33-35 Station Rd, Letchworth Garden City - 01462 487868 tic@letchworth.com

Letchworth, officially Letchworth Garden City, is a town in Hertfordshire, England, with a population of 33,600. It is a former civil parish.

The town's name is taken from one of the three villages it surrounded (the other two being Willian and Norton) - all of which featured in the Domesday Book. The land used was purchased by Quakers who had intended to farm the area and build a Quaker community. The town was laid out by Raymond Unwin as a demonstration of the principles established by Ebenezer Howard who sought to create an alternative to the industrial city by combining the best of town and country living. It is also home to the United Kingdom's first roundabout, which was built in 1909.

As one of the world's first new towns and the first garden city it had great influence on future town planning and the New towns movement; it influenced Welwyn Garden City, which used a similar approach and inspired other projects around the world including the Australian capital Canberra, Hellerau, Germany, Tapanila, Finland, and Mezaparks in Latvia.) There is a link to town planning in Stalingrad through the architect V. N. Semionov and an account of Lenin visiting the town when he visited England for a congress of the Russian Bolshevik party, then banned in Russia.

Several housing estates have been added to Letchworth since its inception.

To the north of the town The Grange began construction in 1947 and to the south east Jackmans was built from 1961. These were council / municipal housing estates with many residents originally coming from the London overspill. Two more prosperous (and private) estates - Lordship and Manor Park - were built from in 1971 to the south west.

Smaller areas of in-fill housing also appeared in the 1990s, particularly on land adjacent to Jackmans Estate on the sites of a former creamery and the Willian Secondary School, which had closed in 1991 when school rolls in the town had begun to fall.

Almost all residential housing on Jackmans Estate is in a series of cul-de-sacs with access off a single feeder road - appropriately called Radburn Way - which in turn is crossed by a series of underpasses.

The effect is to largely separate pedestrians from motor traffic. Most houses do not open onto streets with passing traffic, but onto pedestrian squares, green areas, and children's playgrounds. The estate is crossed by a series of footpaths. The idea is not unique to Jackmans Estate, and has been tried in New Towns elsewhere, but rarely so successfully.

In some cases the housing itself varied in quality as - perhaps harking back to the Cheap Cottages Exhibition 60 years before - various different construction methods were tried, including the pre-fabrication of some houses at a shipyard in Sunderland. This resulted in dwellings with large amounts of internal space, but of variable build quality (particularly, it is alleged, for houses whose panels were constructed on Friday afternoons). Other parts of the estate used more traditional methods.

Over time increased mobility and changing age profiles has reduced the need for the estate to have its own facilities. Although a small parade of shops and a community centre flourish, the estate lost its secondary school (Willian) in 1988, its public house (initially called the Carousel, later the Gatehouse, finally the Sportsman) in 1998, and its public library in 2006. By 2007 the two primary schools on the estate were both running at under 50% capacity, and after a brief consultation the county council closed Lannock Primary School, the smaller of the two, in July 2009. Radburn Primary remains in operation.

The Garden City estate began to turn a profit in the 1970s, leading to investment in a number of town amenities: a working farm, Standalone Farm, in 1980, a leisure centre and a theatre named Plinston Hall in 1982, a free hospital (the Ernest Gardiner Day Hospital) in 1984, and major refurbishment of the town's cinema and shopping centre in 1996 and 1997. A further major programme to improve and update facilities in the town centre - entirely funded by the Foundation - began in 2009.

On 1 October 1995, the 'Foundation day' event took place celebrating the 100th anniversary of the establishment of Letchworth. Markets and stalls ran throughout the day, whilst a fun fair was erected in Norton Common, where tribute bands performed and a fireworks display was held. 'Foundation day' was shortly an annual event for around 5-6 years. The Foundation later celebrated the town's centenary in 2003 by building a landscaped path for walkers and cyclists. The path, known as the Greenway, forms a 20 km loop around the town.

In 2011 the first George Orwell Festival was held in Letchworth and Wallington, the nearby village where George Orwell lived from 1936 until 1940 and then intermittently until 1947. It was where he wrote some of his most famous books, essays, reviews, diaries and letters, and where he developed many of the ideas leading to his greatest two novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. There was a further festival in 2012.

Letchworth Garden City is home to one of the UK's largest colonies of black squirrels, thought by some to be a genetic mutation of the common North American Grey squirrel, but in fact a rare but not unique example of Melanism. Sightings of black squirrels originally appeared in the area of Norton Common and later the centre of the town from the 1950s, and possibly before, and have since gradually spread, becoming common on the Jackmans estate by the 1980s and Lordship in the 1990s. Reports of black squirrels in the neighbouring town of Hitchin started to appear in the local press around 2005.

There are also muntjac deer living principally on Norton Common, but also increasingly elsewhere in the town (Jackman's Estate, for example where they often leave evidence of their presence on the allotments, much to the annoyance of allotment holders!). About the size of a large dog, they also find their way to domestic gardens and have been seen occasionally in the town centre. They can be something of a traffic hazard, especially on winter evenings, as they do not readily move out of the way of cars.

Laurence Olivier's father was Rector of Letchworth Parish 1918-1924.

To the west of the town are the remains of Wilbury Hill Camp a Late Bronze Age hill fort. It comprises two adjacent enclosures and lies close by the Icknield Way. Settlement is understood to have started in the late Bronze Age, 700BC and it was further developed during the Iron Age. There is also evidence of continued occupation during the period of the Roman colonisation. Regular digs are conducted by Norton Community Archaeology Group in the fields between Norton village and the A1, where they have found evidence of Bronze Age, Romano-British and late Iron Age settlement.