Ebenezer Howard

"Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) is famous worldwide for founding the Garden City movement, and interest in him remains strong. This is the first full-scale biography to be published since the 1980s. It explains the remarkable sequence of events that led from the publication of his ideas to the foundation of Letchworth as the world's First Garden City, just five years later, and it explores other neglected aspects of Howard's life, particularly his religious views. Shaped in the world of London Congregationalism, he became a keen seeker after unity and peace. He grafted new religious ideas, particularly from Spiritualism, and later from Theosophy, into his biblically informed, Protestant faith. Prone to spiritual epiphanies, he believed that he had been raised up to preach the 'gospel of the garden city' and to tackle the housing crisis by beginning to build the New Jerusalem in the Hertfordshire countryside. Although he sometimes appeared naïve, he was astute, and highly skilled at combining different, and sometimes conflicting, ideas in a way that built consensus and gained support from people across the social and political spectrum. Howard wanted his garden cities to be places of spiritual exploration, and as this book shows, early Letchworth certainly lived up to those expectations"--