WARREN DRAPER FIRST started writing in order to document his experiences of the credit crunch for The Idler and has been a regular contributor ever since. This is the fifth part of a six part series he has written concerning his ideas to create a utopian town he has dubbed Morristown. We will publish part six next Wednesday.

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

E. F. Schumacher.

A few years ago I was part of the PermaFuture Project, which had the crazy idea that social housing could be used to provide the means to help people build/grow/create their own way out of relative poverty. I designed a Market Garden Housing Estate based on permaculture zoning principles. Each house had its own workshop and access to both private and communal growing land and the estate was built with a nearby shared factory space for heavier/louder industry. The central tenet being that the design of the estate itself would give its residents the opportunity to engage in the kind of useful work (see part 4) which would allow them to become financially independent individuals whilst contributing to the long-term financial self-sustainability of the estate as a whole. The goal of the project was to use the strengths of both collectivism and individualism to build a housing estate specifically geared at tackling rural poverty. Needless to say the Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council (DMBC) didn’t get it.

Although we only asked for a paltry 5 acres of land for the experiment the DMBC were more interested in quantity than quality. Major players like Persimmon and Barret would build fifty of their generic rabbit-hutch houses on plots of land where we would suggest self-building a mere ten (albeit ten which had the potential to change lives). Self-build was key to our development. Straw-bale house building is still a skilled trade, but it requires fewer skilled workers per job than brick construction so homes can be built using trainer-led teams. Teams made up of – you’ve guessed it – the people who will eventually occupy those very homes. It was through researching load-bearing straw-bale constructions that I met a woman with an even better plan for a would-be idler-inclined town.

Carol Atkinson studied architecture at the Centre for Alternative Technology and in 2006/07, as part of her MSc thesis Energy Assessment of a Straw Bale Building, she and her then 16 year old son, Sam, constructed a straw bale cabin on their farm just outside Goole in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Carol designed and built the cabin on a mobile-home chassis, making it, we believe, the only mobile load-bearing straw-bale house in the world. The 10m by 4m walls were built in just five days using wheat straw grown on a neighbouring farm. In fact the vast majority of renewable, reclaimed, recycled and recyclable materials used for the build were also sourced locally. Carol is keen to point out that such a build is not as straight forward as some people would have you believe. The Atkinson’s had the talents of a great joiner to hand and Carol conducted a huge amount of research to turn her dream into a reality. This is why the importance of an artisan attitude cannot be stressed strongly enough – like Morris himself we must work to develop essential skills or work with those who already have them. Without the necessary skills any model town, no matter how well resourced, is likely to go the same way as Owen’s New Harmony (see part 3).

After the cabin Carol went on to build a beautiful two-storey, two-bedroom straw-bale cottage – both the cabin and the cottage (soon to be joined by some newly developed ‘straw-bale camping pods’) are available to rent as holiday homes at stawcottage.co.uk. But it is the ‘mobile’ home and her ideas about developing farmland which are of real interest to the idle Utopian.

The fact that the cabin is technically a mobile structure can be of immense benefit to people who are worried about potential planning restrictions – such as those faced by Owenstown. The shape of the cabin – as dictated by the mobile-home chassis – is also ideal for building modular units which can be used in combination to create more complicated structures (which can also be broken up and moved easily if necessary). Carol has dreams of taking 10 acres of her husband’s 100 acre farm site and building a housing complex similar to my Market Garden Housing Estate, but Carol’s residents would also productively farm the remaining acreage. They could even grow their own long-stemmed straw… which effectively means the town would grow its own houses while still gaining revenue from the sale of the grain.

There is no reason why our artisan and idler friendly Morristown could not be founded on an existing farm. The average 100 acre UK farm would set you back around £1 million, but using the techniques developed by Carol and her son in combination with permaculture principles (see spiralseed.co.uk) and open source technologies (see opensourceecology.org) we can easily envisage a self-built, self-reliant, community which develops slowly over time, at relatively little cost, using readily available local resources… and that aforementioned artisan attitude of course.

Sadly building our Morristown from the ground up remains the stuff of dreams (unless somebody out there happens to have 100 acres going spare?!?), so for the final part of this series we will look at what can be done to make our existing towns more idler friendly.

Warren Draper is a writer, artist and photographer based in Doncaster. He is co-founder of the Doncopolitan magazine (doncopolitan.com) and is a keen Anglarchist. He can be reached via Twitter at @TheLuddicLife