Country Life and Sport
GARDEN CM( PROBLEMS.
Feudal England, as some would call it, and England of the future join frontiers in peculiarly suggestive contrast just t south of Hatfield ; and at the end of last week I heard the feudal lord, so called, and the apostle of the new England swopping ideals, in situ. The occasion is worth some special attention. A few years ago Lord Salisbury sold (at a sym- pathetic figure) some of his most highly treasured acres to a company who wished to build a new garden city. He recorded how he was overcome by the simple earnestness of Sir Ebenezer Howard, who was the first to preach and practise the doctrine that the best way of curing the evils of the industrial revolution was to take factories into the country
and give the men engaged in what had been regarded as typically urban work a life in conditions more or less rural.
The idea was argued in a notable book published in 1898. In the next year the Garden City Association was formed, and in 1905 the first garden city was founded at Letchworth (the scene, incidentally, of the competition for the Spectator's
£150 cottage). Fifteen years later, thanks, as we now know, in no small measure to Lord Salisbury's sympathetic interest, the second garden city was founded at Welwyn. From the tops of the 1,000-year-old oaks in Hatfield Park you may see the great concrete-making machine that is dealing with the wonderful subsoil of the site of the garden city.
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