A squandered land

The preparations for this work have been suitable to the author's earnest concern for its usefulness.

Daniel Defoe, A Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain

Man and boy

One bright February morning in 1885, a stout, bearded man took a walk around the historic streets of Oxford before heading for Wadham College and the Holywell Music Room where he was to address a political meeting. It's just possible that his walk was witnessed by one of the city's younger citizens – a seven-year-old boy – although in fact he was probably attending the Church School in Cowley, close to where his father worked as a clerk. Our bearded man, a graduate of Exeter College, made several visits to the city at this period, and while it's possible that his and the boy's paths could have crossed, their very different social circumstances make it unlikely. Which is a pity, for here were two people whose ideas and activities profoundly influenced the way we lived throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and the thought of them occupying the same stretch of pavement is a curiously seductive one.

But the comings and goings of well-to-do gentlemen connected with the University probably occupied few of the younger man's thoughts as he grew up, for he was of a mechanical bent and in 1891 was apprenticed to a bicycle repairer. Yet their two paths may have crossed one last time, one wet October day in 1896, when the older man's funeral cortège paused at Oxford station to allow local people to pay their respects. No one from the University attended, for the deceased man had shocked its sensibilities a few years earlier with a harangue about his political beliefs. Once again, our young bicycle repairer, now four days short of his fourteenth birthday, might still have shown little interest in the eccentric and obviously artistic mourners or the beautifully carved coffin in the train's guard's van laid out like a chapel, unless someone had mentioned the name of the man within, for the name was his own.

It's easy to read too much into coincidence, but these two namesakes, despite their very different backgrounds, really did mould the physical shape of our country today. Although both men were philanthropists, both believed strongly in improving the lot of the poor and both were lovers of the countryside and historic buildings, they were very different. Yet their ideas and activities contributed so hugely to creating the car-dependent urban sprawl that passes for environment in the UK today that even such a coincidence is impossible to ignore. The name they shared was William Morris.

Mention of the name William Morris today is likely to bring to most people's minds the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement; the passionate guild socialist; the inspired designer of fabrics, furnishings and furniture; the poet; the writer; the building conservationist and much else besides. Born in 1834, William Morris I (as I shall call him) was an extraordinary man, rightly revered today for his skill as a designer, his advocacy of handicrafts, his role in founding the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, his influence in developing Britain's socialism along a very different path from the one in those countries where Marx was revered, for his poetry, for his close association with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and for much else.

Yet Victorian aesthetic values underwent a long eclipse in the mid-twentieth century, and mention of the name William Morris in that period would have brought to most people's minds an equally famous, but wholly different individual. William Morris II (1877-1963) was an engineering colossus who once stood at the peak of British manufacturing, earning him the title by which he's better remembered: Lord Nuffield. William II was responsible for introducing mass production methods to the British car industry and, within a couple of decades of his founding it, Morris Motors was by far the largest car manufacturer in the land. So successful was it that Morris was dubbed 'the British Henry Ford' and generations of motorists enjoyed their cheap but reliable 'bull-nosed' Morris, Morris 8, Morris Minor and Morris Oxford cars.

The differences between the two are marked. William I came from a well-to-do background and enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle, despite which he became a passionate socialist. William II came from a humble background and became a hugely successful and wealthy industrialist and, although he liked to describe himself as 'apolitical', he flirted with fascism in the early 1930s (to his subsequent regret – he later gave generously to charities helping Jewish refugees from Europe). Both, as befits men with a good Oxfordshire surname, were associated with Oxford for part or much of their lives, but although William I was a graduate he fell out with the University after delivering his tub-thumping socialist polemic to its worthies. William II wasn't a graduate, but held the University in such high regard that he endowed Nuffield College, which he intended should become predominantly an undergraduate engineering college. The University was so grateful it made it a postgraduate social science college.

Both men loved Oxford's historic buildings and both owned substantial homes in the Oxfordshire countryside, but their influence took very different forms. William I inspired a new generation of architects and planners with a view of simple rural idylls for all, which led to an explosion of suburbia that he would no doubt have deplored. William II brought cheap mass motoring to the people at large, enabling them to pursue this rural/suburban dream. The result of a century of practising these ideals is a ruined environment and a country hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with the challenge of climate change.

If that seems harsh, particularly on William I, then bear with me. This will be a tale of idealism gone wrong and greed got right, of the things we craved and the things we continue to crave. It will describe where we went wrong and how we continue to get things wrong. It will look at how we can challenge these failings with ideas from the country where they were most enthusiastically, successfully and damagingly embraced. It will try – and fail – to avoid the seductive trap that most environmental books fall into, of saying 'we need to do things differently', because we do, and urgently. But worry not: a great deal of what we need to do is rediscover old ways of doing things, and in seeking inspiration we will...