Garden cities for to-day

Ebbsfleet: village

So, the Coalition has announced plans to build another New Town at Ebbsfleet. I'm not sure really how this is news, as it's surely the whole point of Ebbsfleet station, standing alone, glassy and gleaming in some fields not very near very much. Actually, the rhetoric is not to build a New Town; rather, to build a Garden City. Actually, it's a 'locally-led Garden City', and I've just been sick in my own mouth. Perhaps the fear is that towns connote the mediocre, lacklustre; cities evoke culture, grandeur, a really big branch of Boots.

In many ways, Ebenzer Howard's original Victorian vision of a Garden City has aged off into irrelevance. There is no longer the need to chose between choked industrial squalor, or honest toil in a rural fantasy. City centres tend not to be packed with coal-fuelled factories. Down here in the tertiary-service South, office work now exists and employs millions of us; we have telephony and its sexier younger friend, the internet, which help us not have to be in those offices to work anyway. And offices can co-exist with houses without necessarily polluting them to buggery. So what is a C21 Garden City? Is it just some housing in a Kentish chalk pit?

Welwyn Garden City is beautiful account of what England doesn't look like

Perhaps, the blurb tootles, since 'the Government does not wish to impose any definition of what Garden Cities are, but instead intends to work with localities to support them in developing and delivering their own vision'. Christ, is this the legacy of Modernism - such an antipathy of planners and architects that we'd rather entrust the development and delivery of a new town to a locality rather than actual human people?

Anyway, the Coalition's blurb doesn't really care what a Garden City is or was or should be - the name is just a catchy something, a vehicle 'for councils to take a strategic development decision about how they should meet housing need over the next decade and beyond'. Ah, so it's just about housing, and nothing to do with those difficult ideas like place, or belonging, or coherence, or home. Just houses. And a train line to elsewhere. And, of course, Bluewater shopping centre (which would be one heck of a high street).

Popping down the shops for a Curly Wurly

Despite my irritation with the naffness of the rhetoric espoused about the new Garden City/-ies, I'm interested to see what the prevalent masterplan behind such a new Garden City would be. The original Garden Cities of Letchworth and Welwyn were all grand vistas and pastoral fantasy Olde housing.  And the UK's first roundabouts. The mk 1 post-war New Towns had informal, pedestrianised shopping precincts, usually ringed by an orbital road and gentle warm-brick Modernist housing in an arcadia of green space.

The UK's first residential tower block, in Harlow

The mk 2 New Town Milton Keynes is a grid format announcing the primacy of the car - there is no grand vista because all roads are of equal importance - with a high-tech glass-box shopping megastructure at the centre, with housing shielded from the roads by rows of trees and wodges of green. And the UK's first multiplex cinema.  What philosophy would guide a C21 Garden City?

I suppose the functions of the town centre will be taken care of by Bluewater (surely making the Garden City much cheaper to build), and it comes with the A2 as a bypass, helpfully pre-built by the Romans. Perhaps the housing at Ebbsfleet will adopt the eco-friendly qualities of somewhere like the post-Millennial BedZed (Beddington Zero Energy Development, since you ask), a distinctly decent Peabody Trust development on some brownfield land to the west of Croydon. Here rows of south-facing townhouses are softened by huge triple-glazed windows and extensive foliage. The bridges remind me of Thames-side wharf buildings, for some reason.  The site is intended to be close to a train station and bus stops to reduce the reliance on cars, and various parking spaces have charging points for electric vehicles.

Photovoltaic panels are in evidence, and the somewhat-wacky heat-exchanger funnel-things pivot in the wind, an eye-catching statement about the estate's green credentials. Fine, some of the technology doesn't work as designed, but the designers' efforts have helped reduce water and energy consumption, which is at very least a bit cheaper for the residents.

It's all rather appealing (and worthy without being too preachy), and so much better than the lazy vaguely-Victorian blocks of new-builds behind Bedzed in their own sea of parking spaces. Although I rather doubt that the Ebbsfleet Garden City housing would be as demonstrably outré as BedZed; given the comtemporary English tastes for Anything Olde, they're much more likely to be mock-something and safely vernacular. And they're unlikely to be 'affordable' in any sense other than NewSpeak vote-seeking spin. Alas.