Abstract
In 1829, the perceptive landscape gardener John Claudius Loudon published an essay in which he introduced the design of a “systematic plan” for the layout of an ideal London that became a theoretical model. Little known today, yet the influence of the Scot’s “beau ideal” is measurable on the course of town planning theory and practice for the remainder of the nineteenth century. This includes colonial Adelaide’s renowned park lands that were conceived in 1835 and executed in 1837.
Keywords
Before the nineteenth century, the only principle guiding the expansion of European cities was to cram as many people as possible into the smallest space. The emphasis when building new towns was on physical things: a town’s size perhaps, or an orderly street pattern, and zones for social classes of course, the whole often within defensive bulwarks. Lands beyond were for palatial retreats or peasant enclaves tending market gardens and grain fields. When street plans were drawn, geometric plan shapes were employed, teased out of theoretical and religious discourse imparted during the Renaissance: round (celestial), square (intellectual unity), orthogonal or grid (rational).
When we study town planning during England’s Georgian years we discover that it was primarily concerned with housing: planners did not foresee a whole community. Rather, certain parts were laid out for the most favored section of the population. It was a remaking of existing cities by addition through the economic means of housing speculation, Bath a valuable example.
When we study London, other than the street axis on Buckingham Palace and the axially symmetrical Greenwich Hospital complex (now housing the Royal Naval College and the University of Greenwich) we find that architectural symbols and associations with authority are not overtly physical except in some instances through size (such as Parliament House or St. Paul’s) or by general location as at Westminster, for example, or within The City or along Regent Street. England’s new Parliament House, a classical nineteenth-century composition in gothic dress, is beside a great river and hemmed in by a church, governmental buildings, and small parks. It is no Versailles. Number 10 is England’s political hub and located in an unimposing town house beside a typical city street, Downing. Therefore grand designs with axial and hierarchical formality were shunned by the English, in particular by later reformers.
The general cultural reaction of disillusioned Europeans during the decades around 1800 is now called “romanticism,” an unuseful but generally accepted term, particularly for the arts. Romanticism identified revolts against conventions, inflexibility, and restraints inherent in classicism, indeed in the immutable of any sort! Its characteristics were an emphasis on sentiment and nature as opposed to depersonalized reason and jaded artificiality and on an insistence on diversity against uniformity: change was essential. The poet and literary critic Edith Sitwell found it a period of profound imagination. It is more difficult to write of the technical beauties of the romantic revival [she said] than to explain those of the Augustan age; since with the romantics we are removed from the delights and splendours of architecture, and of the different textures of marble, stone, jewel and silk, to those of the garden and of the forest. It is more difficult to explain the growth of a flower than the growth of the Parthenon….
1
The eighteenth century was an age of unsettling contradictions that worried citizens of the early nineteenth century tried to resolve in practical ways often with humanistic resolve. The plainly obvious problems of urban living were atop nearly all reformist agendas.
What we now refer to as sociological principles were not added to the theoretical mix until the early 1800s by influential British reformers who, historian Spiro Kostof informs us, “had in common a passion to supplant the deteriorating old cities of the world with a system of fresh implants, small, sanitary and equitable, where the social classes would live in harmony and the bond with Nature would be reaffirmed:” 2 a simplification useful here. It was indeed theoretical, argued in the main by learned Protestants with severe, forceful, and grave words drawn out from changing philosophies and politics. The protests were directed to the profligate and curse of a “useless” aristocracy and centered on the degradation of city life. We shall study one theoretical proposal to alleviate dwellers’ distress by an examination of a design by J. C. Loudon. Its influence on the colonial Adelaide city plan of 1835–37 then becomes clear.
Among the more profound thinkers and doers was the mill owner, factory reformer, nascent socialist, and philanthropist, Robert Owen. Appalled by the gross effects on employees in existing factories and related housing, He maintained that [they]… would inevitably poison society as a whole. He established that the acquisition of wealth and the exploitation of labour… had a destructive impact, not only on the workers but also on the moral standards of those who… justified them as unavoidable.
3
Owen went on to advocate a series of small, experimental cooperative–ownership communities he called “Villages of Co-operation.” The new communities’ political and social conditions were sketched out in Owen’s rather popular book A New View of Society of 1814 and later republications. Everything was to be community owned including natural landscapes, internal and external, and agriculture acreage that would encircle each cooperative. Begun in the 1820s one village was named Harmony, others were Gravaley, Orbiston, Pant Glas and Ralahine. One outside Britain called New Harmony was located in “Indiana North America” and under Owen’s personal supervision 1925–28. Owen purchased agricultural land, the entire town and out buildings of the Harmony Society, a communal group begun in 1814. Reorganized in the early 1830s by son Robert Dale Owen, New Harmony met with modest success. Owen Senior’s personal involvement in Utopian villages ended in 1828, as his personal fortune succumbed to financial adversity. (His five children remained in Indiana.) It needs to be said that none of his communities succeeded for more than a few years. However, his ideas for self-sufficient socialistic communities, for education reform, and his Cooperative Movement continued to receive considerable attention and many followers and detractors in Europe and North America for most of the nineteenth century. 4
The moralistic and inflexible reformer and philosophical radical Jeremy Bentham published studies in civil and penal law, economics, theology, logic, and political theory. His many campaigns, often parallel with Owen’s, against the sinecure-ridden English government and for the poor and imprisoned were sustained. He vigorously promoted Utilitarianism, a complex principle where virtue is based on utility, that is, on usefulness. He believed that the application of laissez-faire would result in the greatest good (or happiness) for the greatest number, and in a “foundation of morals and legislation.” Laissez-faire meant freedom from government interference; a kind of commercial anarchism.
Bentham’s “multifarious activities” were “inspired by a dominant and all-comprehensive desire for the amelioration of human life,” some have said. In this pursuit, “he had found the key to all moral truth,” 5 an ethical key, others have said. Unchecked, however, Utilitarianism would “destroy the notion of a co-operative polity” an observant Lewis Mumford correctly warned, and of “rational planning.” 6 In 1791 Bentham proposed a polygonal shaped flat topped barracks as a typical building for his ideal Panoptican Hill Villages designed for 2,000 people of “all ages:” he called it an “Industry-house Establishment.” 7 It fit his paternalistic ideas for “Pauper Management” and informed the “domestic arrangements” within his idealized villages. No doubt this inspired Owen. Frenchman Charles Fourier would carry Bentham’s and Owen’s communitarian regulations to even greater organizational and communalistic extremes.
The sociological ideas—but not the communalism or the housing cells—of Bentham, Owen, and their many followers, together with the libertarian thoughts of other reformers like James Mill and son John, James Silk Buckingham, Robert Pemberton, Loudon, and another Scot, Thomas Carlyle, were one way or another influential upon Henry George’s popular economic, societal, and governmental ideas put in the 1879, and then upon Ebenezer Howard’s even more popular economic and communal “invention” (as he called it) of Garden Cities. 8
In 1829, Sir Thomas Wilson, lord of the manor of Hampstead, attempted to have passed by the House of Lords a private enclosure bill for “improvements” to the rolled and wooded land called Hampstead Heath, a place so dear to many of London’s commoners. That provocative move was the incentive for John Claudius Loudon to join the growing opposition to the enclosure and to write a memorable essay published in 1829. In it he introduced the design of a “systematic plan” for the layout of an ideal London. Today his design is almost universally unknown and unacknowledged except for an introductory piece by M. L. Simo within a 1988 study of Loudon’s peripatetic mind and an essay by U. M. Schumann comparing works by Ebenezer Howard, John Sinclair, and Loudon. 9 However, the influence of Loudon’s ideal is measurable on the course of town planning theory and practice for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Yet, it has not received a just and proper position in the history of city planning.
In The Gardener’s Magazine that he alone had begun in 1826,
10
Loudon included a tantalizing proposal for the institution of urban “Breathing Places,” a wonderful phrase, for “zones or unoccupied spaces half mile broad:” London was the example of an existing metropolis, its physical expansion inevitable. Further, his theoretical systematic plan was intended to apply in the future to any newly found town. One might be, he surmised, “a capital for an Australian union.” He then provided a careful outline of the “fixed principles” upon which the ideal rested. Our plan is very simple; that of surrounding London, as it already exists, with a zone of open country, at the distance of say one mile, or one mile and a half, from what may be considered the centre, say from St. Paul’s. This zone of country may be half a mile abroad,… and it may be succeeded by a zone of town one mile broad,… and thus the metropolis may be extended in alternate mile zones of buildings, with half mile zones of country or gardens, till one of the zones touched the sea[.] [Figure 1
.] To render the plan complete, it would be necessary to have a circle… in the centre of the city, around St. Paul’s, half a mile in diameter. In this circle ought to be situated all the government offices, and central depots.… [Therefore], whatever might eventually become the extent of London,… there could never be an inhabitant who would be farther than half a mile from an open airy situation… free to walk or ride, and… find every mode of amusement, recreation, entertainment, and instruction. “171”, or the plan of the greater London area showing rings of “town” alternating with “Breathing Places” that were “country,” designed by J. C. Loudon, no scale, as published in Loudon, 1829, and as “143” in Loudon, 1836.
Supposing such a plan considered desirable,… [and] were government to determine the boundaries of certain future zones, and to enact a law that no buildings now standing on the future zones of country should be repaired after a certain years [and so forth],… the alteration in the relative value of property in consequence of the law respecting zones, would not be felt as the slightest injustice or inconvenience. In endeavouring to give an idea of the situations of the zones… We have drawing the boundary lines as perfect circles… This is by no means necessary, nor even desirable. The surface of the ground, the direction of streets already existing… The accidental situations of public buildings, squares, and private gardens,… would indicate an irregular line, [as something] more beautiful [i.e. more picturesque] as well as economical. All the streets of such a city we would limit to two kinds; radiating main streets communicating in direct lines from the centre to the circumference, and concentric main streets or lateral communication… . In the radiating and concentric streets, alternating with these, the mails might… depart; [etc., and streets] might be established for ready and economical intercommunication. Every man might thus ride from any one point… to any other point without loss of time, and at very little expense…. Supposing steam carriages running on railroads,… this might be done with inconceivable rapidity… .
Supposing a town be founded on this principle, a capital for an Australian union for example; then we should propose to place all the government public buildings round the central circle, in one range, with the house of representatives in the centre; [etc].… In the first and succeeding zones of country we would place the slaughtering-houses, markets, churches, [etc.]… and all public buildings and places whatever not connected with the national or municipal government… The zones of town we would confine [to]… private dwellings, not admitting squares, burial-grounds, [etc.]… because we think the closeness together of the buildings containing fires, or otherwise heated by art, would materially aid ventilation, by producing a greater rarefaction of air over them…. In the zones of country we would contrive to… limit certain of the streets which proceed from the centre to the circumference, and certain also of the others which run parallel to the zones, exclusively to the centre of these markets from the distant country.
Under every street we would have a sewer sufficiently large, and so contrived as to serve… as a subway for the mains of water and gas, and we would kept it in view that hot water, hot oil, steam, or hot air, may in time be circulated by public companies.… The matters conveyed by the sewer we would not allow to be all wasted in a river; but here and there, in what we would call sewer works… we would strain the water by means of machinery, so as to gain from it almost very particle of manure held in mixture. The manure being dry from compression might be conveyed… without smell or other inconvenience… .
12
Immediately following Hints about town planning Loudon presented another article that extended the discussion about treated, cleaned, and compressed manure. The article was entitled “Hints for a Plan for saving the Manure lost in the Common Sewers of London, and for rendering the Thames Water fit for Domestic Purposes.” Here he began by suggesting how indiligent and backward England was in comparison to “other cities on the Continent” that he had toured extensively on occasion during the previous two decades. And then he suggested. how every particle of that which now finds its way to the common sewers,… may be saved, and made up in a portable form for agricultural or gardening purposes in Britain, or exportation to any part of the world.
13
In the country zones… and the space not occupied by these [individual] establishments, and by the public buildings before mentioned, we would layout as park and pleasure-ground scenery, and introduce in it all the plants, trees, and shrubs which would grow in the open air.… We would also introduce pieces of water,… rocks, quarries, [etc.]… and other natural-looking scenes, with walks and roads,… shady and open;… [and] bands of music to perambulate the zones… . Though we have not the slightest idea that this beau ideal of a capital for an Australian, or a European union will ever be carried into execution;… yet we think, that,… [there] are some useful principles… [to be] deduced from the foregoing hints….
15
As a child and then an ernest young man in Edinburgh, Loudon aggressively pursued a useful formal liberal education under private tutelage that included drawing, botany, chemistry, languages, and agriculture. With equal energy he engaged in practical training on farms and in study and work with “planners,” as a Scot called landscape gardeners. In 1803, age twenty, Loudon arrived in London with letters of recommendation to “different noblemen and gentlemen,” as his wife put it, and soon was “extensively employed as a landscape-gardiner.” 16 He went on to publish encyclopedias, books, pamphlets, magazines, and articles on, among a wonder of subjects, hot houses, agriculture, trees and shrubs, “commercial” capitalism (as related to land rental), education, suburbs, architecture, construction, and plants, all generously illustrated, all widely read.
An editorial sensitivity can be ascertained by Loudon’s recognition of John Ruskin’s talent. Loudon was the first to publish a prose piece by the fifteen-year-old in 1834. Ruskin soon began a series of articles on “The Poetry of Architecture.”
17
A national and European reputation was assured with Loudon’s publication of Encyclopedia of Gardening in 1822,
18
to then reach acclaim foremost as a horticulturist if not a naturalist (Figure 2
). Loudon soon became a man of eminent stature in scientific, political, artistic, technical, and cultural circles for most of the nineteenth century.
19
Historian Simo thought that within his writings Loudon offered a wide range of technical information on climate, soils, and natural resources; construction, heating and ventilating, and discussions the theory of design.… More immediately appealing… were the hundreds of elevations and perspectives showing cottages and villas in various historical styles, the vignettes of gardens; and the drawings of the indigenous and exotic trees and shrubs then available.
Portrait of J. C. Loudon, artist unknown, frontispiece to his posthumously published Self-instruction for Young Gardeners of 1845.
rural depopulation and destitution [Simo continued]: Luddite machine-breaking, the People’s Charter, the struggle for reform or revolution, utilitarianism, co-operative experiments and the spread of education… [B]y and large [it was] the aristocratic and middle-class men of property who purchased Loudon’s books and engaged his services as a landscape designer. Loudon was deeply chagrined, however, by the political and economic conditions that supported the wealth of his clients. While travelling throughout Britain… Loudon saw the intolerable living conditions of the Lancashire weavers and Birmingham’s “operative manufacturers.”
20
We note that he did incorporate into the 1829 essay and elsewhere a reiteration of concerns that informed a long-term commitment to motivate a few high-placed people to improve the health and physical well-being of city folks and rural poor. Although a client of gentlemen and gentry, he still managed to counsel publicly on a worthy mixture of right-minded polemics and practicalities that influenced social and environmental commentary and reforms over the next eight decades.
In the first line of Hints Loudon indicated purpose: “to devise some plan by which the metropolis” may grow and enlarge “so as to cover any space whatever with perfect safety to the inhabitants, in respect to… water, and fresh air, and… general cleanliness.” That was to also say, without perpetuating the human degradation then being wrought by a self-absorbed establishment. It is true that the Roman architecture and city planning theorist Vitruvius spoke of healthy and ill winds, and so forth. But they were good or bad for societal and religious well-being in first-century Rome, then in eighteenth-century England when swayed by Vitruvian cultism. They were not blowing for health and hygiene.
From the general proposition, then, Loudon’s advice to planners went to particular needs: open airy situations, places “free to walk or ride,” to promenade, to find recreation, to attend “workhouse gardens, botanical and zoological gardens,” and “coffee-houses,” tea-gardens, “baths and swimming ponds.” The “breathing ground,” that is, the park lands half mile wide in concentric rings, was “not to be built on, for the sake of the health of the poorer.” Rather they were to be “breathing spaces… calculated for the benefit of all ranks.” (Patronly neoclassicists were incapable of conceiving such a proposition simply because they could not imagine such an ignoble path.) And not forgetting semirural or rural places, Loudon regretted “that in the numerous enclosure acts… [of] the last fifty years, provision was not made [by Parliament] for a public green, playground, or garden.” And as might be expected, he called for the inclusion of facilities for universal education.
The Gardener’s Magazine was the organ through which Loudon communicated his own thoughts and feeling to the public. 21 Issued monthly, its stated purpose of “the diffusion of useful knowledge” fit the utilitarian cause extolled by friends and colleagues. In the 1830s, it sold more than 3,000 copies of each issue! It was also in 1829 that Loudon wrote a piece, perhaps meant for inclusion in The Gardener’s Magazine, that would have been agreeable to the sometime utilitarian, full-time reformer, and member of parliament, John Arthur Roebuck. It was he who, in the early 1830s, called for fresh air, “green belts” (his term) and public parks in cities, and for a system of national education. As an active reformer, Roebuck argued in and out of Parliament for the New Poor Law, against private land enclosures and pleaded for the introduction into cities of public “parks and gardens, grass, flower and trees” and land reserves “outside the town [my emphasis]… for health and recreation purposes.” 22 Recreational activities were seen as a component of health and comportment.
Deeply impressed that in southern Germany even the poorest children were educated in public schools, Loudon also recorded for readers that each state in the United States received appropriations of land for public schools and colleges. As had Roebuck and a few other utilitarians, Loudon then published an essay on a “Plan for a National Education Establishment.” In manuscript form, the piece was entitled “Parochial institutions; or, an outline of a plan for a national education establishment suitable to the children of all ranks, from infancy to the age of puberty, as a substitute for the national churches of England, Scotland, and Ireland”… When published in mid-1829 in The Gardener’s Magazine, the title was exactly the same. 23 The essay took much from Bentham’s and Owen’s earlier calls but Loudon knew his subject.
In 1806, Loudon had been struck with rheumatic fever that “settled” in the left a knee and later crippled his right arm. (It was amputated in 1825.) Yet in 1808, George Frederick Stratton had engaged Loudon to landscape and farm a 1,500 acre property, Great Tew Park with an attendant village in West Oxfordshire. There Loudon also established a school to train young men, sons of gentry and town lads, in soil cultivation and the theory and practice of farming. 24 So his later expressions about an education policy had a basis in experience, if limited.
Loudon’s knowledge of the ecological effects (he did not use those words) and human benefits of nature’s sun, wind, land, water, and plants upon urban and suburban dwellers provided experiential logic and encouragement that aided his reforming friends and colleagues, people such as Robert Owen (whose ideas and practices stimulated Loudon) and his Scottish colleague John Sinclair (who was a leader in agricultural reforms and dedicated to the revival of villages 25 ), or another to inspire Loudon, the intellectual utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. Then later it was James Silk Buckingham, Chadwick, Roebuck, and who else? At times Loudon suspected recreation and nature’s garden held medicinal benefits but remained certain of its healthfulness for “the poorer” ranks. In the Encyclopedia of Gardening of 1822 (by 1878, eighteen editions or reprints had been produced 26 ), he advocated public city parks, the first person of influence to do so. (And after 1839 he designed not a few himself.) On this issue, he was followed most ably and effectively by utilitarians like Roebuck and less originally by Buckingham, both in and out of Parliament.
After Parliament passed the 1832 Reform Act, there followed a parliamentary committee of great significance. They initiated in-depth studies on subjects such as accessible open space, public walks, promenades, gardens, tree lined streets in cities, and “the Propriety of establishing Public Baths.” 27 On release of the committee’s report in 1833 Roebuck rejoiced: “At last we are getting support for our open spaces and trees… . [S]oon our towns will blossom and the air will be pure.” 28 This was followed in 1835 by a Municipal Corporations Act. That allowed limited local political autonomy and self-funding that led to sponsoring public parks (some to be called People’s Parks), and enabled the municipal part movement. In 1836, there was yet another enclosure act aimed to protect commons close to villages and towns and cities. This success was followed by the passage of a resolution that all future enclosure bills must include provisions for public open space. 29
We can see that Loudon’s idea to patiently insert circular growth rings into an existing urban fabric was, well, outlandish. But his idea to plan a city ab initio with concentric park land rings with an indication of roads and town functions was reasonable and probably known to most Parliamentarians. It certainly became the model for most of the useful theoretical town plans proposed thereafter, Charles Fourier’s community barracks aside. We can isolate authors such as the lucid Buckingham and a dedicated Robert Pemberton, 30 and so on to the wild Peter Kropotkin and, most notably, to Ebenezer Howard’s draft of 1898 about the physical form of self-funded Garden Cities. 31
Seaman, journalist, and MP in the Reform Parliament from 1832 to 1837 Buckingham retired at age fifty-one. In 1849, he published a book about political and economic reforms that would form what he termed a “New Association.” They were based on the paternalistic ideas offered by Bentham, Owen, and Thomas Spence’s improbable land tenure ideas. 32 Buckingham and Loudon served together on the Committee of the Metropolitan Improvement Society when formed in 1842. Others involved were influential reformation figures such as Chadwick, the doctor politician and reformer James Mill, and others of the Bentham school like Joseph Hume, Francis Place (an influential friend of John Stuart Mill), and the architect and housing reformer Charles Barry; cross-fertilization was inevitable, is patent.
Of interest here is Buckingham’s model town designed to receive his reformed society (Figure 3
). It would be one mile square and have sequential equilateral squares that formed rings of dwellings for various classes, public facilities such as baths, schools, “dining hall,” a continuous Covered Gallery for Public Promenades, and so on. Alternating with those functional rings would be landscaped open space with gardens, walks, “lawns,” colonnades, and the like, of what he called “free breathing places:”
33
the plan closely followed Loudon’s specification of 1829. As well, residential “mansions” were to be on each side of a Grand Inner Square described as an open air space for public assembly and likened to an ancient Forum or Agora. Overseeing all was what is best described as a symbol of an all-seeing omnipotent eye. Buckingham’s words: In the centre of the whole is an Octagonal Tower, of 100 feet diameter at the base, to be crowned with a spire of 300 feet elevation, and to contain an Electric Light for lighting the whole Town: a large illuminated clock; the bells for public worship, and other [state] occasions… .
34
James S. Buckingham, “Sketch of the Plan of a Model Town,” 1849, no scale, from Buckingham, 1849.
As a self-proclaimed disciple of Owen, some have said the last Owenite, all land and facilities in Pemberton’s model town “must be public property,” they “must be” held “conjointly.” As well, “Right angles are opposed to the harmony of motion, and in a town there must be motion”
35
(Figure 4
). Pemberton’s “Model town for the happy colony, to be established in New Zealand by the Workmen of Great Britain” had at its center an open space engaged by four “colleges, or National Universities,” the buildings illustrated in Greaco/Roman dress. From there outward, there then was a road, then “manufacturies” with open court yards, then a road, then housing with green court yards, then a tree lined road, then “public horticultural gardens and arboretum,” then housing with green court yards. The outer or fourth “circle is a park, three miles in circumference.” The arrangement was similar schematically to Loudon’s Hints of 1829. The focus on educational facilities follows Pemberton’s often published analyses of Owen’s theories on training and instruction. Of added interest to students of Garden Cities is the following requirement: As regards the happy Colonies… I have before observed [herein] that they are to contain twenty thousand acres each, and all the ten towns to be of the same form, according to the plan annexed [herein]: to be round or circular, resembling the [celestial] creation, with communicating roads between all the towns.
36
Robert Pemberton, “Ground plan/of the Model Town for the Happy Colony,” 1854, no scale, Robert Wm Armstrong, architect, Charlotte Delia Pemberton, delineator, color chromolithograph, London: Day & Son, Lithographers.
Theories of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin might seem out of order but some of his ideas were influential upon many social, economic, and political theorists and city planners up to today. In a series of articles published in the 1880s while living in England, he outlined certain ideas more or less as follows. There is a world trend for manufacturing industries to decentralize, so, production for local markets is therefore inevitable. This implies that each region must feed itself. The dispersal of industry on a small scale and in combination with agriculture is rational and desirable. Education that combines manual and intellectual work is essential. Of course, Kropotkin’s remedies would not be undertaken by a centralist government as with Pemberton. Resolution would be accomplished through human intelligence and brotherhood and by cooperation, not by statism. He rejected emphatically the authoritarian ideas of Bentham, Owen, Fourier, Marx, Engels, and Edward Bellamy. 37 Moreover, Kropotkin’s educational ideas had a meaningful effect on European and American progressive education movements before and after 1900.
Decentralization was not a direct subject within Loudon’s writings but implied. It was obvious in Owen’s and therefore in Buckingham’s and Pemberton’s. Kropotkin did not furnish a picture of his model “Industrial Village.” But his idea, so similar to Owen’s, of villages scattered about the countryside impressed his contemporary Ebenezer Howard. He may have seen the essays or read them in book form when collected in 1899. In any event, he diligently took up the cause of decentralization. 38
As amended in 1902, Howard expressed admiration for proponents of urban depopulation by emigration.
39
He was inspired positively and negatively, he said, by the improbable nationalization of land as proposed by Thomas Spence in the 1770s (and therefore Bellamy), by Herbert Spencer’s similar call, and by Henry George’s “inaccurate” reasoning, as Howard called it.
40
He also studied Buckingham’s restrictive cooperative model town named Victoria and offered severe criticism. Now it will be seen that though in outward form Buckingham’s scheme and my own present the same feature of a model town set in a large agricultural estate… yet the inner life of the two communities would be entirely different—the inhabitants of Garden City enjoying the fullest rights of free association, and exhibiting the most varied forms of individual and co-operative work and endeavour—the members of Buckingham’s city being held together by the bonds of a rigid cast-iron organization, from which there could be no escape but by leaving the association, or breaking it up into various sections.
41
Ebenezer Howard, “Ward and Centre/Garden-City. A diagram,” drawn to scale of 440 yards equals 1/4 mile where the distance from center to outer avenue is 930 yards, from Howard, 1902.
When architects Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin prepared a drawing of the final plan of Letchworth Garden City, a fairly large but imprecisely defined Green Belt nearly encircled the town (Figure 6 ). “Green belt” was a term coined by Roebuck in 1832.
“Letchworth/Garden City,” the “ultimate” form of the first garden city as proposed by architects Raymond Unwin & Barry Parker in 1904, partially built 35 miles north of suburban London, the illustration added by editor F. J. Osborn to Howard, 1945.
The essay delineating the need for Breathing Spaces was a neat summary of some—and only some—current moves toward reformation that carried into the years when the venture to colonize South Australia was being prepared, or 1832–36. Loudon’s practical and theoretical ideas were known not only to those in London planning to colonize South Australia but to Australians down under through personal contact within well-regarded professional gardeners and botanists during the 1820s and 1830s. They were initially with people in the colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania. At times he published information about Australian events. On a couple of occasions, he included notes on the impending settlement of South Australia. 42 That was information personally gathered or gleaned from Loudon’s friends who were involved with emigration generally, and South Australia particularly, men such as Bentham, Charles Buller, Mill senior and junior, George Grote, the Hill brothers, and a swag of others.
While employed in the London office of the Commissioners overseeing the settlement of South Australia, in 1835 George Strickland Kingston, then in charge of the survey department, was assigned the task of setting out parameters and details for the expedition to the great south island, including the town plan of the future capital city. In 1833, Loudon wrote that “The time is just commencing for the establishment of public parks, and gardens adjoining towns, in which the beau idéal… will be realised, at the expense of all, and for the enjoyment of all.” Then he published the second edition of his Encyclopedia of Gardening. Under the general heading of “Public Gardens for Recreation” were sections devoted to “Public gardens,” to “pedestrian promenades,” to “public squares,” to “public Botanic gardens,” and to “Cottage-gardens.” In one instance, he said with philosophic insight that
Cottage-gardens, in a moral and political point of view, are of obvious importance; attaching the cottager to his home and to his country, by inducing sober, industrious, and domestic habits; and by creating that feeling of independence which is the best security against pauperism.
Loudon’s ideas were known to Kingston who owned at least one of Loudon’s books as did other colonists and friends. When designing the physical plan of a future Adelaide in late 1835 Kingston included a surround—a single ring—of “adjoining” park lands. Then in January 1837, Kingston and William Light cooperatively executed that plan (with slight modifications) as South Adelaide. They also added North Adelaide on the upper side of River Torrens, Figure 7 : all was and is girded by park lands. We can say with some certainty that Kingston provided the first design in clear outline for a public park and green belt in October 1835 and when laid out in January 1837 it was the first application of Loudon’s idèal and first in the world to be freely accessible public parks owned and operated by the people. 44
“Plan of the city of Adelaide, in South Australia/with the acre allotments numbered, and a marginal reference to the names of the original purchasers/Surveyed and Drawn by Colonel Light.” This is the plan as designed by G. S. Kingston 1835–37, and jointly with W. Light during January 1837. The publisher was John Gliddon, South Australian agent in London, but a first set of lithographs were printed in Adelaide. They arrived in England via Rapid during November 8, 1837. Layout on-site of the street plan and encircling parklands, their limit indicated by a dashed line that have since held firm, was conducted by Kingston and Light. The drawing upon which the print was based was not by Light but by Robert G. Thomas, a young draftsman articled to Kingston. It was executed sometime after May 23, 1837, when an ad hoc committee named the streets and six town squares and, Thomas has said, from a plan supplied by Kingston. Based on this lithograph a series of other prints were subsequently made (without marginalia) by other people in London, Sydney, and Adelaide, and have become well known.
In 1902, Howard presented North Adelaide as a new town established beyond the perimeter of park lands on the assumption that South Adelaide had reach its population limit (Figure 8 ). “How does it [Adelaide] grow?” he asked. “It grows by leaping over the ‘Park Lands’ and establishing North Adelaide.” 45 There was no leap. North and South Adelaide were laid out in January 1837 as was the most important attribute of the Kingston/Light town plan, the encircling park lands. Those parks were the practical result of learned debates either side of 1830 and at the same moment the first act of what became the municipal park movement. The aesthetic component of that movement leads to the establishment of American national parks. Both movements spread around the world.
“Adelaide/showing park lands all round/city…”, no scale, and “Diagram/illustrating correct principle/of a city’s growth…,” both from Howard, 1945. These two illustrations were part of Howard’s chapter for the 1902 edition entitled “Social Cities.”
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
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