News from Nowhere is an apt title for a concept of Utopia that truly exists in nowhere and so therefore can only exist in the vanity of human imagination.  Nevertheless that word Utopia has acquired the implications of the ideal, and ideals are of course frequently attempted in the built environment if not the wider social field.  The notion of the ideal, is then, arguably very different from the vision of Utopia which cannot exist, simply because Ideals are attempted and do therefore exist, at least in part, somewhere.

It maybe a paradox that More’s Utopia may well be based on at least a romantic understanding of a real place whereas Morris’s noble medievalism is truly utopian.  Nevertheless whereas More did not build his utopian state, Morris did attempt it.  Morris’s mostly practical failure of his social ideal however inspired a tangible aesthetic for a new socio poiitical order but also an empathy that runs through the modernist ideal even though its outcomes are so different from anything that Morris could ever have dreamt of.   Conversely, he can also be said to give added substance to an English suburbia, the very thing that destroyed his real world and is in its essence such a parasite on the notion of aesthetics.

This exploration of Morris is for me both personal as well as ‘academic’.  To the best of my memories Morris was rarely quoted in my own family home yet my grandfather, two generations after Morris’s birth shared a similar radical Liberalism, the same ultraist philosophy both in his teaching and his attitude to the social role of the craftsman and the role of art.  I can remember reading both Ruskin and Cobbet from my grandfathers books as well as sharing a disgust at suburbanisation of the fields he once lived amongst - or is that my own romanticism? The nod to socialism was the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and the grand tour he sent my father on – was not to Italy but to Iceland, France and Germany.  In the end though, he too felt let down by the Liberalism and social movements he once believed in (and WW2 only compounded this).  Like Morris his ideals for a socially just society were simply overtaken by greed.

These digital visual notes focus on some of the key places in Morris’s life.  The digital format is a virtual world and so cannot exist in a reality as we commonly understand it.  In this sense it can reflect a concept of utopia but its slow movement also reflects the slow change the icon brings about in the eyes of the viewer and the believer – a portal.   Put another way Ideals can almost be seen as a form of stasis, either monumentally unchanging or else changing very slowly around an eternal core.  There has been no attempt to recreate a past Morris may once have lived in – the images are very much marred by a world Morris may have had difficulties with.

Malcolm Barrett

Cambridgeshire 2005