The Chicago school
David Cameron has called for the building of a new generation of ‘garden cities’. In Britain the term is most associated with Letchworth, founded in 1903 by Ebenezer Howard, who formed the Garden City Association in 1899. His concept was for a series of towns with populations of up to 32,000, spread over 6,000 acres.
— But the original garden city was, ironically, a city now more associated with the birth of the skyscraper: Chicago, which adopted the motto Urbs in Horto, ‘city in a garden’, in 1837, to describe the patchwork of buildings and gardens in its heart.
— Howard lived in the city in the 1870s, a few years before some of those gardens disappeared beneath the early skyscrapers.
Driven away
The government announced a study into new toll roads. How much will British motorists pay for toll motorways? The M6 Toll, bypassing the original M6 and opened in December 2003, provides an insight.
| Car toll | Average daily number vehicles | |
| £3 | December 2004 | 45,500 |
| £3.50 | Oct–Dec 2005 | 44,300 |
| £3.50 | Oct–Dec 2006 | 51,000 |
| £4 | Oct–Dec 2007 | 44,400 |
| £4.50 | Oct–Dec 2008 | 39,300 |
| £4.70 | Oct–Dec 2009 | 38,600 |
| £5 | Oct–Dec 2010 | 38,400 |
| £5 | Oct–Dec 2011 | 34,300 |
Who pays
A recent study showed that the best-paid 1 per cent earn an eighth of the total paid in salaries, but contribute over a quarter of all income tax. What about the rest of us?
| Share of earnings | Share of income tax | |
| 13% | Top 1% | 28% |
| 25% | Top 5% | 47% |
| 35% | Top 10% | 58% |
| 55% | Top 25% | 74% |
| 23% | Bottom 50% | 10% |
| 9% | Bottom 25% | 2.5% |
| 3% | Bottom 10% | 0.5% |
Source: HMRC 2011-12
Ticket to ride
Bus passengers in Corby were stranded after 12 drivers, a fifth of the workforce, each won a £3m share in the lottery. Some other workplaces threatened with mass retirement through lottery wins
— Hewlett Packard, Liverpool. Seven IT workers shared £45.5m in 2009
— Egglescliffe Comprehensive School, near Middlesbrough. Sixteen cleaners shared £4m last year
— Berlinos steak house, Berwick-upon-Tweed, where 31 staff shared £1m this month
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