Letchworth, just half an hour north of London on the train, is a rather unusual town. Leafy, peaceful and green, it’s filled with space and long, wide boulevards lined by early 20th-century architecture.
But this isn’t just a regular, sleepy commuter town. It was built as a radical experiment – a vision, in the mind of its pioneering founder Ebenezer Howard, of what a city should be.
And for a modest Hertfordshire town, rarely visited or even heard of elsewhere, its impact was huge. In the following decades, all the way through to today, it would influence how Britain (and well beyond) thought about building towns.
One building reveals its ideals better than any other, and stands as a workplace far ahead of its time. The Spirella Corset Factory – which, of all things, would go on to play a part in cracking the Enigma code.
This blog is part of my Building of the Week series, where I explore a different story each week.
Ebenezer Howard – an unlikely pioneer
Any story about Letchworth has to come back, in the end, to one man and one idea. And he was an unlikely figure to change the face of British towns.
Born in London in 1850, Ebenezer Howard came into a city – and a world – in flux. This was the era of great industrialisation, and the mass urban expansion that came with it. People flocked to cities in their tens of thousands, chasing the opportunities only cities could offer.
The result was miles and miles of slums. People packed into overcrowded conditions, unsanitary and rife with disease, crime and poverty. The catch 22 was that they had no real choice. The city was where the work was – but the city was also killing them.
These were the places that Ebenezer Howard saw in the late 19th century, when he worked as a parliamentary reporter. (I’ve explored the slums from these eras in some of my other posts (Leeds here, London here).
And despite having no training in architecture or planning, he was surrounded by radical thinkers, and had spent time in Chicago – watching it regenerate after a great fire that destroyed much of the city, a city that was itself nicknamed ‘the Garden City’.
There had to be a better way, Ebenezer Howard concluded. In his first and only book – ‘To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform’, later ‘Garden Cities of To-morrow’ – he set it out.
Garden cities: the grand ideal
Ebenezer Howard’s idea was, at its heart, simple. Take the best of the city – the work, opportunity, sociability it provided – and combine it with the best of the country – space, fresh air, quality of life. A third way, if you will.
He imagined a future that left the overcrowding and the slums behind for good. In 1899 he founded the Garden City Association (still going today, now as the Town and Country Planning Association). Just four years later, First Garden City Ltd bought a few thousand acres of Hertfordshire farmland.
Building began very quickly. Old commons and trees were preserved. In Broadway Gardens – still the green thoroughfare of the town – old oak trees from before the town’s founding can still be seen.
Letchworth was the result – the first garden city in the world, which remains a pleasant town, living up to many of its ideals of urban meets rural.
But the challenge for the garden city was that it didn’t want to be just a commuter town. This was a movement trying to create a better vision for what cities could be. For that to succeed, it needed its own opportunities; its own industry.
There are many examples of this. But one of the most interesting is the Spirella Corset Company, which would become one of the biggest employers in the town.
The Spirella Corset Company
The Spirella Corset Company had made its name in America on the back of the ‘Spirella Stay’ – a flexible corset built for the modern, active woman of the new century. (All of its founders were, of course, men.)
One of them, William Wallace Kincaid, had taken an interest in the garden city movement. With the company eyeing expansion into the UK, he came to see Letchworth for himself, and met Howard in person. Kincaid wanted to build a firm that genuinely put its workers first, and in Letchworth he found the perfect match.
Operations began, modestly, in a cluster of temporary sheds, the very huts thrown up to house the labourers who were building Letchworth itself. But the company outgrew them fast, and an architect, Cecil Hignett, was commissioned to design a permanent home.
One of the main instructions given to Hignett captured the company’s thinking from the very beginning: the factory should be designed so the whole space was illuminated, and anyone working there would be doing so in the light.
The first wing opened in 1912, though the First World War held up the rest, and the building was not completed until 1920. The result is a gorgeous, arts and crafts style building, one of the most refined buildings in this part of Hertfordshire.
It came to be known as the ‘factory of beauty’. This wasn’t like many workplaces of the time, cheap spaces where cheap labour was piled in and ground down with hard work. It was something different.
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A workplace ahead of its time & the women who worked there
Spirella’s peak was during the interwar years. At this time, labour protections existed but did little to guarantee a decent place to work.
Many factories meant long days bent over a bench in cramped, poorly lit and badly ventilated rooms, with a working week that often ran to 48 hours or more and few breaks to soften it.
The Spirella factory embodied many of Howard’s ideals. It had baths and showers for the workforce, who were given regular breaks. There was a gymnasium – and even free eyetests and bicycle repairs. And another interesting feature. At the time, most employers wouldn’t employ a woman if she was married, but Spirella was happy to.
Spirella was far from the only enlightened employer of the age, but it was among the most exceptional.
The result was something that many modern companies could learn from. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers toured the factory in 1931, and found that almost half of the employees had been there over a decade. It turns out if you treat your staff well, it builds loyalty.
The vast majority – around 90% – of workers were women, and some of their stories have passed down through the staff magazine, Threads. One was a woman named Maude, who wrote a column for the magazine, one of which has been reproduced by Herts Memories:
“I am all merry and bright, sitting at my post, tape measure in hand, working like a true Briton, pieces of rubbish and fluff often fall on my head, and occasionally a corset which has fallen out of the chute. I look up and say “Gee there’s old Hitler having a go at me !”
Maude Emily, 1939 in Spirella’s staff magazine
And a quick search of the 1921 census shows that women held senior positions, too. Both overlookers recorded in the census were female; two of four foremen/forewomen, and four of five supervisors.
As you might expect, the more senior roles were predominantly male. There were nine people with manager in their title – just one of which was a woman: one Emily Moore, originally from Newcastle, a job which she still held in 1939.
From corset wire to code-breaking
Like factories across the country, Spirella adapted during the Second World War. First came parachutes, produced inside the factory. But its stranger, secret contribution stayed hidden for decades: the corset factory helped crack the Enigma code.
The link started when one of Spirella’s neighbours, the British Tabulating Machine Company, based in Letchworth, was chosen to design and build the ‘Bombe’ – an electromechanical machine originally devised by Alan Turing, which would help speed up the process of cracking the Enigma code.
Most of the work was done at the British Tabulating Machine Company’s factory on Icknield Way (the building no longer exists). But part of it fell to the women of the Spirella Factory.
The Bombe machine was made up of a series of rotating drums, which contained over 100 wire brushes, which needed to be made with finesse and skill.
The women of the Spirella Factory had spent years shaping the wire stays in Spirella corsets, so they knew very well how to work with fine wire – they were the perfect match.
They played their role in over 200 Bombe machines being produced in Letchworth, from where they were driven to Bletchley Park. Ultimately their work helped Bletchley decode German messages quickly, pass the intelligence on to be acted upon, and help the Allies win the war.
The final chapter – Post-War decline, revival & legacy
After the war the Spirella Factory fell back into its original use. But in a Post War world, corsets were going out of fashion. The company was bought out a couple of times, and for a while moved most of its operations to Harlow New Town.
But ultimately, by the 1980s it wasn’t profitable. The building closed in 1989, and a period of decline started.
The Spirella Factory occupies a prime location in Letchworth. Its gradual decay could have become something of a symbol for the town; so the Letchworth Garden City Corporation stepped in, purchasing it in 1994.
Restoration began in 1997, an £11m project led by the newly formed Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation. It was reopened by the Prince of Wales in 1999, and is now home to offices, a cafe and fitness centre.
In 2019, a further tribute arrived: a life-size bronze of Ebenezer Howard, set in the grounds of the building that encapsulates his vision. It was sculpted by a local man, Peter Colvin, an osteopath with no formal training in art – which rather echoes Howard himself, who had no training in planning.
And as for the Garden City Movement – it gave us a few more, most notably Welwyn and several garden suburbs. But after the War it would morph into the New Town movement.
Fittingly, the first of these – Stevenage – would be built just a few miles from Letchworth. But whereas garden cities were bottom-up, private developments, new towns were top down, led by the state.
And yet more than a century on, many of Ebenezer’s ideals remain as influential as ever. Councils across the country are working to ‘re-green’ their spaces, bringing nature into the urban environment. The 15-minute city borrows directly from his thinking.
But his idea was also founded on a sense of community, a more equitable society and, importantly, community ownership.
Were he to be transported to modern day cities, perhaps he would be pleased by the increase in cleanliness; the lack of slums; the greenery.
But stick around a little longer, and he might begin to get a sinking feeling that some of the issues he rallied against haven’t gone away.
The cities that shaped his vision – Chicago and London – remain incredibly unequal. And he dreamed of a community that owned the land it stood on. We live in a world where even the simplest version of that dream, owning your own home, drifts further out of reach every year.
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