I am writing a piece for a film journal on Edgar Wright's The World's End, and want to to discuss the film in relation to the history and geography of the 'New Towns' or garden cities, particularly Letchwroth and Welwyn (where the film was shot). I have watched a few documentaries and have some key points of reference earmarked, for instance Ebenezer Howard's work, but don't really know where to start as I am not a historian or geographer. I will be using a primarily Marxist cultural framework, and am particularly interested in the class constitution of these towns and the utopian element of town planning. Any recommendations?
Ta
For your purposes, a good place to start might be John Grindrod's Concretopia (about post-war building) and Outskirts (about the Green Belt), both of which touch heavily upon the Garden City movement and are intended for the non-specialist. You'd likely also benefit from checking out Owen Hatherley's work - I'm not sure of a specific book to recommend but it's excellent. Mark Clapson has also produced some important work, chiefly on suburbia but related to new towns - e.g. Suburban Century: Social Change and Urban Growth in England and the USA (2003) and Invincible green suburbs, brave new towns: Social Change and urban dispersal in postwar England (1998).
Some other useful work includes Elain Harwood's 2002 article in Twentieth Century Architecture, "White Light/White Heat: Rebuilding England's Provincial Towns in the Sixties." This is less about the Garden City movement, though, than it is about new (or remade) towns and cities - see also Lancaster and Mason's Life and Labour in a Twentieth Century City: The Experience of Coventry (1986). There is other work on the history of English council estates (e.g. Alison Ravetz or Lynsey Hansey) but I'm not sure that's quite what you're going for so I'll leave it at that.
Edit: Regarding the class composition, I'd also recommend having a look at Stuart Hall's "A Sense of Classlessness" if you haven't already!