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In a sense the walled city is that old emblem the walled garden, the Hortus Conclusus, turned inside out; a post-lapsarian inversion. To be outside the walls is not exclusion from the garden, but from the city. The emblematic value of the walled city is deep. Some people like to see the city as an organic growth out of the land, local stone etc. To me it is potent because it asserts its distinction to the land: that is made by nature, this is man-made. The contrast is poignant. I have simply to see a wall descending to meet a lawn to experience an eery spasm, but in recognition of which archetype, which folk memory?

The Garden City is a dream of uniting the two. An honourable dream; but the Garden City holds no attractions for me. I personally would have no interest in living in one, but dutifully recognise the wholesomeness and sense of its vision. Indeed how persuasive it is sometimes in its plans and drawings! I look at Ebenezer Howard's diagram for a "Group of Slumless Smokeless Cities" or Unwin and Parker's plan for Letchworth; or George B. Post's design for Eclipse Park in Beloit or Louis de Soissons' design for Welwyn Garden City; and I know it "should" be thus. I know that is right, that were the human race visited suddenly by a sweet reasonableness this is how they would live.

In a glass case in the British Library I came upon the prison notebook of Ernest Jones, a nineteenth century Chartist activist, imprisoned in the 1840s. In his notebook, side by side, meticulous drawings of the city "as it was" and the
city as it should be, would be; the city now is indeed the City of Dreadful Night, a kind of pastiche of Manchester and Birmingham, lowering clouds, warehouses, doleful figures, their faces turned to the walls, filthy canals. And then, on the opposite page, (in the same pernickety, touchingly amateur hand) the city of the future; what is moving here is that Jones painstakingly delineates an Ancient Greek city with agora, temples, little clusters of rationally dressed Greek-ish figures under a serene sky; and how you feel for the poor man (pre-Marxist in the simplicity of his socialism) yearning for such a city; you just wish he could have had what he dreamed of.

It is easy to make fun of the Garden City. Even those who deride the utopian rus in urbe plans do so, perhaps against their better nature; Betjeman, in his satirical lines on Slough writes:
"I have a vision of the future, chum…
The workers flats rise up like silver pencils in a field of soya beans."

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