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Ebenezer Howard founded the Garden City movement, and he continues to be cited by planners and theorists.
Ebenezer Howard: Inventor of the Garden City is a properly contextualized analysis of Howard's religious views. It investigates neglected aspects of his life, and provides a significant new interpretation of the Garden City movement.
List of contents
- Introduction: Ebenezer Howard - the Man and the Message
- 1: The Early Years of Exploration 1850-1876
- 2: Laying the Foundations 1876-1889
- 3: The Days before To-morrow 1890-1898
- 4: The Path to First Garden City 1899-1904
- 5: Howard in Letchworth 1905-1914
- 6: The Spiritual Life of First Garden City 1904-1918
- 7: Howard and Welwyn - the Second Garden City 1919-1928
- Conclusion-Ebenezer Howard - A Spiritual Life
About the author
Frances Knight is Emeritus Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Nottingham. She is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and was President of the Ecclesiastical History Society in 2021-22. She taught at the University of Wales, Lampeter, and then the University of Nottingham for many years. She publishes mainly in the areas of the history of the Church of England from the late-eighteenth century to the present and the interactions between religion and culture in Britain in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
Summary
Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) is famous worldwide for founding the Garden City movement, and he continues to be frequently cited by planners and theorists. When he was dying, he urged his prospective biographer to remember that 'the spiritual dimension' had always been central to his life and work. He wanted this to be prominently brought out in any biography.
Almost a century after his death, Ebenezer Howard: Inventor of the Garden City is the first book that does justice to that wish. Frances Knight has written a very readable biography, the first since the 1980s, with a properly contextualized analysis of Howard's religious views. Shaped in the world of London Congregationalism, he became a keen seeker after unity and peace. He grafted new religious ideas, particularly from spiritualism, and later from Theosophy, into his biblically-informed, Protestant faith. Prone to spiritual epiphanies, he believed that he had been raised up to preach the 'gospel of the garden city' and to tackle the housing crisis by beginning to build the New Jerusalem in the Hertfordshire countryside. Although he sometimes appeared naïve, he was astute, and highly skilled at combining different, and sometimes conflicting, ideas in a way that built consensus and gained support from people across the social and political spectrum.
As well as explaining the remarkable sequence of events that led from the publication of his ideas to the foundation of Letchworth as the world's first garden city, just five years later, this book investigates other neglected aspects of Howard's life including: the years he spent in America, his career as a shorthand writer, and his relationship with his first wife Lizzie - herself an important garden city pioneer. Howard wanted his garden cities to be places of spiritual exploration, and as this book shows, early Letchworth certainly lived up to those expectations.
Additional text
Knight has given us an excellent account of Howard's life and times, drawing on her extensive knowledge of the diverse religious culture of late Victorian and Edwardian England ... Her biography is also based on extensive primary research among Howard's correspondence, articles and lecture texts. She writes beautifully, with sensitivity, empathy and understanding of Howard, and of those who worked and dreamed with him.
