Tomorrow's Garden City Plan Submitted
Local housing association North Hertfordshire Homes (NHH) has submitted a planning application for an exciting new eco-housing scheme in Letchworth Garden City. The project, known as Tomorrow’s Garden City, will provide 60 new homes for rent, shared ownership and sale.
NHH Chief Executive, Kevin Thompson, said “We are really excited about this project. We have spent two years working with our partners, the Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation, and North Hertfordshire District Council to produce these landmark proposals – which update the original concept of the Garden City for the twenty-first century. The new homes we hope to build will be environmentally friendly and very cost-effective to run using geo-thermal heating systems and solar energy. We are especially pleased to have been able to incorporate into the scheme the winning entry and a runner up from the international design competition ‘Tomorrow’s Garden City’ that we and the Heritage Foundation ran last year.”
Housing challenges met ‘head-on’ in world’s first Garden City
Over 100 years ago, the founding father of the Garden City Movement, Ebenezer Howard, bravely challenged the intolerable living and social conditions that existed in certain parts of Britain at that time and became the catalyst for bringing about monumental change to improve the quality of lives for millions of people in the UK and subsequently throughout many countries.
Today, Ebenezer Howard would have no doubt been delighted to see his beloved Letchworth Garden City – the world’s first Garden City – at the forefront of a renewed special housing challenge in the City – again in the form of an International Housing Design Competition.
History repeating itself with international housing design competition
Echoes of an international house building design competition in the early 1900’s, which captured the imagination of the whole country, will once again reverberate around the world’s first Garden City.
Over 60 high-quality, affordable and environmentally friendly homes will be constructed, based on the winning designs, on land owned by Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation – town founder Ebenezer Howard’s company in modern times. The competition is aptly named ‘Tomorrow’s Garden City.’
In 1905, the eighth Duke of Devonshire opened the ‘Cheap Cottages’ Exhibition in the Garden City, showcasing some 131 entries to an international housing design competition. The brief given to architects of the day was to build innovative housing for a maximum cost of £150 per property – this dream became reality.
