Welwyn: not a common-or-Garden City

I have been to Welwyn Garden City three times, and have ensured that each time the mercury has at very least been nudging the high twenties.  This is deliberate and important: WGC (as it's known to its chums) is an English fantasy, and must therefore only ever be visited when the English weather is fantastic.

(I'm not quite sure what this means for the people who live there).

WGC is the sister (slightly younger, slightly better-looking) of Letchworth Garden City, a short distance up the A1.  Each was established in the early Twentieth century by proto-hippie / philanthropist Ebenezer Howard, as a foil to the polluted and cramped cities formed during the industrial revolution.  They were hoped to be self-sufficient, rather than satellites to established cities.  These Garden Cities helped bring about the post-WWII New Towns; in a somewhat circular way, WGC itself was designated one of those New Towns in 1948.

In true English style, first impressions from the train station aren't particularly exciting. On the right side stretches the blank red brick of the Howard Shopping centre; directly ahead a badly-rusted bridge apparently made of spare rivets and unpainted scrap metal, attempting quite successfully to transmute into CoreTen.

On the left gleams a strangely clean factory, with low blocks of offices scattered around. The pristine white silos look like a Moderne chemical weapons facility, where civilised gentlemen with neat hair smoke pipes, whilst considering the best way to burn out the eyes of the dreaded Hun using a piquant distillation of mustard and bakelite. Reality, sadly, is less noxious - the factory (by the chief architect of WGC, Louis de Soissons, 1926) formerly made Shredded Wheat, which is much more wholesome. Pleasingly, it's also Grade II listed, so future generations can wonder why on earth the building isn't being consistently lauded as fab (although it does get a glowing entry in the Twentieth Century Society's architectural-coffee-table-porn book, 100 Buildings 100 Years).

Having broached that blank brick wall, the enclosed Howard Centre (1990) is also very white, and ends up being very dull through its desperate efforts to offend no one. Cut-and-paste context has been affected through the application of a disembodied clock and something that looks like the plans for hedge-planting in the formal gardens of a country estate.

However, if you fight your way through the dullards queuing in Starbucks, you can take advantage of the fine views from its balcony, turning golden in the improbable sun. 

Welwyn is arranged around a green core (the Parkway), which stretches for almost a mile.  And Welwyn Garden City, as opposed to a Welwyn Countryside City, is quite right.  There's a smooth, lush lawn, mature trees, and tidy borders for flowers. It's quite unrealistic; it's more like the Photoshop'd fictions used to sell the lifestyle opportunities (TM) of new builds on scraps of land near train lines. But here it's real! Although there are not many people around enjoying the fine, expansive lawns; like all communal spaces, the English interpretation is that this space is no-one's, rather than everyone's. It doesn't matter whether this is a concrete forecourt to a Brutalist bus station, or a welcoming and verdant lawn. It becomes somehow a place to be avoided. 

NO.  Or someone might speak to you.

The housing stock around the central drag is a riot of rustic charm and English passive-aggression. Tremendous effort goes into mainaining beautiful gardens; but they are essentially just moats around castles, intended to keep intruders, and the neighbours, at bay.  The street names could have been taken directly from Tolkien's Shire (or, having just looked up when The Hobbit was written, perhaps the other way round).

John Grindrod, in his super Concretopia, summarises the central core of WGC as 'low-wattage triumphal', and you'll soon see what he means.  The generous spacing and flat lawns create a uniquely heavy local gravity, and centripetal force that makes exploration strangely challenging. But, if you can make the effort, you can find the Daily Mail Model Village of 1922 - a cluster ('living museum', if you really must) of house styles, demonstrating house-construction techniques designed to help build a post-War England fit for heroes.

If you, like your author, are a dreadful child, you may find some of the text amusing.  Nos 14-15 Meadow Green are headlined as 'Double Walls Rapid Erection' (teehee), whereas another bit of copy cheerfully reinforces gender stereotypes - 'The back doors of two of the houses will be fitted with "Receivadors" in which tradesmen can leave their goods without disturbing the housewife'. I bet they can.  Sorry, it's all gone a bit On The Buses.

Anyway, a little further on (you can make it!), lies a very early English roundabout (Letchworth Garden City apparently having the first).  It's not very photogenic, but it is part of history #educationisfun

Now, I understand that this kind of lush, gentle planning consumes vast tracts of land, and is probably therefore inherently evil.  But WGC tugs at my heart strings; perhaps its scale manages to realise a fictional Never Never Walled Midnight Garden Land Shire of unending space in which to run and hide and seek, before getting lashings of ginger beer and some (less tasty) iodine for that grazed knee. 

And I should probably address the apparent discrepancy of my mild obsession with neo-Georgian WGC, and my distaste for Georgian-pastiche Poundbury. I've no problem with the aesthetics of either place - I imagine Poundbury looks spiffy on a summer's day too. Rather, it's the gulf between the underlying philosophies underpinning each which affects me. 

Back in the early C20, WGC sought to provide a wildly better quality of life than that threatened by the density and pollution and growing pains of industrial cities.  It was looking to build a new, better future, albeit one using a Hobbity sort of architectural vernacular.  I cannot help but admire it for this.

C21 Poundbury, in contrast, uses its architectural language to convey all manner of pompous, slow-witted messages to its willing audience. It is an overblown argument about nostalgia, a daft assertion that life was better back in those Quality Street days of BBC1 dramas, when it was all Mr Darcy wet-shirt competitions and Empire-line dresses, before cars, before poverty or illness or other blights were created by those pesky post-War planners and their experiments with that nasty, nasty concrete. 

Perhaps, really, I'm more disappointed with the pathogenic and self-delusional English desire for this guff, rather than with Poundbury itself for catering for those desires. But it's much more English of me to express hatred for places than people.  Safer that way.