William Morris and the Garden City

• Published in: Ecology and the Literature of the British Left pp. 125 - 136
• Main Author: Vaninskaya, Anna
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2012
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Great Global Warming Swindle; Graeco Roman Pastoral; Vincent Van Gogh; Fine Day; Young Man; Gogh; Garden City; Lewis Grassic Gibbon; Wild Geranium; Welwyn Garden City; Thunder Storm; Ad Astra; Animal Kingdom; Final Lesson; Wigan Pier; Poisonous Substances
• DOI: 10.4324/9781315578675-10
• ISBN: 1409418227; 9781409418221; 1138249300; 9781138249301

The phenomenon of the Garden City represented a union of three contradictory aspects: Howard's inspirational vision, the business reality and what came to be known as the 'spirit of the place'. Although the green paradigm, most faithfully embodied in the modern eco-village, was not developed with the Garden City in mind, the rhetorical similarities are worth dwelling upon nonetheless. Virtually no treatment of the Garden City movement, and, by extension, of early-twentieth-century British town planning, omits to mention the influence of William Morris. One of the most familiar linkages of the Garden City lifestyle with a Morrisian brand of socialism was forged by George Orwell several decades after Letchworth's foundation, in his anti-crank tirades in The Road to Wigan Pier and Coming Up for Air. Lifestyle choice versus political movement: that, in a nutshell, is the difference between the ideology of the Letchworth citizen and Morris's more orthodox socialism.