In the autumn of 1852, the journalist and social investigator Henry Mayhew took a hot air balloon ride over the vast expanse of London. Mayhew had spent years reporting on the lives of those living in the humble alleys and hovels that lay behind the city’s glittering facade of money and power. From up in the sky he wanted to see London as a whole, a place where there was ‘more wealth and more want huddled together on one vast heap than in any other part of the earth’. Today London remains a place of economic extremes – a city of ‘turbo’ capitalism and international finance in which decent housing is out of reach for many and at least a third of children live in poverty.
Anxiety and anger about the city’s entrenched inequalities have spurred a tradition of utopian dreamers who over the centuries imagined alternative versions of London and society more broadly. In The Infinite City I tell the story of these thinkers and doers. In rebelling against what the city has so often seemed to stand for – capitalism and the free market – many of them rejected too conventional economic ideas about what makes a good life.
An early phase of this alternative tradition came with the publication in 1516 of Thomas More’s Utopia, often considered the first modern utopia. More was then a rising city official and lawyer and through his work saw the effects of rapid commercialisation as modern capitalism emerged in Britain. His famous tale of a virtuous city on a far-off island depicts a morally renovated London. Its inhabitants are high-minded, studious types, indifferent to conventional riches such as gold (not caring about it, they use the metal to make their chamber pots). They allocate goods collectively and having few material wants, none of them demand more than they need for a simple, wholesome life. Houses are distributed by lot and every ten years they switch them round.
More’s fictional city was meant as a work of the imagination and he in no way sought to create a practical movement to bring his vision to life. But by the late 18th century, enthused by the modern ideal of progress and by the revolution in France, London’s utopians began agitating for a new society. One of them was Thomas Spence, a coin dealer and bookseller, who had a shop down an alleyway in Holborn. Close to his premises were the Inns of Court – a place of power and privilege – and squalid slums whose inhabitants scraped together meagre livings. In Holborn’s taverns, Spence and his followers – the Spenceans – imagined a city in which the people would collectively own the land, increases in the value of which would go to the community rather than to the landlords. The Spenceans preached resistance and revolution and as London’s social tensions rose, some of them joined insurrections and were imprisoned.
Towards the end of the 19th century another London utopian imagined the creation of a ‘garden city’ that would be a repudiation of the smog, dirt and greed of the Victorian city. Ebenezer Howard, a clerk employed at the law courts and in Parliament, was far from being a fiery revolutionary like Spence but was influenced by his utopian predecessor’s economic ideas. His plan was to create a new city incorporating Spence’s notion of the collective ownership of land. Combining the best of urban and rural life, it was to offer a green, healthy living environment for working people. He built his garden city at Letchworth to the north of the capital, and it was intended as a prototype for a new London. At around this time ‘garden suburbs’ began to emerge on the edge of the city, the most famous being Henrietta Barnett’s Hampstead Garden Suburb to the north, which was intended to bring together Londoners of all social classes in a spacious and leafy settlement, a different world to the city’s existing districts of slum and tenement housing.
London is often seen as a symbol of money making, of political power, and in centuries past of imperial domination. But woven through these perennial images of the city is a thread of utopian imagining – yearnings for new kinds of politics and economics that serve true human needs. And these have continued into our own time. Most recently when the Covid lockdowns radically disrupted the daily routines that people took for granted, many began trying out new ways of living and of cooperating and said that they did not want to go back to the ‘old normal’ once the crisis had passed.
But why talk of utopia rather than ordinary human desires? Utopia is often seen as the epitome of naïve impracticality or dangerous grandiosity. In fact, utopia is not necessarily about the achievement of a perfect society where there are never any problems. Through storytelling, social imagining and practical experiment, it is a way of giving focus to people’s yearnings for economic security, connection and community. Often yesterday’s utopian visions – of universal schooling and health care, for example – become today’s commonplace. The utopian tradition can therefore be a source of inspiration as we grapple with our own social dilemmas. By activating hope, the seeds of utopian longing that exist in London’s past and present offer a means of exploring new social and economic possibilities in pursuit of human flourishing, and today the need for that is more pressing than ever.
Niall Kishtainy is the author of The Infinite City: Utopian Dreams on the Streets of London and A Little History of Economics. To sign up to his newsletter, visit www.niallkishtainy.com
