All over Britain and Ireland there are planned villages: for aesthetic, philanthropic or political reasons, for convenience and for ideals – the best known being Portmeirion, Port Sunlight, New Lanark and Bournville. Gillian Darley covers many hundreds of these strange and pretty arcadias built by aristocrats, industrialists and visionaries.

This revised edition includes a greatly expanded gazetteer, revised bibliography and a new introduction. The gazetteer shows, county by county, where such villages can be seen – not as museums but as evolving, living places.

The book is no mean achievement. It spans over 250 years of development…The hare-brained, the magnificent, the withered, the bizarre notions of architectural theorists, as well as the successful, are all here in abundance
— Design Magazine

Gillian Darley has produced an attractive book on an attractive subject…fascinating and lively
— TLS

Gillian Darley is a writer, broadcaster and prize-winning journalist, a former architectural correspondent of the Observer and Director of the Landscape Foundation until 1998. She is the former Chairman of the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings.

She has degrees in History of Art and in Politics and Administration. Her biographies include Sir John Soane (shortlisted for the James Tate Memorial Prize), John Evelyn and Octavia Hill (all Yale). She has written on architecture and landscape, in publications including the Financial Times and the Observer as well as the London Review of Books and the TLS.

Illustrated throughout, preface by the Guardian’s David McKie.