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Letchworth

Letchworth, now officially called Letchworth Garden City is a town in Hertfordshire, England. It was one of the first new towns, and claims to be the world's first Garden City. It was founded in 1903, taking its name from the village it surrounded. Today it has a population of around 33,000.

The early days

Howard's Three Magnets diagram

In 1898, the social reformer Ebenezer Howard wrote a book entitled Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, in which he advocated the construction of a new kind of town, which combined the advantages of cities and the countryside while eliminating their disadvantages. This idea was summed up in his famous Three Magnets diagram.

Industry would be kept separate from residential areas-- such zoning was a new idea at the time-- and trees and open spaces would prevail everywhere.

A competition was held to find a town design which could translate Howard's ideas into reality, and within a few years a company had been formed, First Garden City Limited, Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin had been appointed as architects, and 1600 hectares of land outside Hitchin had been purchased for building.

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Letchworth".