Welwyn Garden Heritage

The Welwyn Garden Heritage Trust was recently invited to send a representative to an EU project in Paris based on the importance of Garden Cities throughout the Community. As it turned out Welwyn Garden was the only UK town to turn up out of all those contacted.

The meeting took place in St. Denis opposite The Stade de France, which is just to the north of central Paris, and involved people from Belgium, Germany, The Czech Republic, Hungary and France. There are numerous garden cities across Europe all based on the original ideas of Ebenezer Howard but adapted to create green havens in cities such as Paris and Budapest. The two themes of the meeting were “Tourism & Culture”, looking at how garden cities could work together to promote their towns and increase tourism, and “Garden Cities and Sustainability”, which concerns combining all the main features of the garden city concept with the need to create sustainable communities for the future. As part of the meeting delegates were taken on a tour of one of the ‘garden cities’ in St Denis.

Following its commitment to consult on implementation of the revived Estate Management Scheme (EMS) with both the WGC Society and the Trust an initial meeting was held on 22nd October.

First item on the agenda was publicising the EMS to everyone in the town, whether in the scheme or not, given that it is likely to affect all the residents in some way over time. The Council will be publishing and distributing a new booklet on the EMS that will be delivered to very house affected. WGCS and WGHT promised to promote the scheme to the best of their abilities via their members and supporters as well as using the respective websites.

At a Cabinet meeting held on 7th October the recommendations from Cabinet Planning & Transportation Panel relating to the revitalisation of the Estate Management Scheme was unanimously agreed.

Included in the recommendations was a commitment by the council to consult with the Trust and the Welwyn Garden City Society on how the scheme is to be monitored. As both organisations were heavily involved in the review of the whole scheme, and were significantly in support of reviving it rather than any of the other alternatives, the Trustees were delighted with the council’s decision.