Qualla: Letchworth https://qualla.com/letchworth en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:15 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/z/letchworth-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Letchworth https://qualla.com/letchworth Letchworth: Introduction https://qualla.com/letchworth/ Photo credit Ebenezer Howard, Public domain. Ebenezer Howard was working as a parliamentary stenographer in London in 1898 when he published a small book with a long title: To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. The book had a diagram in it. Three magnets, labeled Town, Country, and Town-Country, drew people in different directions. Howard argued that the third magnet, a new kind of settlement combining the best of cities and countryside, could outpull the other two. Most reviewers ignored him. A few read the book, met him for tea, and decided to actually build one. The land they bought, 3,818 acres around the small village of Letchworth in north Hertfordshire, became the first attempt to put Howard's diagram on the ground. The first families moved into their new houses in July 1904.

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Image: Ebenezer Howard | Public domain

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/z/letchworth-wp/gcpz-letchworth-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Letchworth: The Letchworth That Was https://qualla.com/letchworth/ Photo credit Richard Kelly, CC BY 4.0. Long before the garden city, there was a village called Letchworth. It appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Leceworde: nine villager households, four cottagers, one slave, one priest, suggesting it was already a parish. The parish church of St Mary's was built in the twelfth c...

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Image: Richard Kelly | CC BY 4.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/z/letchworth-wp/gcpz-letchworth-the-letchworth-that-was.mp3 0:06 2 full Letchworth: Unwin and Parker https://qualla.com/letchworth/ Photo credit Jeff Tomlinson, CC BY-SA 2.0. The architects Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker drew the original layout. Industry was to be kept to the eastern edge, near the railway and the Great North Road. Housing radiated out from a central avenue, organised around tree-lined streets and small parades of local shops. There ...

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Image: Jeff Tomlinson | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/z/letchworth-wp/gcpz-letchworth-unwin-and-parker.mp3 0:06 3 full Letchworth: Sollershott Circus https://qualla.com/letchworth/ Photo credit Jeff Tomlinson, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1908 the engineers came to a six-way junction in Letchworth's main avenue and proposed something unusual. The plans, drawn in July of that year, called for a circular traffic island at the meeting point of Broadway, Spring Road, and Sollershott. Unwin had recently been to Pari...

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Image: Jeff Tomlinson | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/z/letchworth-wp/gcpz-letchworth-sollershott-circus.mp3 0:06 4 full Letchworth: The Town with No Pub https://qualla.com/letchworth/ Photo credit Richard Kelly, CC BY 4.0. Many of the early residents had non-conformist or Quaker leanings, and Letchworth quickly acquired a reputation for earnestness. The poet John Betjeman, in his poems Group Life: Letchworth and Huxley Hall, painted the inhabitants as health-obsessed sandal-wearers eating brown bre...

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Image: Richard Kelly | CC BY 4.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/z/letchworth-wp/gcpz-letchworth-the-town-with-no-pub.mp3 0:06 5 full Letchworth: Hotel York and the Rescue https://qualla.com/letchworth/ Photo credit WFan, CC BY-SA 4.0. The garden city was supposed to be run for the benefit of its residents. The original company, First Garden City Limited, restricted shareholder dividends to 5 per cent and intended that, once the town was complete, the estate would pass to a public body. By 1956, that intention ...

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Image: WFan | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/z/letchworth-wp/gcpz-letchworth-hotel-york-and-the-rescue.mp3 0:06 6 full Letchworth: What Howard's Idea Became https://qualla.com/letchworth/ Photo credit Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, CC BY-SA 3.0. Walk down Broadway in Letchworth today and the trees are mature, the front gardens are well-tended, and the houses have a slightly fussy Arts and Crafts solidity. Some of them are the original 1904 buildings. Norton Common, the wedge of unimproved grassland and woodland on the no...

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Image: Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/z/letchworth-wp/gcpz-letchworth-what-howards-idea-became.mp3 0:06 7 full