Food Planning In Garden Cities: The Letchworth Legacy

Ebenezer Howard wanted people to live in a town that was self-sufficient in food that would recycle its food waste into green manure and be part of a network of towns that would provide markets for such food

By Yves Cabannes and Philip Ross
This publication is part of the Occasional Papers Series on Food and Urban Agriculture initiated by the RUAF Global Partnership on Sustainable Urban Agriculture and Food Systems.
Nov. 2018

2.1.1 – Pioneering Urban Agriculture and food in cities

The reason why garden cities are relevant to the urban agriculture and food agenda is that It is Howard’s concept were pioneering in this area. He recognised both the value and need for agriculture and food in the city at multiple levels. The early Garden City movement saw a formal need for agriculture land in the city as an asset, it didn’t view it as a ‘left over land’ activity. Also that it addressed social issues such as integration and also helped to alleviate poverty.

It is important to consider what Britain was like at the turn of the 20th Century. The country had industrialised, but new homes had tended to follow the pattern of back-to-back housing. These were terraced homes with concrete yards at the rear (usually where the outside privy was located) which didn’t provide the means for people to grow their own food. Howard recognised the importance of not just a city that could grow food, but the importance of empowering people to be able to grow food at small scales as well as a larger one.

In practice this would mean land by homes for growing food, whether as gardens or allotments. He also looked at “socialised food-related features” included some of the houses having “common gardens and co-operative kitchens” (Howard, 1946:54) and the improvement of land not in use for building, where fruit trees could be planted, or a dairy set up (Miller, in Parsons and Schuyler, 2002:106).

He also envisioned allotment areas in a park like settings and a productive agricultural periphery. Susan Parham of the University of Hertfordshire notes “Howard was particularly concerned with the possibilities for agricultural production in close vicinity of such settlements”. Howard saw these as being of benefit to the farmer in producing a local food market and to inhabitants in lowering food costs. As far as Letchworth was concerned, a strategic decision was to ring the town with what we now call a ‘green belt’. This was a ring of agricultural land around the town.

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