By Eleanor Margolis
“I dreamt I was torturing my grandkids last night,” says a woman behind the counter of a charity shop, in Welwyn Garden City. She’s the embodiment of the word “chipper.”
She’s around seventy and, by the sounds of it, a heavy smoker. She’s talking to her colleague, a younger, even heavier smoker.
A funny thing happens the moment you leave London. Just twenty miles outside of the city, in Welwyn, the ambient sound changes. Background chatter goes up an octave, tempting me – a lifelong Londoner – into believing people are just happier in places like this. Which was the precise intention of Ebenezer Howard when he founded Welwyn and a handful of other “garden cities” in the 1920s. The utopia-minded Howard devised greenbelt-surrounded towns, which sought to combine the best features of both cities and the countryside.
I barely collide with a woman on the high street. It’s hard to tell whose fault it is but in my London way, I mechanically mutter, “Sorry.”
“That’s OK!” she says, loudly and cheerfully enough to suggest she’s genuinely taken aback and mystified as to why this situation calls for an apology.
When it comes to utopias, Welwyn is probably the only one with both a Carpetright and a Tapi Carpets. The last stop on one of the Great Northern trains from Moorgate, it’s one of those places Londoners find themselves wondering about. Wondering if they could see themselves “moving out there” to save on rent – maybe even buy there one day. The 20-minute journey – we may well note - even takes you through fields with actual horses in them (imagine that on your commute).
As I thumb through endless Barry Manilow in the charity shop record bins, I notice a couple of pastel-haired queer teenagers examining the books and discussing sci-fi. Something tells me they’ll both end up at university in one of the big cities, where they’ll make fun of their little hometown with its decommissioned Shredded Wheat factory, two carpet shops, and zero gay bars. Whatever normality is, Welwyn is it.
Following the design of other towns of its type, a central parkway runs through the middle of the main drag: a spine of neatly tended garden straddled by even neater Georgian revival buildings. The “garden" is taken a little more seriously than the “city” here, with several men in green fussing over the marigold- and pansy-flooded flowerbeds. I sit on a bench near the climactic fountain, surrounded by roses and lavender. A distant lawnmower combined with the rumble of the A1 is surprisingly hypnotic, especially on such a warm day. Children splash in the fountain which – I imagine – is the exact vibe Ebenezer Howard was going for.
I follow the garden spine further, to the war memorial and a small park that breaks free, ever so slightly, from the uniformity of everything leading up to it. There’s something either reassuring or unsettling about a town where nearly every building is from the same period. And surprisingly for a town built in the 1920s, there’s no art deco in Welwyn. With its anachronistic architecture, I suppose it was – at the time – both forward- and backward-looking.
“Steven Spreadbury,” reads a plaque on one of the park benches. “Dearly Loved. Liked this view so much he decided to live here.” The view in question – a clear sweep down the middle of the parkway – is green, symmetrical, and quietly grand. Which I suppose must have been Steven Spreadbury’s thing. Lawn after lawn, without a single rebellious blade of grass. I can see why people go so nuts for the smell of freshly cut grass; I want to take a bong hit of the stuff, breathe it down into my toes.
A couple in their early twenties take a selfie with the parkway as backdrop. Welwyn hadn’t struck me as an envy-inducing Instagram destination, but I’m open to being wrong about that. Come to think of it, I did take a picture of the “Welwyn Garden City” sign at the train station, which – set in its own bed of roses and wildflowers – is the prettiest (if not only pretty) station sign I’ve ever seen.
I take another hit of grassy air.