Villages of Vision: A Study of Strange Utopias by Gillian Darley

I was looking at an Ordnance Survey map for Surrey when I saw something intriguing on the outskirts of Esher, close to one of the UK's most celebrated landscape gardens, Claremont. It's a settlement with a plan consisting of an outer octagon around two concentric circles, all linked by radial roads at regular intervals in a way that recalls in miniature those Renaissance schemes for 'ideal cities'.

So what's this geometric purity doing in suburban Surrey? The answer comes in Gillian Darley's Villages of Vision: A Study of Strange Utopias, published in 1975 and now available in a new edition. It's a village dating from c. 1917, founded on the bequest of department store magnate William Whiteley as a haven for deserving pensioners – almshouses for the 20th century.

Clearly the product of intensive research and exploration, Darley's fascinating book examines many such settlements which were planned from scratch. Their founders' motives – and the architectural results – vary enormously, ranging from John Nash's stuccoed Park Villages of 1824, close to the AJ's offices in Camden, to F H Crittall's development of flat-roofed houses at Silver End in Essex from the late 1920s; and from models of social justice to rural arcadias... this book is full of enticing destinations.

Andrew Mead

Gillian Darley’s 1975 study is updated to include more villages driven by religion, philanthropy, ideology or self-aggrandisement. It takes in such well known developments as Saltaire, Bournville, and Port Sunlight as well as lesser known utopian models such as the seven settlements built in the UK by the Moravians, an 18th century German Protestant sect. New additions include an urban village under construction at Lightmoor in Telford. Darley sums them up perfectly: “A delicious stew of crankiness, utopian thinking, architectural purity, philanthropic impulse and enlightened expediency."

Darley has expanded her 1978 gazetteer of Britain's purpose-built villages, but her main text is unaltered from original publication. When new this was an inquiry into the many self-consciously created villages from the mid-18th century, for purposes ranging from the selfish (to provide charming views from the stately home), charitable (to house factory or estate workers, and the elderly) and idealistic (to found communities to serve God and their neighbours).

In 1978 Darley was writing in the Hovis-ad period of phoney nostalgia for a rustic past and she had a sharp eye for illusion, noting how the cottage was designed so that its exterior was gratifyingly quaint to the superior eye, and to hell with those who had to perch in its poky rooms. Our very idea of a what a village was and should be was based on artistic and literary fictions. Now the chapter that looms most ominous is on villadom, the self-centred, middle-class estates of the 1830s and 40s, which expanded in size and acquisitiveness when transplanted to America and have since returned, cheaper, coarser and more me-me-me than ever, to gobble the land.

Vera Rule

"an excellent dissection of the ideas and realities of visionary design and social thinking."

From Saltaire to Bournville, Hampstead Garden Suburb to Portmeirion, Britain has more than 400 communities planned from scratch to fulfil a cultural mission or appease a capitalist conscience.

This delightful and revealing book, now updated, tells the bizarre history of these "strange Utopias" from New Lanark to Poundbury, and supplies a county-by-county guide. On every page, comic delusion vies with inspiring idealism.

Boyd Tonkin

These few comments relate to my first edition 1978 Paladin paperback, which I now have to replace as the binding glue has dried allowing the pages all to fall out, largely also due to continuous use over 30 years. I was still using it often, to devise interesting excursions with more purpose than merely gawping at countryside. The only similar terrain is covered by Dennis Hardy's useful Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England, which is more political and less architectural than Darley's nicely balanced book. I look forward to the updated gazetteer.

Vic Lanser