Country Life
The Garden City Idea
GARDEN CITIES.
Most of the leading spirits in the campaign for the preserva- tion of rural England and Wales assembled with other distinguished persons at the Welwyn Garden City to open the " Civic Week" now concluding. They heard and pre- sumably approved of the preaching of the garden city idea. Is it a good idea ? The time is coming when it becomes necessary to answer that ingenuous question, for a very influential body of persons in England (as others in America) see in the garden city the salvation both of rural and industrial England. " Civic Week at the Garden City " is a phrase apt perhaps to turn the old-fashioned stomach queasy. It suggests a sham compromise of mutually exclusive ideas. It sounds un-English. It savours of crankiness. Its very idiom is alien and pseudo-intellectual. I may as well at once confess that the phraseology repels my own interest. There are no civic weeks in the deep, deep country, and nothing " cityful " taints our village gardens.
Previous page
