The Garden City Utopia: a Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard

Robert Beevers

Ebenezer Howard is recognised as a pioneer of town planning throughout the industrial world; and Britain's New Towns, deriving from the garden cities he founded are his monument.  But Howard was more than a town planner.  He was first and foremost a social reformer, and his garden city was intended to be merely the first step towards a new social and industrial order based on the common ownership of land.  First published in 1988, The Garden City Utopia remains the only comprehensive study of Howard's theories.  Robert Beevers traces the ideas back to their origins  in English puritan dissent and forward to Howard's attempt to build his new society in microcosm at Letchworth, and later at Welwyn.

Howard first published his ideas in Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1898.  By 1902 Howard's ideas had attracted wide interest, and a new town Letchworth was in process of planning.  In the same year, a revised version of Howard's book, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, was published. 

"Robert Beevers does well to draw together the various threads of Howard's life as a "social inventor".. It is a fascinating

  story, delightfully written."  Dennis Hardy, Town and Country Planning

 "An exemplary biography..." Andrew Saint, Art History

Robert Beevers is a graduate of the Universities of Oxford and London, and an Honorary Doctor of the Open University, of which he was a founder member.  He is an historian specialising in 19th century cultural history.

206 pages                                                        Price: £15.50 (UK)

10 Black and White illustrations                                      $30 (USA)

ISBN 0 9542118 0 4                                                                                                                             

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