind when he chose Birmingham as the site of his meeting—incidentally, the first urban planning conference in Britain or America. There was a place Howard wanted the delegates to see. Four miles from central Birmingham, an experimental village called Bournville was being built next to the Cadbury chocolate factory. By 1901, it had 313 comfortable Arts-and-Crafts-style cottages with ample gardens, as well as shops and recreation grounds. A social and cultural center, a Quaker meeting house, and a school were started soon after.
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