Welwyn Garden City Architect

The year 2020 marks a milestone for Welwyn Garden City, as it celebrates its centenary and looks forward to new generations in its charming tree-lined streets.

The pioneering garden city was the world’s second after Letchworth, and after its creation would come to offer an Arcadian blueprint for many newer, greener towns around the world. The garden city movement was the brainchild of social reformer Ebenezer Howard, who saw it as a way to create self-contained communities surrounded by permanent greenbelts, giving residents all the benefits of both a country lifestyle and an urban environment without any of the disadvantages of either.

Howard collaborated with the Canadian-born architect and town planner Louis de Soissons. Together they laid the foundations for work to begin on Welwyn Garden City in 1920. The architect was barely 30 at the time, but he had already been widely recognised as one of the brightest architectural talents of his generation. He was Howard’s obvious choice to create what would become a masterpiece of planning and design, carved out of a stretch of rolling green fields in undeveloped Hertfordshire.

Before construction began, de Soissons designed a range of house models to show off the newest and most economical building styles of the time – including avant-garde steel- and concrete-framed structures. In the end, however, the majority of the new town was built in a neo-Georgian style, combining nostalgia for bygone English village living with the mod cons of the 20^th century. Today, this is the magic combination people buy into when they embrace the garden city lifestyle.

Though not as revolutionary, architecturally, as the housing in some of the New Towns that followed, the houses of Welwyn Garden City were – and still are – interesting for the way they combine conventional neo-Georgian and Arts & Crafts influences with the more radical modernist styles that were starting to come from Europe at the time. The city was laid out along wide, tree-lined boulevards emanating from a central spine called, simply, Parkway. The focal point is the delightful fountain, luring visitors to an array of shops and restaurants. Dotted around the town are abundant green spaces – parks, formal gardens and private gardens for all.

The city perseveres partly due to its proximity to London and they excellent transport links that get residents to London’s King’s Cross in 20 minutes. Commuters don’t have to think twice about settling up in the heart of Hertfordshire, with an abundance of pretty residences – the showpieces are to be found on the West Side of Parkway, particularly around Sherrardspark Wood. Fans of modernism can revel in the Span-type estates around Panshanger.