This article is about full size villages, typically built for factory workers. For miniature model villages, see miniature park. For the place in Ireland, see Model Village, County Cork.
A model village is a mostly self-contained community, built from the late 18th century onwards by landowners and business magnates to house their workers. "Model" implies an ideal to which other developments could aspire. Although the villages are located close to the workplace, they are generally physically separated from them and often consist of relatively high-quality housing, with integrated community amenities and attractive physical environments.
According to Jeremy Burchardt, the term model village was first used by the Victorians to describe the new settlements created on the rural estates of the landed gentry in the eighteenth century. As landowners sought to improve their estates for aesthetic reasons, new landscapes were created and the cottages of the poor were demolished and rebuilt out of sight of their country house vistas.[1] However, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (2024), the first use of the term model village is post-Victorian, dating to 1906.
Starting in the 18th century, new villages were created at Nuneham Courtenay when the village was rebuilt as plain brick dwellings either side of the main road, at Milton Abbas the village was moved and rebuilt in a rustic style and Blaise Hamlet in Bristol had individually designed buildings, some with thatched roofs.[2]
The Swing Riots of 1830 highlighted poor housing in the countryside, ill health and immorality and landowners had a responsibility to provide cottages with basic sanitation. The best landlords provided accommodation but many adopted a paternalistic attitude when they built model dwellings and imposed their own standards on the tenants charging low rents but paying low wages.[3]
As the Industrial Revolution took hold, industrialists who built factories in rural locations provided housing for workers clustered around the workplace. An early example of an industrial model village was New Lanark built by Robert Owen.[4] Philanthropic coal owners provided decent accommodation for miners from the early nineteenth century. Earl Fitzwilliam, a paternalistic colliery owner provided houses near his coal pits in Elsecar near Barnsley that were "...of a class superior in size and arrangement, and in conveniences attached, to those of working classes."[5] They had four rooms and a pantry, and outside a small garden and pig sty.[6]
Crespi d'Adda in the Lombardy region, is a well-preserved model workers' village, and World Heritage Site since 1995. It was built from scratch, starting in 1878, to provide housing and social services for the workers in a cotton textile factory on the banks of the river Adda.[citation needed]
Nuevo Baztán outside Madrid dates from the mercantilist and entrepreneurial ambitions of an industrialist from the early-eighteenth century.[citation needed]
^Burchardt 2002, p. 58"Model villages, as their name implies, were rural in origin, and can be traced back to the eighteenth century (although the phrase itself was a Victorian coinage, reflecting the mid-nineteenth-century emphasis on the model village as an example set to other builders, architects and landlords."). Initially the main impetus to model village building came from the desire of landowners to improve and embellish their estates. The fundamental aim was aesthetic; social considerations were marginal or even absent.
^"Tasmanian Industrial Village Successful Co-operative Building (1 November 1923)", The Australian Home Builder (November 1923), Herald and Weekly Times: 50, 1923-11-01, ISSN0819-7008
Burchardt, Jeremy (2002), Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change Since 1800, I. B. Tauris, ISBN1860645143
Thornes, Robin (1994), Images of Industry: Coal, Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, ISBN1-873592-23-X
Further reading
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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