Property News · June 1, 2012

Let's move to Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire


Town + country = a taste of utopiaWhat’s going for it? Who’d have thought utopia was alive and well and living in Hertfordshire? Or utopias, I should say, for with Letchworth, Stevenage, Hatfield, Hemel Hempstead and Welwyn, this unassuming, mild-mannered county is oversupplied with garden cities, new towns and visions of the future. The government, in its wisdom, has decided it would like us all to live in garden cities, combining as they do “the advantages of the most energetic and active town life, with all the beauty and delight of the country”. Our ideas of energy may have altered since Ebenezer Howard’s day (see below), but beauty and delight Welwyn does have. It was founded in the 20s when the very Victorian Howard was an old man and the rest of Europe was erupting in modernist fervour. Not Welwyn. With its pretty neo-Georgian cottages, roses round frilly porches, avenues of trees bursting with spring buds, the town (“city” is a little de trop) is a most English, arcadian vision of the future, assuming all its citizens would need for fulfilment was a well-watered municipal border. And at the centre? Not a church or a cathedral, but a heavenly John Lewis.The case against It is, whisper it, a teensy bit dull, like a town laid out by your mum. The radical, egalitarian side of garden cities, that they would be affordable and collectively owned, seems to have gone for a burton. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…Let’s move to Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire

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