Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (47 page)

With land in England in increasingly short supply, a new breed of settler utopian began to look to the New World to found its ideal colonies. The Pilgrim Fathers’ 1620 landfall aboard the
Mayflower
was just the first of a series of invasions from all over Europe, many of them by extreme religious sects for whom the ‘virgin’ territories of North America promised the opportunity to build utopia for real. Although some, such as the Swiss Amish, founded successful agrarian communities, the majority found that having unlimited amounts of farmland at one’s disposal was not much use without a sufficient labour force to farm it. According to the historian Niall Ferguson, between one half and two thirds of all Europeans who crossed the Atlantic from 1650 to 1780 did so under a system of ‘indentured labour’, pledging a number of years’ service in exchange for the cost of the voyage.
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The New World might have seemed like paradise on earth to some, but, as Ferguson pointed out, it was built on the backs of settlers who were little more than ‘slaves on fixed-term contracts’.
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With colonisation of the Americas creating the labour shortages that would eventually give rise to full-blown slavery, the onset of industrialisation back home was creating a new breed of manufacturing utopian. Foremost among them was Robert Owen, a Welsh craftsman’s son who made his father-in-law’s cotton mill at New Lanark on the River Clyde into a model working community. Within a few years of taking control in 1799, Owen had turned an unruly and unwilling workforce into an eager, efficient brigade, simply by reducing their hours, registering their performance on coloured ‘monitors’ mounted on looms, and rewarding their efforts with good-quality housing, a school, and a non-profit company shop. New Lanark soon began to receive a stream of illustrious visitors, and Owen’s pamphlets were read
by world leaders including King George III, Thomas Jefferson and supposedly even Napoleon in exile on Elba.

Convinced that he had discovered the answer to the relief of the urban poor, Owen presented plans to the House of Commons for a number of ideal communities, ‘villages of unity and mutual cooperation’ in which 1,200 people would live and work together, surrounded by 1,500 acres of farmland.
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The settlements were to be somewhat like secularised, industrialised monasteries, containing blocks of family houses, communal dining halls, a school, guesthouse, meeting rooms and library. Unfortunately for Owen, the official enthusiasm that had greeted his plans soon waned when it became a question of having to pay for them. Disappointed by this lukewarm response, Owen headed off on the well-worn utopian trail across the Atlantic, plunging most of his considerable fortune into setting up a prototype community, New Harmony in Indiana, incorporating 30,000 acres of land bought with his own money. Around 1,000 disciples went with him, but unfortunately most of them, unlike Thomas More’s farming-mad Utopians, were scientists and academics, who spent two years bickering about how their inappropriately named community should be run, before their founder finally ran out of cash.

Owen’s experience was far from unique. His brand of utopianism, like those of his French contemporaries Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon, was forged in the afterglow of the Enlightenment, when it seemed that science and design could come together to create not just an ideal human settlement, but a perfect society to go with it. Their utopias were of a new kind, intended not merely as contemplative exercises or satirical critiques, but as blueprints for a better future.
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While Saint-Simon looked to science and industry to create a new social order, Fourier spent a (disappointed) lifetime refining plans for his
phalanstères
: large hotel-like buildings surrounded by farmland in which the inhabitants would be motivated purely by pleasure, only performing tasks that suited their personalities.
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All three ‘socialist utopians’, as they were later dubbed by Marx, would have a lasting influence on Western thought, yet for all their insights, their combined legacy was one of paradox. By seeming to suggest that paradise might be achievable on earth, they effectively folded the utopian timeline back
on itself. Their optimistic formulations suggested that some transformational medium would come along – science, rationality, man’s rediscovery of his inner ‘noble savage’ – and resolve all the dilemmas of human existence. There was just one problem. What everyone seemed to forget in the rush to build heaven on earth was that it is only in the celestial variety that
nobody
has to do the farming.

According to their keenest student and harshest critic Karl Marx, the socialist utopians’ proposals were ‘necessarily doomed to failure’, because they attempted to create a perfect world, rather than change the existing one.
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Marx dismissed their schemes as ‘pocket editions of the New Jerusalem’, going so far as to write an open letter to Etienne Cabet, a French Owenite who, with his mentor’s encouragement, had tried to set up a proto-communist society in Texas in 1847. Marx warned Cabet that his project would fail because of its isolation: ‘… a few hundred thousand people cannot establish and continue a communal living situation without it taking on an absolutely exclusive and sectarian nature’.
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What Marx had put his finger on was the fundamental problem dogging all ‘activist’ utopias: scale. Arguably the most influential utopian thinker of all time, Marx did not consider himself to be one, because for him, the only true utopia would come when the entire world, not just one part of it, was transformed by revolution. Like Adam Smith before him, Marx foresaw the way in which improvements in transport and communication – ‘the annihilation of space through time’, as he put it – would lead inevitably to globalisation:

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe … In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.
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Since capitalism would lead inexorably to the concentration of wealth among just a few, the only route to collective justice was the gradual dismantling of the entire system. In his
Communist Manifesto
, written with Friedrich Engels in 1848, Marx listed the 10 measures necessary ‘in the most advanced countries’ to get the ball rolling, including ‘The abolition of property in land … equal liability of all to labour … the establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture … the combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, and the general abolition of the distinction between town and country.’
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After Marx, utopians would no longer attempt to flee the world, but would try to change it from the ground up. A new batch of literary utopians took to imagining life under communism, among them William Morris, a pioneering British socialist, as well as one of the most gifted artist-craftsmen of his generation. Morris’s utopia took the form of a futuristic fantasy,
News from Nowhere
, in which a time-traveller (also called William) wakes up in an England transformed by a short, bloody revolution into a proto-communist state. He discovers that all land and means of production are now held in common, but instead of a single centralised authority, the country is organised into a federation of independent local democracies. Exploring his native London, William finds many landmarks have disappeared under ‘pleasant lanes’ and meadows, culverts have been restored to ‘bubbling brooks’, and Trafalgar Square has been transformed into a sloping sunny orchard full of apricot trees, from which the Dung Market (formerly the Houses of Parliament) can be glimpsed.
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‘I fairly felt as if I were alive in the fourteenth century,’ comments Morris’s astonished time-traveller, who finds as he wanders though this Wen-turned-idyll that the ‘sham wants’ of capitalism no longer exist, and that most people work in agriculture or handicrafts, doing whatever suits them best. Thanks to their countrified, creative lives, the people have carefree countenances that are ‘frankly and openly joyous’, and when William asks one man what motivates them to work, he is told, ‘The reward of labour is
life
. Is that not enough?’
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Part committed Marxist and part Romantic, Morris expressed the dilemmas of socialist utopianism perfectly. Fully prepared for the bloody revolution he believed to be necessary in order to create a better
future, his vision of a pastoral, crafts-based, retro-medieval society was nevertheless about as fanciful as utopianism gets. The nearest it came to being realised was the distinctly un-revolutionary Guild of Handicrafts, set up by Charles Robert Ashbee in the picturesque Cotswold village of Chipping Campden in 1902. Like so many visionaries of his age, Morris’s idealism was based on a fantasy in which his own talents and preferences would be shared by the world at large. Unfortunately for him, the world had other ideas. However, there was one man who shared enough of his vision to bring at least some of it to reality. That man was Ebenezer Howard, and his utopia was one of the vanishingly few ever to be even partially realised – the Garden City.

Perhaps the best-known utopia after those of Plato and More, the Garden City is arguably the most consistently misinterpreted of the three. Frequently cited as the inspiration behind the leafy suburbia that spread through Britain like a virulent weed during the early twentieth century, Garden Cities were originally intended to be precisely the opposite: a network of small, independent, self-sufficient city-states, connected to one another by railway. So how did the confusion come about, and why has it stuck? The answer goes back to the crinkle in the utopian timeline created by the socialist utopians. Howard’s use of the word ‘garden’ in his title simply triggered the Arcadian dream latent in every Victorian city-dweller, now seemingly brought within reach by the railways. Suburbia, for most people,
was
a garden city – at least as close to one as they cared to get. Howard’s title overtook his vision, which is a shame, because 100 years on,
Garden Cities of To-morrow
remains one of the most persuasive and inspiring utopian tracts ever written.

A mild and modest man, Ebenezer Howard was an unlikely figure to bear the ‘visionary’ tag. After a formative period in America in his early twenties during which he discovered, among other things, that he was not cut out to be a farmer, he spent the rest of his life in London working as a parliamentary stenographer.
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Hardly the stuff of legend;
yet arguably it was Howard’s unshowy personality and day job that made him the perfect vessel to absorb all the influences of his age and combine them into a vision that had something in it for everyone. First outlined in a pamphlet of 1898 entitled
To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform
, his Garden-City concept was an amalgam of almost every utopian idea going, from Plato and More, via Owen, to Marx and Morris. Remarkably, Howard managed to turn this improbable smorgasbord into a proposal of such coherence and appeal that it won the immediate backing of the sort of convert of whom most utopians can only dream: captains of industry with plenty of cash. Within months, Howard had set up his Garden Cities Association with the heavyweight support of Lord Leverhulme, Joseph Rowntree and the Cadburys.

In 1902, Howard republished his concept as
Garden Cities of To-morrow
, the title by which it would become both famous and commonly misapprehended. The book contained detailed proposals for what Howard called his ‘town–country magnet’: a Garden City that would combine the benefits of town and country living, while neutralising the disadvantages of both.
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The ‘magnet’ was effectively a city-state that would occupy 6,000 acres of land, of which 1,000 would be built up and the rest cultivated. Crucially, all the land would be owned by the community and held in trust on its behalf, with all rents going to run the city and fund public works. This would mean that as land values rose, it would be the city, and not individual landowners, that would get rich. The close bond between city and country would ensure that there was a thriving agricultural estate, which would benefit from a secure market for its produce, as well as receiving waste from the town to increase the soil’s fertility.
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Howard’s economic ideas were radical, but it was his urban design that really caught the public imagination. Here was another irony: Howard, who was no designer, made it clear from the start that his plans were ‘merely suggestive, and will probably be much departed from’.
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Nevertheless, with the true instincts of a salesman, he took great pains to describe his ideal city, laid out in a spacious series of concentric rings, with boulevards of ‘very excellently built houses’, a large central public park bounded by a ‘Crystal Palace’ (a sort of circular winter-garden-cum-shopping-arcade), and a tree-lined Grand Avenue
150 metres wide. Despite all its open space, the city would be relatively compact: with an average 200 people per hectare in residential areas, it would have a density similar to that of central London; however, unlike London, it would also have a maximum population of 30,000, with a further 2,000 to work the land.
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Once that number had been reached, a satellite city would be founded nearby, connected to the first by railway, a process that would repeat as the movement spread.