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This diagram was first published in Ebenezer Howard’s book Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1898. Four years later in 1902 the book was reprinted under a different title: Garden Cities of To-morrow. Both versions of the book laid out Howard’s ideas to create new settlements for people that were neither town nor country but ‘town-country’. In this way, Howard hoped that the problems of city congestion could be relieved and that the countryside could be protected from further expansion by limiting the population of the town.

As the diagram demonstrates, the town is arranged in concentric circles. There is a park for use by the residents of the town at the centre and a railway running round the edge of the settlement, providing a boundary and preventing further building. The railway was not intended to carry passengers but raw materials and goods for the citizens.

This garden city model was built most fully in Britain’s first garden city at Letchworth, north of London. Howard founded the town in 1903, and he appointed the partnership of Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker as architects to design the buildings. Soon after construction was started, in 1905 and 1907, examples of Letchworth’s housing were shown as ‘ideal homes’ in a very popular exhibition sponsored by the newspaper The Daily Mail. This exhibition continued to be held in London throughout the interwar period and was very important in establishing modern methods of design and prefabrication in Britain.