There was a time when day-trippers came to Letchworth Garden City just to marvel at spectacles like Andrew Muir, consultant architect to the first garden city in the world, a proud exponent of “rational dress” leaning against a tree wearing a heavily embroidered shepherd’s smock, knee britches and sandals.
There was much more to admire in the years after 1903 when the visionary Ebenezer Howard created the town in north Hertfordshire: the sandal-shod socialists, the Simple Life hotel, the teetotal pub, the vegetarians, the barefoot suffragettes, even the cohabiters – the cranks of Letchworth as they were immediately lampooned, who became as famous as the idealistic new town housing them. Their history is now being celebrated in an exhibition drawn from the town’s archives and local history collection.
“The cranks were always very much in the minority but, in the early days, in a town of only a few hundred people, they were much more visible. As the town grew they were gradually eclipsed,” said Vicky Axell, joint curator of the exhibition at the town’s new Broadway Gallery and curator of the Garden City collection. Traces of the old spirit remain, she said, though the town is now solidly Tory – they gained an early toehold by serving alcohol in the Conservative club, decades before the first licence was issued to a hotel in 1961, and the first pub with real beer opened in 1974.
“We had a man here from Hampstead Garden Suburb and he said he could still see the old spirit, but that it had gone completely in Hampstead,” she said. “I suppose if you put a merchant banker in a smock he’s still going to look like a merchant banker.”
“The exhibition includes CND and other themed protests that show the spirit did not go away completely. The key survivor is vegetarianism,” she said. “The town does still boast a vegetarian wholesaler that proves [there’s a] remaining clientele. Also, Letchworth has a transition town group and a thriving allotment group; there are rarely protests but the one thing that stirs local passion is the loss of prominent trees…”
In the 1900s radical crankery only went so far: it was agreed that the owner of the vegetarian shop sunbathing in his own garden wearing a short-sleeved shirt was acceptable, but the two suffragettes who took off their shoes and stockings to walk barefoot across the common on a summer’s day bumped into Howard himself, who told them they were a disgrace to their cause.
There was widespread disapproval of the cohabiters who lived together and refused to marry. Axell said it was not always easy to tell from the records whether the cohabiters were just sharing a house or actually couples. “Though one woman, an artist, chose to have her woman partner’s name on her tombstone, which to me is very suggestive.”
“It certainly was the centre of sandal-wearing,” Axell said. A workshop was set up in the town making copies of Indian sandals, which she said became known as “Fabian uniform”. George Orwell, who knew Letchworth well, in a memorable rant in The Road to Wigan Pier denounced “that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat”.
The exhibition includes surviving examples of the sandals and other artefacts, along with photographs, contemporary cartoons gently mocking the cranks, pantomimes and programmes for entertainments at landmarks like the Cloisters, an extraordinary building – now owned by the freemasons – constructed as an open-air theosophy and psychology teaching centre.
Most of the artefacts have never been exhibited before, including a genuine smock, recently donated to the collection, cherished in the town since the days when it was the proud uniform of the Letchworth crank.
- Alternative Letchworth, past and present, at the Broadway Gallery, Letchworth Garden City, until 19 February 2017, free
