Howard, Ebenezer

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Howard, Ebenezer (1850–1928). Howard, born in London, made a modest living as a shorthand writer and his importance was as a pioneer of the garden city movement. He believed that unrestricted private development of towns must lead to squalor and the communities which he advocated in his book Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898, 1902) were to be owned by trustees, carefully planned, and surrounded by a green belt. He founded the Garden City Association in 1899 and the planning and development of Letchworth in Hertfordshire began in 1903. In 1919 he followed it with the purchase of an estate nearby at Welwyn. The examples had a vast influence on the planning of new towns in Britain and abroad, particularly after the Second World War. Howard spent the last years of his life on the Welwyn estate and was knighted in 1927.

J. A. Cannon

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