Critic's Choice - Hidden Utopias

A new book unearths hidden utopias in the strangest of places, finds Andrew Mead

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 (Five Leaves, £14.99). 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 (pictured below); and from models of social justice to rural arcadias. For this new edition, Darley hasn't revised the text, only added to the lengthy gazetteer, which is a shame – one would like to know what she makes of Poundbury and its kin. But that gazetteer will have readers reaching for their Ordnance Survey maps – this book is full of enticing destinations.