Pages from history
Right: The
exhibition homes
today
The First Exhibition was opened
on 25 July 1905 by the Duke of
Devonshire.
I spoke about the exhibitions
with Historian Josh Tidy, Curator
of the International Garden Cities
Exhibition and author of An A-Z of
Letchworth Garden City.
He said: “The 1905 Exhibition
attracted over 60,000 visitors to the
fledgling Garden City, including
reporters from every corner of
the land curious about modern
and innovative types of housing
construction, and also about the
strange new Garden City idea that
was being pioneered there. The
success of the exhibition persuaded
the Great Northern Railway to build
a temporary station in the town, so in
that sense it literally put Letchworth
on the map.”
All 130 cottages built for the First
Exhibition were sold out. Thousands
of Londoners travelled by cheap day
returns from Kings Cross to have a
look at the exhibits. The appetite for
affordable country housing was such
that it was decided to have another
exhibition a couple of years later.
Held under the title ‘Urban Cottages
& Small Holdings’, it was sponsored
by the Daily Mail newspaper, for
which it became a precursor of its
popular Ideal Home Exhibition –now
known as the Ideal Home Show.
The 1907 exhibition was smaller
than the first one and, according to
56
Issue 1 2020
The Exhibitions of 1905 and
1907 are effectively still going
on, only the visitors have
turned into residents, and the
exhibits into the cottages in
which they live.
Tidy, “focused much more on groups
of houses while its architect entrants
were much more local, resulting in
a more sensitive approach to the
cottages’ look and feel, fitting in with
the now-established design aesthetic,
or ‘Letchworth Look’.”
With 120 of the 130 First
Exhibition Cottages (and nearly
all of the Second Exhibition ones)
still around and populated, it
is no wonder that the peculiar
‘Letchworth look’ is very obvious
to any visitor to the town, which
has come to resemble a permanent
housing exhibition in its own right.
In the course of its 115-year-long
history, that perennial real-life
and open-air exhibition has seen a
number of notable visitors. Within
10 years of the town’s foundation,
Letchworth’s account books showed
it to be a financial success. It saw
growth in its industry, public
Below: A window
into the past,
courtesy Garden
City Collection,
Letchworth Garden
City Heritage
Foundation.
building, housing and population
– facts that couldn’t have failed to
impress Russian ‘socialist democrats’,
who were watching its progress with
interest and fascination.
This included Lenin, who
(reportedly) stayed in Letchworth in
1907 as a guest of religious minister
Bruce Wallace. Wallace rented his
Brotherhood Church in London to
the fifth congress of the Russian
Social Democratic Labour Party
(RSDLP).
There is little doubt that the
success of the Garden City movement
in its very early stages must have
impressed Lenin to such an extent
that he tried to hijack some of
Ebenezer Howard’s ideas and to
implement them in Russia – with
catastrophic results.
However, Letchworth has become
a model and an inspiration for
hundreds of similar settlements all
over the world: in the USA, Australia,
Japan, South Africa, Czech Republic,
Brazil, Germany and France. Official
delegations sometimes arrive in the
area from China.
All of it means that the Exhibitions
of 1905 and 1907 are effectively
still going on, only the visitors
have turned into residents, and
the exhibits into the cottages in
which they live. The whole of
modern Letchworth, though it has
slowly expanded, remains basically
unchanged since its exhibition
grounding in 1905!
w w w.exhibitionworld.co.uk