Abstract
From mid-nineteenth century onwords, as increasing industrialization caused British population to concentrate in cities, living conditions became densely overcrowded and heavily polluted. As a solution to this problem, Sir Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) proposed a ＂Town-Country＂ unit, in 1898 developed the concept of the Garden City in 1902 and found a site north of London in 1903 to build the world's first Garden City: Letchworth Garden City. However, Art-history scholarship has not undertaken a thorough study of how relevant visual representations of the city were produced over the years and how such materials shaped the image of the city. This paper will thus attempt to address this neglected area. It will first explore the images of the Garden City when Howard was developing his idea (1898-1903),taking his own drawing of a ＂Master Key＂ as the point of departure. It will then investigate the visual representations of the city after Letchworth was built (1904-1909), especially those made along with the Cheap Cottages Exhibitions, forging a natural, healthy and comfortable impression of the city. For this later period, I adopt the idea of ＂Permanent Dwellings＂ from the exhibitions to construct my argument. Although this study focuses on a relatively short period of around 11 years, it will provide a detailed visual analysis, suggesting that these pictorial representations have paved the way for the subsequent image of the Garden City, an image which has persisted to the present day.