Monday, 14 January 2008

Finally, I can breathe without pain and my eyes can focus enough to read.

Snuggled up on the sofa, I rewarded myself with New Towns and Garden Cities - a collection of essays issued in 1989 to commemorate the centenary of HCC.

I had forgotten how much the Garden City movement was in fact an early (and very successful) example of a social enterprise.

I was also struck by how closely Ebenezer Howard’s plan for his Social City resemble the topography of the ancient civilization on the Plain of Kor in H Rider Haggard’s She. I worried that I might be hallucinating. But just fifteen pages later, I read that H Rider Haggard was a prominent agriculturalist (which I vaguely knew) who had worked closely with the Letchworth Garden City Corporation!

How very pleasing. I wonder how many other literary connections there are to the Garden City movement: Kipps of course, and Laurence Olivier, and much of GBS, and Ruskin, and the Webbs, and EM Forster, and ...