From Cromford and Cresswell to Port Sunlight and Saltaire, the despotic and the cutesy collide in this tour of philanthropic model villages
Jacqueline Yallop mentions in her book the problem of deciding what to call the places it covers. “Model villages” was the original nomenclature – model as in an exemplar for others to follow – but she finds other people assume she is referring to miniaturised villages, toys. Although she settled on “Village Utopias” instead, Yallop argues that the impulse behind the two kinds of model village can be pretty similar – a desire to create and tinker with an ideal community in microcosm, one over which the creator has absolute power, and whose population cannot answer back; a peculiar and very English combination of the despotic and the cutesy.
The tour takes in, among others, small-scale, large-ambition philanthropic settlements such as Cromford and Cresswell in Derbyshire, Port Sunlight in Merseyside, Saltaire in West Yorkshire and Nenthead in Alston Moor, Cumbria, where the author spent what appears to have been an unrewarding time as a tour guide in her early 20s. These are then interspersed with thematic digressions and excursions to New Lanark, Blaise Hamlet and a Moravian square in suburban Manchester. All are products of the industrial revolution, roughly from 1770 to 1930, and most were projects of enlightened philanthropists. Dreamstreets’s stall is set out, though, in an opening comparison between Cromford, a planned village created not far from the mill by the pioneering industrialist Richard Arkwright, and New Lanark, opened in Clydeside by his partner David Dale, and then revolutionised by his successor Robert Owen. The juxtaposition is of planning and speculation, utopianism and commerce, and their results in the place’s ease of living.
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