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 fourth 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 five next Wednesday.

“The anarchist conclusion is that every kind of human activity should begin from what from what is local and immediate.”

Colin Ward, Anarchy In Action.

In part 3 we looked at a potential new town development inspired by the work of Robert Owen. Owen was an important reformer who did indeed improve the working conditions of his own workers and workers the world over, but they were still his workers and we are still slaves to the tyrant work. Thankfully Owen would inspire another socialist hero who would look deeper into the realities of work and become an inspiration for idlers everywhere.

After coming across Henry George’s Progress and Poverty William Morris began to seek out the works of other socialist thinkers; including, of course, Robert Owen. With new-found conviction Morris would dedicate his life to the socialist cause, but unlike other socialist reformers Morris could see that it would be changes to the nature of work, production and creative processes – rather than changes to the nature of government – that would ultimately lead to true liberation.

Morris’s importance to the idle canon cannot be overstated, but there is little room to dwell on his wider accomplishments here. Instead I would point the uninitiated to John Mitchinson’s wonderful essay On the Visionary Work & Revolutionary Life of an Idle Idol: William Morris (Idler No.41: The QI Issue, 2008 – although by far the best way to enjoy this Morrisian masterpiece is via the hand-bound, letterpress printed Bracketpress issue occasionally available via www.bracketpress.co.uk). Here we shall simply focus on Morris’s vision of the perfect town.

Morris famously differentiated between ‘useful work’ and ‘useless toil’, summing them up thus: “one good, the other bad; one not far removed from a blessing, a lightening of life; the other a mere curse, a burden to life.” He reasoned that if our species were engaged in useful work, as opposed to the useless toil of wage slavery, then: “being no longer compelled by anything but their own needs, they would refuse to produce the mere inanities which are now called luxuries, or the poison and trash now called cheap wares … the work of the world might be carried on in hope and with pleasure if it were not wasted by folly and tyranny, by the perpetual strife of opposing classes.”

Once relieved of the burden of useless toil our lives would become less fractured as the boundaries between work, play, education and the essentials of living became meaningless. So too would the divisions of our towns into unique commercial, manufacturing, agricultural, social and living areas become largely unnecessary. Morris’s 1884 vision, A Factory as it Might Be, describes beautiful, well-designed buildings which house workshops, dining halls, studies, studios, libraries and ‘places for study of various kinds’. These are surrounded by gardens which are tended by those workers who find gardening and growing a joy. Morris says that this cooperative gardening may be pursued for beauty alone, but also, through growing food-stuffs, as an additional form of livelihood. What’s more he recognises the positive environmental effects of such endeavours:

“Well, it follows on this garden business that our factory must make no sordid litter, befoul no water, nor poison the air with smoke.”

This cleaner, more rewarding and ultimately more beautiful ‘factory’ is hardly a place we would wish to escape from once our working day is done. Indeed it is easy to imagine such a place as somewhere we might like to relax and socialise in once the working day is done – add a micro-brewery and some musicians and you’d never have to leave. As such houses, apartments and dormitories would also be central to the ‘factory’ complex.

In his 1898 book Fields, Factories & Workshops, friend and contemporary to Morris, the anarchist prince Peter Kropotkin, took things a step further by arguing that there was little need to separate agriculture from everyday life – indeed he argued that people would be healthier for engaging with outdoor farm labour as a respite from their other work. The works of William Cobbett do seem to testify that the population did become more sickly and more dependent as they made the (often forced) transition to an urban factory system.

With the rise of new micro-manufacturing and prototyping technologies (3D printers, CNC milling machines, laser cutters, Arduino microcontrollers, Raspberry Pi computers, etc.) the potential to create Morris’s perfect factory has never been greater. Morris himself was not averse to using such technology: “machines of the most ingenious and best-improved kinds will be used when necessary, but will be used simply to save human labour”. For it is levels of tedium and creativity which ultimately divide useful work from useless toil and Morris would never wish to rob the artisan of ‘the pleasure and reward derived from making and doing’.

So here we have a blueprint for a town which is geared toward the self-reliant, creative artisan for whom beauty, art and health are as much a part of the economy as financial reward. In other words a town built for idlers. In part 5 we’ll examine how somebody with the means might go about founding such a place.

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