Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform by Hall Edith;Stead Henry;

Author:Hall, Edith;Stead, Henry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472584274
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

11

The Space of Politics

Classics, Utopia and the Defence of Order

Richard Alston

A consensus on cities

On 24 September 2013, Ed Miliband, current leader of the Labour Party, announced a radical new initiative. In response to a crisis in the provision of housing, and perhaps to the widespread angst that followed the urban rioting of 2011, he called for the building of garden cities. The idea appealed to the political classes, and on 16 March 2014 George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced plans for a new garden city at Ebbsfleet. From somewhere in the shallow recesses of political memory, the ideas of Ebenezer Howard are resonating with the centre left and the ideological right of British politics. The ghost of Howard himself, however, was not summoned to the banquet; there was no celebration of a ‘Great British Reformer’.

There are parallels with a century ago, both in the political flexibility of the idea of the garden city and in forgetting Howard. In 1898, Howard published To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, to what appears to have been minimal acclaim. The Garden Cities Association was formed, and membership reached 325 by 1900. Two years later, the volume was reissued and repackaged as Garden Cities of Tomorrow, and Howard was in the process of becoming a visionary.1 Garden cities launched a transformation of the British urban landscape. With remarkable speed, the ideas were adopted and modified and, astonishingly, implemented across a range of sites in the UK. Perhaps equally remarkably, the idea travelled, being taken up in the United States, France and Germany, but in forms unrecognizable from Howard’s original plan. Almost as quickly, Howard and his original radicalism were sidelined, sidestepped by history, as town planning moved from its anarchistic and revolutionary roots to become a technocratic and governmental intervention.

The Garden City movement may seem an unpromising place to start to think about classics, class, politics and city. As I have pointed out elsewhere, Howard’s Utopia and the real ‘cities’ that followed were often distinctly non-classical in form.2 Furthermore, the garden city idea looks to be an ‘empty frame’ in cultural and political terms. The garden city has an extraordinary aesthetic history that takes it from the workers’ cottage of Letchworth, low-tech, cheap, vernacular designs, to the neo-Georgian splendours of Poundbury, Dorchester, and the ‘new urbanism’ movement in the United States responsible for the villas of Seaside, Florida and the Disney-constructed utopia of Celebration, Florida, with their neo-Palladian and classicizing echoes.3 But, if the architectural journey is bewildering, the political journey is more extreme, from the communitarian anarchism of Peter Kropotkin (and its terroristic fellow-travellers), to the traditionalism and paternalism of HRH the Prince of Wales, to the arch-conservatism of Disney.

Such transitions raise fundamental questions about the relationship between politics, ideology and architecture (aesthetics). In what follows, I outline the architectural and political journey of ‘new cities’ from nineteenth-century neoclassicism, through the anarchist and neo-medievalist roots of the Garden City movement, to a form of political classicism in communitarian thought and a weaker classical form in architectural representations.

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