Barometer | 5 January 2017

Village people

The government announced plans for 14 ‘garden villages’. The concept of a garden city or village is attributed to Ebenezer Howard, who founded the Garden City Association in 1899 and Letchworth Garden City in 1903. But he was inspired by his time in Chicago, which had already been nicknamed ‘Garden City’.
— The term ‘garden village’, however, was coined by Alexander Turney Stewart, a Northern Irish Protestant who emigrated to the US with a suitcase full of linen and went on to found the world’s biggest department store, on Broadway, New York.
— In 1869, looking for new ventures, he purchased 10,000 acres of Long Island. The result was a community still called Garden Village, centred around the Cathedral of the Incarnation, where Stewart is buried.