Nestled in between Harpenden to the west and Ware to the east, sits the town of Welwyn Garden City, in Hertfordshire. Welwyn Garden City is one of the most well-known towns in the South-East, owing to its remarkably unique history and design, helmed by master planner Ebenezer Howard in 1920. The garden-city design of Welwyn is still thoroughly maintained today; with suburban housing swathes looped around green-spaces, and the town’s central hub Parkway a green-centre that anchors the town’s infrastructure. Welwyn Garden City is a very popular town owing to its remarkable commutability into London, with a train that gets from Welwyn to St Pancras in just 40 minutes! Owing to this desirability and the unique design history of the town, property is often expensive, with detached five-bed properties with offers in excess of £1.5 million!

Welwyn Garden City was proposed and designed by master planner Ebenezer Howard, and was opened in 1920. The town served as a vital inspiration for the myriad of new towns that would follow after the postwar 1946 New Towns Act. In 1898, Howard published ‘Garden Cities of To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform’, which outline his design principles: the meshing of town and country, free of poor housing, that balanced individual and community needs. In 1919 Howard, following the experiment with Letchworth Garden City, bought over 4,000 acres of land in Hertfordshire for his new garden-city. The principles of design involved his ‘three magnets’ paradigm which saw the confluence of the benefits of Town, Country into the hybrid Town-Country.

Residents began to move to Welwyn Garden City in December of 1920. However Howard’s design ethos pre-dates even his architectural or design career. It is often noted that the garden-city design imprint focuses on a particularly British sense of place and coutnryside; although Howard actually got his inspiration from moving to Chicago. Arriving in Chicago in 1871, he arrived just after Chicago’s Great Fire, and witnessed the devastation it brought. This, along with meeting several famous literary figures such as Walt Whitman, led to Howard’s initial vision of the better quality of life to unfold.

Owing to the centralised location, developments in Welwyn Garden City’s town centre is often slow and met with an abundance of restrictions. Resident’s are often resistent to new developments that do not cater to the unique locale of Welwyn Garden City. However, the Welwyn Hatfield Local Plan 2016-2036 has identified several key areas in the Welwyn Garden City locale for the allocation of new dwellings; totalling at over 4,300 new homes to be built in the region!