Letchworth Garden City

for him.

Based on, in Britain, we've got these things, garden cities, Dwellin Garden City and Letchworth Garden City, and it was based on Letchworth Garden City.

So it looked like an English village in the middle of industrially Chicago.

So like imagine like a Miss Marple adventure in the middle of like Wally.

was based on a British model town, right?

Yeah, Letchworth Garden City.

They're all gabled roofs and very sweet, but completely enclosed by heavy industry.

If people want to look online, look up an aerial shot of Marktown.

Going back in history, in the late 1800s, there was this concept called garden cities.

It started out of England and Ebenezer Howard built these two suburbs, Welwyn and Letchworth, and they connected into London and they were what we now call transit-oriented developments.

That kind of morphed into what was called the Newtown Movement that happened even before World War II and then after World War II, but it was predominantly in Scandinavia, Europe, Japan, you know, other cities like Korea, you know, they kind of adopted some of these new town movements.

Again, it was focusing on building these transit oriented communities around train stations and connecting them to the center city.

John from Derbyshire.

Linda from Letchworth Garden City got it spot on.

I didn't know that ABBA song you mentioned in your voicemail.

I'm going to have to research that one.

The song was called Woman.

So we didn't do too bad, did we? Any more late entries? No.

So Howard, John from Derbyshire, Linda from Letchworth Garden City, Paul and Melanie, David and Trina all got it right.

You can have your opal fruits in your jamboree bag.

But there's also these things called garden cities that are being designed and built as well.

So you have Welland Garden City, you have Letchworth Garden City.

These are all ideas of serious urban planning to say, actually, how do we deal with a future where we build enough enough jobs, enough transport links, enough shopping in single places to create livable communities together.

And in 1965, there's a Newtown Act that effectively sets the scene for another stage of this building.

So, slaves, no locks, company rent, a mirrored megacity that keeps shrinking, a village with painted-on windows, is there a version of Utopia that actually works? Well, sort of, and it's deeply unglamorous, unfortunately.

Letchworth, in Hertfordshire, was Britain's first garden city.

Today, it's run by Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation.

The foundation manages the town's land purely to generate income and puts every penny of that straight back into the town.

Nobody's name is above the entrance, no single family's idea of a good life gets to overrule everyone else's because there isn't a family to do that.

Every utopia built around one person's vision fails the same way.

The moment that person's interests stop matching everyone else's, the whole project is abandoned and becomes fodder for urban explorers in 20 years' time.

The versions that last, Letchworth, Keralgo's 500-year-old towns in Mexico, are the ones built around the idea of equity.

Anita, yes.

John from Derbyshire, Linda from Letchworth Garden City, and David and Trina, all spot on.

And actually, I got a couple of voicemails where you actually sang it.

So you remember the song, very impressive.

That's another great song taken from the Big Elf, Fab 500, 1966, The Beach Boys, of course, and then I Kissed Her.

Oh, so we didn't do too shabby at the end of the day.

Howard, Anita, John from Derbyshire, Linda from Letchworth Garden City, and David and Trina are all spot on with the answer, which I'll give you in a second.

Steve and Jenny, I'm looking for that song that you would like to hear.

And it was basically looking at things with a sort of almost, with a, with a pa- part engineering, you know, of, of sort of how do we create that sort of s- you know, how do we solve a problem? And, and it, and that's, that's what we had in England.

We had places like Letchworth, um, garden, uh, village, uh, well in places like that, that were b- delivered-

Mm-hmm

... you know, over 100 years ago.

And then arranged by Bazalms and Richard Newman.

So congratulations to Howard, Linda from Letchworth Garden City- David in Trina, Steve and Jenny.

Another voicemail has just popped in, so I, I don't know who that is.

There could be another winner to this competition

Where was this?

So, it was, this was in Hertfordshire, in Letchworth, a school called Wilbury Primary School.

So it's Hertfordshire, it's Hertfordshire known for not pronouncing their Ts?

Like, not really.