10th October 2008

For this investigation in October LPS travelled across to the museum in Broadway, Letchworth. This investigation turned out to be a very interesting one with several instances where different people encountered the same occurrences or feelings entirely independently of the other team members and at different times. These can be seen in the team reports and investigation analysis which can be viewed by following the links at the bottom of this page.

The original village of Letchworth stood 1.5 kilometres (just under one mile) due south of where the museum now stands in Broadway. This was the area occupied by St Mary’s church and what is now the Letchworth Hall Hotel (the former manor house). For a long time the village was a small one with just a population of 100, no shops and not even a public house, until Ebenezer Howard founded the Garden City Movement in 1899. This was based on his book Tomorrow, later republished as Garden Cities of Tomorrow in 1902. His aim was to restrict the unregulated growth of industrial cities and create towns based on a combination of aspects of both the town and the country. This way he hoped to avoid the problems of overcrowding, pollution and poor living conditions.

Work on the construction of Letchworth Garden City began in 1903 and was done so that every house had its own plot of land, all factories were outside the city whilst amenities were in the centre and the whole was surrounded by a ‘green belt’. All of this can be seen in the maps of the county, in 1901 there were just fields and by the 1922 map the town had been developed. The museum was built in 1914 for the specific purpose of housing the collection of stuffed birds in glass cages owned by the Letchworth Naturalists’ Society. Before then the collection had been on display in the main room of the Skittles Inn. This was not as bad as it sounds as the Skittles Inn was an unlicensed public house selling Cydrax (a non-alcoholic apple wine), Bourneville’s Drinking Chocolate, Tea and Sarsaparilla.

Adjacent to the museum is the library and it looks like the two form one building but the library is a later addition as can be seen on the old maps. On the 1922 and 1925 maps the museum is shown and labelled but there is nothing next door. On the 1938 map the library has appeared.