‘You may have luxuries and dainties that I have not’ said the country mouse to the town mouse ‘but I prefer my plain food and simple life in the country with the peace and security that go with it’
- The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse, Aesop Fables
- Hyde Park, Edward Bawden, 1925
The urban and the natural world have long appeared, at least in literature, in opposition to one another. Cities, presented by the likes of Charles Dickens, were filthy labyrinths of pollution and poverty: the habitat of the workhouse and the land of pickpockets and chimney sweeps. Many early-modern intellectuals had nauseating (near on phobic) opinions of the city and took pity on the squalid urban dwellers. Rousseau proclaimed ‘Of all animals man is least capable of living in flocks. Penned up like sheep, men soon lose all. The breath of man is fatal to his fellows .... Cities are the burial pit of the human species’. In one poem, William Blake recalled an epidemic of the human spirit upon the streets of London:
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe. (London, 1794)
In 1854, London’s cholera outbreak claimed hundreds of lives and plunged the city’s citizens into one of England’s first modern public health crises. Wrongly believed to be spread through miasma (diseased air), the public-health puzzle was deciphered by John Snow as a water-borne disease, but not before it claimed the lives of 127 people in just three days (and 616 in total within a month). A mere 4 years later, in the summer of 1858, London was plagued by the Great Stink whereby the hot weather exacerbated the vomit-inducing smell of untreated human and industrial waste on the banks of the Thames. Parliament was abandoned, and Punch commissioned cartoons of personified death floating down the riverbank. These scenes further established the city in the eyes of contemporaries as a grubby unsanitary environment, where even the flowers grew within the confines of flower beds (because anywhere else they would be considered weeds).
- The Silent Highway Man, 1858, PUNCH
In his 1910 publication Howards End, Edward Morgan Forster forlornly mourned for the city’s absence of nature, a mere whisper or fragment of the imagination for London residents: ‘London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relation a stress greater than they have ever borne before’, this he blames ‘cosmpolitanism’ for those burdening metropolitan streets, ‘trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the bind force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone.’ Morgan has a rather pitiful depiction of Edwardian London, deprived of life, meaning, and cursed with a spiritual malaise.
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The countryside was quite the opposite. A place where ‘rose and honey-suckle clung to the cottage walls’ (Oliver Twist) and even the peasantry were harmonious and beautiful. The meditative walks taken by Jane Austen’s characters painted pretty, quaint depictions of undulating scenery, and many relished in the simple delight of countryside walking: ‘Is there a felicity in the world superior to this? Margaret, we will walk here at least two hours.’ (Sense and Sensibility). The rural English countryside has long been romanticised, becoming somewhat central to this country’s national identity. William Wordsworth (who, like me, is bloody obsessed with trees) likened golden daffodils to the stars which dance in the milky way and, when reminded of their quaint beauty, declares ‘my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.’ William Turner, the 19th century romantic painter, scarcely hid his love for English rurality and, with every rose-tinted brush stroke, depicted terrains of rolling hills as a charming heaven-like oases.
- Raby Castle the Seat of the Earl of Darlington, 1818, William Turner
The countryside is synonymous with tranquility. Tomas Hardy oft cited the peaceful solitary life of rurality and poetically recited the charming beauty of the Wessex valleys:
Red roses, lilacs, variegated box
Are there in plenty, and such hardy flowers
As flourish best untrained. Adjoining these
Are herbs and esculents; and farther still
A field; then cottages with trees, and last
The distant hills and sky. (Domicilium, 1857)
Many traditional English festivities are associated, almost exclusively, with the country. Historical depictions of may day celebrations conjure images of glee children prancing around maypoles, neighbours singing in harmony, clinking glasses, cheering and embracing. A festival dedicated to the resurrection of natures fertility, freed from the vices of barren winter-landscapes, whereby the sun can bless crops with life and bring hopes of prosperity. Then, following six joyous months, the days somberly begin to shorten again, and with it the harvest festival brings more merrymaking. Banquets in autumnal shades over-flow alters and children’s pupils dilate over the opportunity to gorge for one night only. With the oncoming hardship of winter and its bitter frost, the rural community unite, singing hymns in low harmonies over ale and shared bread, and stack wheat sheaths into a mosaic of pryzms that scatter the bare-boned fields.
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It may seem as though this was a country of two nations: two demographics and two landscapes. Appearing as though the countryside and the city are binary opposites: the clean and the dirty, the healthy and the ill, the happy and the sad. Aside from the fictitious and romantic depictions of countryside, the reality was that rural peasantry were often worse off than city dwellers. For all the charcoal-black carcinogenic smog that billowed out of factory chimneys and blackened the precious lungs of new borns, the city was a place of opportunity, modernity, and excitement. While Dickens’ damning depiction of the city in Oliver Twist has been forever immortalized as the epitome of Victorian London, he has also painted it as a metropolis of venture and excitement elsewhere ‘…throughout the day [London is] swarming with life and bustle, that is very impressive.’ Let us not forget Samuel Johnson’s famous utterance that characterizes the rise of industrial Britannia: ‘Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’ Likewise, for all his discourses on the marvel of Dorestshire when viewed from on top of brisk windy hills, Hardy’s literature iterated the monotonous hardship faced by its residents. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, a tragedy, is written about the injustices of existing as a poor yet innocent woman doomed to suffer a cyclical life of laborious agricultural work, late nights with drunkards, and vulnerable walks down unlit country paths.
Amongst all this, rumbling amidst the country divided, a movement was growing. It was during the late 19th century (1898) that Ebenezer Howard revolutionised English urban planning with a prophetic idea to merge the city and the country. The ‘Garden City’ was his solution to the awful sprawling and squalid aspects of urbanisation, he asserted that central cities were to be separated from surrounding towns by greenbelts, agriculture, and allotment plots. The best elements of the countryside and the city become one (cue Spice Girls) while, supposedly, avoiding the disadvantages presented by both topographies. Howard believed that the worst parts of the city with its ‘foul air’, ‘murky sky’, ‘drought’, ‘slums’, and ‘closing out of nature’, could be solved with the countryside’s ‘wood, meadow, forest’, ‘abundance of water’, ‘fresh air’, and ‘low rent’. Likewise, the worst parts of the country with its ‘lack of society’, ‘land lying idle’, ‘low wages’, and ‘lack of amusement’ could be countered with the city’s ‘social opportunities’, ‘high wages’, ‘employment chances’, and ‘well-lit streets’. The garden city resembled ‘freedom’ and ‘cooperation’ with a ‘flow of capital’, ‘bright homes and gardens’, and ‘good drainage, no smoke, no slums’.
- The Garden City, Ebenezer Howard, 1898
Howards utopia was powered by a vision of self-sufficient localised areas. Imagine thousands of acres of farmland – head-height wheat fields, tidy orchards, and pastures of baby cows – grown within the greenbelts of the outward (and upward) growing cityscapes, serving to feed the suburban and city dwellers and provide refuge from the monotonous affairs of daily life. Picture the tsunami of people flooding into the 19th century city, drawn in with the promise of economic opportunity but met with unsanitary dwellings, could potentially indulge in both the beauty of the natural world and the thriving city life. Benefiting from modern transport networks in between the greenbelts and satellite towns, Victorian cities were to become a place to be enjoyed, for the countryfolk could share the leisure facilities urban centres and the cityfolk would enjoy local access to the countryside. Gone were the days of the Dickensian dichotomies, no longer one or the other, but potentially a new hybrid landscape. As Howard put it: 'The people, where will they go? Town. Country. Or Town-Country?'
A few cities were made following this design, Letchworth and Welwyn garden cities in Hertfordshire being the first. Welwyn, with its tree-lined central boulevards and neo-Georgian architecture was the model 1920s modern city. Designed with ‘grand’ promenades circulating the inner city with its libraries, theatres, and galleries, and a secondary outer ring surrounding the centre full of allotments, dairy pastures, and green recreational spaces. Contemporaries once proclaimed that the view of Welwyn’s Parkway and memorial gardens to the south of the town was the world's finest urban vista (see photos below). In its time, the manicured yet natural landscape, with its ambréd sherbet flower beds of peonies and primroses, would be a welcome break from manmade cityscapes. A sanctuary for the busy urban people whose eyes and minds needed a break from the fuss of the city: a multifunctional location, nourishment for the human spirit just as it was practical and aesthetic.
- Welwyn Garden City, The Fountain, Parkway c.1955
- Welwyn Garden City, Parkway c.1955
Since the birth of the Welwyn, the rise of other English cities now appear to outcompete its quaint artistry, one does not need to look further than Bristol (a European Green Capital) to witness Howards marvellous impact on of urban planning. You would struggle to find a road in Bristol without at least some canopy cover or grass bank, in fact, Bristol was the outstanding city in the country’s ‘Plant a Tree in 73’ campaign. Many of the London Plane species planted in this campaign can be spotted on Bristol’s tree map, and many more will pop up as the city aims to double it’s number of trees by 2045 (planting 18,000 trees annually on average). Howards legacy is apparent as much in Welwyn as it is in Bristol, Welwyn has its own environmental legislation (‘Scheme of Management for Welwyn Garden City’) including measures to ensure that every road must have a wide grass bank or verge (a recognised vital aspect of modern urban ecology). A simple nod to its past. Essentially, we can see a trend over the twentieth into the twenty-first century of greening cities - the countryside spreading its tentacular roots into manmade high-rise jungles. The city and the country do not have to be polarising images, in fact, they may serve as a source of nationhood, not in the people but in the landscape.
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Let us reimagine the origins of the modern English city. Not something entirely born out of the rubble of WWII but much earlier, in the midst of industrialisation, it is here when urban planners blurred the boundary between the country and the city. No longer a site of Dickensian moral corruption spurred on by polluted streets and overcrowded homes. Rather a place of opportunity, liberal people, and modernity. A place of meeting for more than just two populations, countryfolk and cityfolk, but a place of cohabitants between humans and wildlife, animals and plants, biotic and abiotic. The English city today is a source of national pride, not just London, but all urban areas strive to offer inner-city residents access to elements of the countryside. Inner-city green spaces should be protected, treasured, and grown because, alongside all the instrumental benefits of carbon capture and noise pollution reduction, the countryside at large is something that should be nurtured, and certainly shared.
Written by Beatrix Knight
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