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…and I must admit I was
pleasantly surprised. Whilst some recent promoters of such proposals
have bastardised the concept of the ‘planned settlement’, and simply
sought to badge very poor and in some cases totally unsustainable
housing estates as eco-towns, “sustainable new communities”, the
promoters of Owenstown – the Hometown Foundation – really mean it,
man. They intend to put community at the heart of all they propose to
do, and are in the process of forming the Owenstown Co-operative
Society, which they intend to work alongside in the establishment of
the settlement. Owenstown is potentially spectacular and real
progress.
Located
on a 2,000-acre site five miles south of Lanark, and to a masterplan
developed by Geddes Consulting and JM Architects, the £1.5billion
project is intended to deliver 8,000 new homes, have a population of
20,000 people and will create 8,000 jobs. The vision for Owenstown
is self-sufficiency, with the place being shaped and managed by the
people who will live there. The new homes will be produced in
kit-form by a factory that will be the settlement’s first major
employer, with profits ploughed back into the community. The town
will have its own wind farm, producing low-cost energy, and a green
heating system powered by the recycling of waste produced by
residents. A farm on the outskirts of the
town will grow organic produce, and a
fleet of low-carbon electric vehicles will provide an ultra-modern
transport system. Sounds like paradise doesn’t it, and almost too
good to be true. Well, the Hometown Foundation are serious, and are
aiming to be on-site building within three years.
Good luck to them, because such
proposals are normally prey to Nimbyism. However, Owenstown is
stirring considerable excitement north of the border, with Harry Reid
of the Herald describing the proposal “a pioneering idea to excite the
entire nation”, and adding that Owenstown is “the most exciting thing
to have happened in Scotland since the SNP formed the Scottish
Government”.
Whilst the proposal is indeed
exciting, and a great insight into an alternative way of delivering
new homes on a grand scale, you could hardly describe Owenstown as
“pioneering”. This part of the world has previous, and the clue is
in the name of the new town: Owenstown is a celebration of the
ideals of the industrialist, politician and progressive social
reformer, Robert Owen.
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In the early 1800s, Welshman Owen led a
series of ground-breaking social and educational experiments at the
cotton-spinning village of New Lanark, with the community becoming a
showpiece for its ‘New System’ of society.
Robert Owen |
New Lanark |
Although Owen was an entrepreneur, an
extremely intelligent and smart businessman, at heart he believed that
the newly revolutionised industrial world could create a better
society, and he harnessed the enterprise developed by his
father-in-law – the banker and textile manufacturer, David Dale – in
an attempt to create something visionary and utopian, that better
society he believed could exist, and Owen led a partnership that
bought the mill complex from his father-in-law.
At the time, some 2,500 people lived
and worked at New Lanark (the population today is around 200), and
although the populace coped with grim conditions, they were by no
means the grimmest. However, Owen believed their conditions to be
unsatisfactory, and resolved to deliver improvements. He went on to
lead a number of social welfare programmes, focusing on the
approximately 500 children that lived and worked in the industrial
village.
Although the mills thrived
commercially, Owen’s partners became frustrated with the cost of his
welfare programmes, and pushed for them to be abandoned. Owen was
however, a man of principles, and believed that what he was doing was
“the most important experiment for the happiness of the human race
that had yet been instituted”. He therefore put his money where his
mouth was and bought his partners out, and continued with his drive to
make life better for his employees.
New Lanark became much celebrated
throughout Europe, and visitors from the Continent were amazed to find
a clean industrial environment, with a healthy and contended workforce
that lived in first class housing with exceptional amenities. Perhaps
the one thing that amazed them the most though was the continued
viability and prosperity of Owen’s business.
As industry went into decline during
the twentieth century, so did New Lanark and its population, and the
mills closed completely in 1968. Despite the formation of a local
housing association who commenced the restoration of a number of
buildings in the village, in 1970 the mills, houses and other
industrial buildings were sold to a scrap metal company, Metal
Extractions Limited. In 1974 a trust was formed to prevent the
village’s demolition, and in 1983 a Compulsory Purchase Order was
issued to acquire the site from the scrap metal company. By 2005,
most of the village had been restored, and it is now a World
Heritage Site which attracts around 400,000 visitors each year.
Owen was described as a
Utopianist, putting into practice ideas and theories that were the
basis of Sir Thomas More’s 1516 book Of the Best State of a
Republic, and of the New Island Utopia, which further developed
Plato’s Republic, and described a fictional Atlantic island
that possessed a perfect socio-political-legal system. It is
interesting that More’s work was a work of fiction; the word utopia is
rooted in the Greek for ‘not’ and ‘place’, and implies that the utopia
is actually ‘nowhere’. Indeed, More actually considered that such a
place was not realistically attainable.
Sir Thomas More |
Utopianism has more often than not been
used to describe the thought process that underpins ‘planned
settlements’ of which there is a great history and legacy throughout
the world, and in particular the British Isles, thanks to the nation’s
socialist heart.
Such thinking and philosophies came to
the fore as the effects of the Industrial Revolution began to blight
lives and communities “among those dark Satanic mills”. People like
the aforementioned Robert Owen began to search their souls, and
consider how they could ease the burden of those who were making them
incredibly wealthy, and places such as Saltaire in Bradford, and the
Cadbury family’s planned settlement in southern Birmingham, Bournville
began to emerge. |
