This article is about full size villages, typically built for factory workers. For miniature villages, see miniature park. Model villages were created in the United Kingdom by some of the first industrialists. Eighteenth-century industrialists such as Arkwright and Wedgwood built housing for their workers, but fully developed settlements are more typical of the nineteenth century and continue into the twentieth.
Model villages tended to be built by philanthropist industrialists such as Titus Salt and George Cadbury to house their workers as well as provide social amenities. Architects associated with the movement include the designer of Woodlands Model Village and Creswell Model Village, Percy B. Houfton.
There are also some agricultural villages which can be seen as model villages. English examples are seen when a medieval settlement has been rebuilt by a rural landowner, as at Edensor (on the Chatsworth estate) and Selworthy.
Particular villages
British Isles
England
(Chronological order)
- Blaise Hamlet, Bristol, England - (1811)
- Selworthy, Somerset, England - (1828)
- Meltham, West Yorkshire, England - (1850)
- Saltaire, West Yorkshire, England - (1853)
- Akroydon, West Yorkshire, England - (1859)
- Nenthead, Cumbria England - (1861)
- Copley, West Yorkshire, England - (1874)
- Bournville, West Midlands, England - (1879)
- Port Sunlight, Merseyside, England - (1888)
- Creswell, Derbyshire, England - (1895)
- New Earswick, North Yorkshire, England - (1901)
- Woodlands, South Yorkshire, England - (1905)
- Silver End, Essex, England - (1926)
- Stewartby, Bedfordshire, England - (1926)
Some villages were built up around coal mines. In Yorkshire, the villages of Grimethorpe, Goldthorpe, Woodlands and Fitzwilliam were all built to house workers at the colliery, around which the houses were built. Following the mass pit closures of 1984-94, many of these villages suffered from huge losses in population.
Ireland
(Chronological order)
Scotland
Wales
Italy
In Italy’s Lombardy region, Crespi d’Adda is a particularly well-preserved model workers’ village, and a World Heritage Site since 1995. This was built from scratch, starting in 1878, to provide housing and social services for the workers in a cotton textile factory erected on the banks of the river Adda.
United States of America
Model villages were also built in the United States along the same lines as planned industrial communities, for example at Gwinn, Michigan. There were also such agricultural communities as the 18th century Davis Bend, Mississippi.
Venezuela
Jají model village, Mérida, Venezuela
Other examples
Most controversially and newsworthy of recent years has been the establishment of Poundbury, a model village in rural Dorset guided under the auspices of HRH the Prince of Wales.
References
For Individual entries see the articles. Standard reference work on subject (including some US and European examples) are;
- Gillian Darley's 'Villages of Vision: A Study of Strange Utopias' first published 1975 (Architectural Press, pb 1978 Paladin) and republished with fully revised gazetteer 2007 (Five Leaves Publications)
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