Dreamstreets: A Journey Through Britain’s Village Utopias by Jacqueline Yallop (review)

Although the title Dreamstreets and the use of the word utopias in the subtitle strongly suggest a focus on the utopian, there are only a few references to utopia in the book, which is about the author’s responses to some of the model villages established in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author says that there were about four hundred such villages, and she has visited many I have not visited and know little about; she is particularly good on some of the less well-known model towns. While the table of contents suggests that she visited ten of them, she discusses quite a few more, all of which she has visited.

I found the discussion of New Lanark (which is one of those not in the table of contents) a bit odd in that the author states that she did not like New Lanark, because it is not a living village. Admittedly New Lanark can be overwhelmed by visitors, but it is in fact a living industrial village that still produces fabric in its mills powered by the same flow of water that powered the mills in Owen’s time (with the excess sold on to the power grid) and is lived in by people who work in New Lanark and in the surrounding area, with a substantial number of owner-occupiers and a large number of rental units available at social rents. In my visits to some of the model towns discussed, I found them rather less connected to the site than New Lanark.

Most of the villages were built by industrialists, quite a few of whom were Quakers, to house the workers in the factories that they built near resources to be exploited and/or power sources. The villages that interest the author were built as model villages designed to provide an environment that would, and generally did, improve the life situations of the workers and their work habits, thus benefiting both factory owners and workers. This leads to a regular theme of the book, control of the lives of the workers by the industrialists, albeit generally with good intentions.

This is a personal book about the author’s responses to the villages she visited buttressed by research, some of it in the archives of the villages. The author is quite interested in the architecture of the villages, including their layout, specific buildings, and details of buildings, particularly in the model towns inspired by the Picturesque and Arts and Crafts movements, which leads to discussion of Ruskin, but without mention of the Guild of St. George, and William Morris, which includes News from Nowhere. But I found one thing very odd; at no point does she mention interacting with/speaking to any person, even in the village where she held her first paying job. This gives the book the flavor of all the architectural designs and architecture books where no human being appears, and as with many architecture books, there are no people in any of the photographs illustrating the book. The author at least mentions seeing other people a few times, but I found the lack of interaction with people in the model towns where they live their daily lives disconcerting here, just as I do in the architectural material.

The author visited towns where the lives of the villagers were transformed and which can appropriately be called village utopias. To me the most interesting example was Nenthead in Cumbria, a place I knew nothing of, which, according to the author, was an example of a company that continually adjusted its practices to benefit its workers as well as itself. “Nenthead was the first place in the UK to make schooling obligatory” (46), and it had “the first free library in England” (54).

One of the extended reflections inspired by the author’s visits is on the position of women as factory workers and in the villages. She notes that many, particularly in...