Site Planning in Practice at Welwyn Garden City
Louis de Soissons and Arthur W. Kenyon, with new essays by Paul Roberts and Isabelle Taylor
2017
When the proposal to build Britain’s second, privately funded garden city was launched in 1919, the odds were stacked against its success. A shortage in building materials, inflated prices and high interest rates were followed by the deepest recession in British history. And yet, in spite of unceasing financial difficulties, in spite of public and state scepticism, the gamble paid off.
Nearly 100 years after the founding of Welwyn Garden City, this enlarged reissue of Site Planning in Practice at Welwyn Garden City is a celebration of the achievements of the settlement’s early development. First published in 1927, the book was a visual record of Welwyn Garden City’s design and construction up to that date, presented through sectional plans by the town’s architect-planner Louis de Soissons and his assistant, Arthur Kenyon, and accompanying photographs.
This new edition reproduces the original in its entirety, and expands it with a series of prefatory essays exploring the development, the design and the legacy of the town, as well as modern-day photographs which document the evolution of the streetscapes over the last nine decades.
