Villages of Vision - Softcover

Darley, Gillian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586082794 ISBN 13: 9780586082799

Publisher: HarperCollins Distribution Services, 1978

Synopsis

British villages evoke images of serenity, slow and peaceful change, lanes, gardens, cottages... a reassuring continuity with the past. All over Britain, however, there are villages that were planned: invented for aesthetic, philanthropic or political reasons, for convenience and for ideals. The best known are Milton Abbas, New Lanark and Port Sunlight. Villages of Vision includes hundreds of these planned villages, among then strange and pretty arcadias built by conscience-stricken aristocrats, industrialists and visionaries. The book includes a gazetter showing, county by county, where such villages can be seen - not as museums but as evolving, living places. David McKie, the Guardian's McElsewhere, provides a preface.

About this title

Review:

The book is no mean achievement. It spans over 250 years of development and it is much to Ms Darley's credit that she has included not only schemes realised. The hare-brained, the magnificent, the withered, the bizarre notions of architectural theorists, as well as the successful, are all here in abundance. --Design Magazine

First published in 1975 but recently revised and updated, Gillian Darley's Villages of Vision is a quirky account of the many planned villages dotted across Britain and Ireland. Tracing a history that dates back some 250 years, and covers enclosure, the picturesque, the industrial revolution, and large-scale philanthropy, Darley does an excellent job of unpicking the egotism/ideology/upheaval that so often lay beneath what we now think of as picture postcard English villages. But Darnley is also a sensitive narrator, whose exhaustive, but lightly worn, research enables a nuanced history, attuned to the individual eras, geographies and personalities in question. --Journal of Wild Culture

Gillian Darley has produced an attractive book on an attractive subject... fascinating and lively --Times Literary Supplement

About the Author:

Gillain Darley is a writer and broadcaster. She is the biographer of Octavia Hill, John Soane and John Evelyn. Her most recent book is on Vesuvius. Her journalism appears in the London Review of Books, the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement and the architectural press.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins Distribution Services
• Publication date: 1978
• ISBN 10: 0586082794
• ISBN 13: 9780586082799
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304