Letchworth, Hertfordshire, England, United Kingdom

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Letchworth Garden City, commonly known as Letchworth, is a town in Hertfordshire, England, noted for being the first garden city. The town is the administrative headquarters of North Hertfordshire.

Letchworth was an ancient parish, appearing in the Domesday Book of 1086. It remained a small rural village until the start of the twentieth century. The development of the modern town began in 1903, when much of the land in Letchworth and the neighbouring parishes of Willian and Norton was purchased by a company called First Garden City Limited, founded by Ebenezer Howard and his followers with the aim of building the first "Garden City", following the principles Howard had set out in his 1898 book, "To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform". The aim was to create an alternative to the industrial city by combining the best of town and country living.

The town's initial layout was designed by Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker. It includes the United Kingdom's first roundabout, Sollershott Circus, which was built c. 1909.

As the world's first garden city, Letchworth has had great influence on town planning and the new towns movement; it influenced Welwyn Garden City, which used a similar approach, and inspired other projects around the world including the Australian capital Canberra, Hellerau in Germany, Tapanila in Finland and Mežaparks in Latvia. There is an account of Lenin having possibly visited the town in 1907 when he visited England for a congress of the Russian Bolshevik party, then banned in Russia.