Villages of Vision: A Study of Strange Utopias - Softcover

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

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.