How does your garden village grow?

A garden city planned by Sir Edwin Lutyens was never brought to completion. Plans to redevelop it today, however, threaten to destroy the character of what was created. Clive Aslet reports

ALTHOUGH most people will have heard of Knebworth House, in Hertfordshire, the garden village that was developed on the estate in the Edwardian period, with Sir Edwin Lutyens as its consulting architect, is less familiar. This is surprising, given the attention that has been given to garden cities and garden suburbs in general, not least because, around the year 2000, the creation of new garden villages was promoted as a solution to the planning dilemma of where to build more homes in the crowded South of England.

The Department for Communities and Local Government has more recently re-asserted the point in its publication Locally-Led Garden Villages, Towns and Cities (March 2016).

Furthermore, bucolic Knebworth Garden Village was important in Lutyens's career, as a stepping stone-unlikely as it might seem on the path to the vastly bigger town planning venture. Astonishingly, before his involvement in New Delhi in India, Central Square at Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London was the only other significant piece of urbanism that he had designed.

Lutyens's influence on Knebworth, beyond buildings produced under his eye, can still be seen by those who know where to look.

This is no thanks to the local planning authority, which seems determined to betray his legacy, despite strenuous local efforts to perpetuate it. Rather than take account of local circumstances, planners point at national policy, which they seem insistent on applying.

The connection to Knebworth came through Lutyens's wife, Lady Emily Lytton: the house was her family's seat. In truth, she did not spend many years there when growing up. Although her father, a diplomat, poet and Viceroy of India, was made an Earl, he had little income to support the title; besides, he was made the British ambassador to France in 1887 and it was in Paris that he died in 1891.

Knebworth House remained let even after the Earl's eldest son, Victor, came of age in 1897.