Mr Ebenezer Howard is not content with half measures; like Sir Thomas More, he builds a Utopia – a charming “Garden City” of 32,000 people in the midst of a little territory, all owned, planned, built and generally directed by the community itself,” was how The Times sniffily reported on plans to build Letchworth Garden City some 100 years ago.

Yesterday’s response to the announcement of 15 proposed eco-towns was similarly grudging. But if we must build to meet the Government’s target of 3 million new homes by 2020, then these zero-carbon settlements seem as good a scheme as any. What’s more, after the wrong turn of the New Towns and edge estates of the postwar years, the eco-towns herald a return to the purity of the Garden City template.

For just as Caroline Flint, the Housing Minister, promised that her eco-Jerusalems would “revolutionise the way people live”, so “Ebenezer the Garden City Geyser” (as George Bernard Shaw dubbed him) hoped to elevate the human spirit through a new way of rural-urban living. “Town and country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilisation,” he promised. For he was adamant that the city had no future: Victorian London was a tumour, an elephantiasis, whose overcrowded conditions were undermining the racial strength of the nation, and whose sprawling suburbia was threatening to consume southern England.

The solution was to stop extending the city and start again on virgin territory. But not with the kind of model villages that industrialists George Cadbury and William Lever had laid out at Bournville and Port Sunlight – developments that Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, this week misguidedly dismissed, alongside the Prince of Wales’s Poundbury, as owing “more to paternalism and the aggrandisement of the benefactor, than real concern for residents”. Instead, Howard aimed to solve the problem of suburban sprawl, inner-city squalor, and rural depopulation with a magic planning bullet, “in which all the advantages of the most energetic and active town life, with all the beauty and delight of the country, may be secured in perfect combination”.

The Garden City plan was seductively simple: 6,000 acres of land would be purchased by a four-man corporation “of undoubted probity and honour”, in the midst of which a tightly knit 1,000-acre city would be laid out surrounded by a green belt of agricultural land and parkland. In contrast to the uniform, deracinated Victorian suburbs, Howard promised easy access to the surrounding countryside as well as all the buzz of city living with shopping arcades, museums, picture galleries and teetotal pubs.

Best of all, there would be no commute to work as industry was located within easy walking distance of housing. In fact, all the prerequisites for a modern eco-town were there in the early 1900s: mixed-use planning, walkability, green spaces, business zones and a management body “to coordinate service delivery”. And when the population reached 32,000, the Garden City would be declared complete with no further sprawl.

Only in the tiny hamlet of Letchworth, among the gentle hills of Hertfordshire, was the scheme ever properly attempted. Under Howard’s oversight, architects Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin set to work building a Garden City designed to embody more than the “mere self-centred independence and churlish disregard of others, which have stamped their character on our modern towns”. For here was the guiding ambition: through design and architecture the garden cities, like the eco-towns, would foster a new approach to society and nature. Today, the challenge is climate change; then, a fear of humanity losing its spiritual and social bearings as it was steadily detached from the soil.

In the event, Letchworth Garden City became a byword for freethinking crankiness: a bohemian netherworld of naturists, Esperanto-speakers and morris dancers. In 1927, George Orwell passed through it on a bus, “and two dreadful-looking old men got into it. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts, into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured, ‘Socialists’.” Perhaps this is the underhand, political rationale behind the citing of 12 prospective eco-towns in true-blue, Tory constituencies.

While Letchworth eventually prospered, beyond a rather aborted attempt in Welwyn, the Garden City model did not catch on. Instead, it reemerged in a horribly mangled guise under the New Town schemes of the postwar decades. The organic Arts and Crafts ethos of Unwin and Parker was junked for modernism, brutalism and all the hubristic arrogance of the town planning establishment. The results were the cheap, sprawling, car-dependent, anywhere-nowhere developments of Harlow, Basildon, Crawley and Stevenage. By 2002 a parliamentary select committee report described the New Towns as facing “a spiral of decline” caused by poor housing, bad public transport and crumbling civic amenities. There wasn’t much new life, new civilisation here.

So far the signs are that the Government has learnt from the worst mistakes of the New Towns experiment and, with their demand for each site to have a “separate and distinct” identity, is rightly seeking to avoid the McMansion sprawl so favoured by property developers. Of course, there remain sites in the long list that should be aborted: building on open countryside around Pennbury is ill-advised given the amount of regeneration that is needed in run-down Leicester, only four miles away. While the developments in Bedfordshire, Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire all threaten Greenbelt land.

More than that, there still remains the unfortunate whiff of post-war planning aggrandisement and disdain for the messy workings of the market. A desire, in the words of Ms Blears, “to build strong communities” through state intervention. Yet urban history is adamant that the finest cities, the strongest neighbourhoods, evolve organically, often haphazardly, building on ingrained landscapes, communities and civic sensibilities. “The only difficulty is to create it,” as The Times noted of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, “but that is a small matter to Utopians.”

Tristram Hunt is author of Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City

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