The Rebellion in the Roses

Where did your last bank holiday take you?

Perhaps you were off hiking in the dales? Taking tea in the Cotswolds? Enjoying the first bit of sun in the park or just binging out on Netflix and nearly getting round to odd jobs?

Well, if you were married to me, you’d have found yourself with a coffee and a banana on an early morning train to Letchworth Garden City to investigate the home of Britain’s first roundabout, constructed circa 1909. (Yes, my husband is a very good sport.)

But Letchworth was no let down. It was one of the most thought-provoking trips I have made in a some time.

Letchworth Garden City was built at a time of rapid urbanization. The early 20th century saw a massive influx of people into cities, driven by industrialization. This led to the construction of high-density streets, apartment blocks, rapid urban expansion and tightly packed neighbourhoods.

So it was strange to discover a town from that period almost deliberately built with inefficiency in mind. Letchworth has one of the lowest housing densities in the UK. Spaced-out cottages formed its earliest streets with low-rise arts and crafts buildings on large plots of land. Occasional terraces do pop up, but earn their place more for aesthetic variety than through an attempt to house the many.

Letchworth Garden City was also built in an era when the individual was being put in front of the spiritual. Darwin's theory of evolution, published in the late 19th century, had made a big impact on religious beliefs, challenging the fundamental creation narrative by offering a scientific explanation for life. Society was questioning the church’s authority in favour of reasoning.

Despite all this going on, one of the most important buildings I stumbled across in Letchworth Garden City was Vasanta Hall: a centre of Theosophism (an esoteric spiritual movement and a big part of town’s early identity). A mile down the road, I discovered ‘The Cloisters,’ now an events space, but originally built by a Quaker philanthropist as a school of psychology before it became home to the Theosophists and the Freemasons. Even the design of the town incorporates spirituality, with open spaces originally intended to promote higher-order contemplation.

In Britain, in the early years of the 20th century before WW1, hedonistic urban pleasure-seeking was on the up. Gin palaces were transforming into dance venues. Oscar Wilde was running wild opening risqué proto-queer clubs like The Cave of The Golden Calf, and bohemian Soho was booming. (There were 150 illegal nightclubs in Soho alone prior to 1919). Yet, when you walk the lanes of Letchworth the thing you notice immediately is…where are all the pubs?

Turns out, this was no accident. Ebenezer Howard and the founders of Letchworth deliberately excluded pubs from the plan to move away from the drink-soaked debauchery elsewhere. Letchworth was mostly dry until 1960 with just one inn, The Skittles, set up in 1907. This ‘pub’ sold only soft drinks and became known as the 'pub without beer.’ Early residents had to travel to neighbouring towns for a pint. Eventually, the temperance laws were relaxed and Letchworth got its pubs, but they remained under strict control and were much more family friendly.

So there you have it, at a time of rapid urbanization, declining religious faith, and burgeoning hedonism, a whole new town emerged built along an idealized version of the British past.  Cottage gardens instead of sprawling cities. Spiritual introspection over secularism. Community-focused activities in place of naughty fun. And to a large extent it worked. Letchworth Garden City attracted a big population drawn to its utopian ideals and became a model for other garden cities.

This rebellious, counter-cultural nature of Letchworth’s rose-filled streets struck me.

It summed up everything that is wrong with how we sometimes try to understand culture and individuals today.

Whether in trend reports, media narratives, or industry analysis of generations, too often the conclusion is built on the idea of convergence. Culture, we are always told, is moving one way with certainty. We are becoming more liberal, or less liberal. More tech-obsessed or getting back to reality. More eco-conscious or giving up on our ecological ideals. Whatever the direction du jour, the one thing you can be certain of is that we are always told there is a direction, an overall thrust that’s shifting the dial.

Wouldn’t it be more helpful if we stopped trying to paint the world with a single brush stroke?

It may sound like sacrilege for a planner to argue in favour of less focus, but when it comes to understanding the changing world, the attempt to be single-minded may result in us becoming narrow-minded.

If Letchworth Garden City taught me anything, it's this: in order to build things of meaning – be they brands or towns – we must stop trying to define culture and start embracing the fact that culture goes everywhere, all at once, and ever was it thus.