A doomed quest reveals why Britain is no utopia
Trucks in the Garden of Eden is a sad book, although that sadness is not immediately apparent. Its subtitle, In Search of Britain’s Utopias, leads us to expect one of those comic Brysonesque travel books, a road trip in search of idealists and eccentrics. And that is exactly how the story begins.
After taking some sideswipes at the state of contemporary Britain, Ukrainian-born Vitaliev, who worked as a journalist in Moscow before defecting to the West in 1990, sets off around the country in a camper-van named Alphie with his wife Christine and Tashi, their Tibetan terrier, by his side. Their mission is to discover utopia.
They don’t find it. And this in spite of an alarmingly generous definition of “utopia” which for Vitaliev encompasses everything from Gretna Green (“a utopian concept”), and a nudist colony outside St Albans, to fake caviar, the author’s recovery from heart surgery, and even Alphie the campervan, “a real Utopia on wheels”. But wherever Vitaliev goes, all he sees are failed communities, failed ideals.
Post-war new towns such as Stevenage, announced by Labour minister Lewis Silkin in 1946 and nicknamed “Silkingrad” by its opponents, are ugly, brutalist experiments in socialist engineering. Claims to have created a paradise on earth by religious communities such as Bedford’s Panacea Society are “laughable”. Model settlements such as William Lever’s Port Sunlight and George Cadbury’s Bournville are monuments to paternalism and an employer’s desire to control every aspect of their workers’ lives. Utopia is nowhere.
It doesn’t help that Vitaliev’s quest takes place during the pandemic. Letchworth Garden City is in lockdown; Chipping Campden, where C R Ashbee and his Guild and School of Handicraft settled in 1902, is deserted except for the Arts & Crafts museum, which to Vitaliev’s chagrin is just about to close its doors for the day as he arrives. (It was 5pm, for heaven’s sake; didn’t he think to check opening times on the website?) He drives Alphie 70 miles out of his way to see New Lanark, to find that although Robert Owen’s model village hasn’t succumbed to lockdown, its museums and heritage sites are only open three days a week – and this is not one of those days. (Again, check the website!)
In this case, he contrives to make a virtue of necessity: “There was a certain creative challenge in the shut-down, deserted and even permanently abandoned sites, villages and towns,” he writes, “where, for lack of interviewees and interlocutors, you had to converse with the walls, the streets, the parks and the houses, all of which had their stories to tell.” At least Clough Williams-Ellis’s fantasy village of Portmeirion is open; but there’s a snag. Its “draconian regulations” include a ban on dogs, thus excluding Tashi and meaning that Vitaliev and his wife must tour the place singly and in shifts, while one of them keeps the terrier company in the van.
Trucks in the Garden of Eden is often gently funny. But beneath its surface, there runs a deep and disconcerting vein of sadness which stretches back to Vitaliev’s early life in the Soviet Union. No matter how much he loathes Soviet Russia – its monochrome misery, its lies, its cruelty – it’s the reference point against which everything is measured. Wherever he looks, he’s unable to escape the prison of memory.
So the Kelmscott Manor love triangle between William Morris, his wife Janey and Dante Gabriel Rossetti reminds him of a similar triangle between Vladimir Mayakovsky, Moscow socialite Lilya Brik and her poet husband Osip. Whiteway Colony in Gloucestershire is like a village near Moscow where Vitaliev used to have a dacha; Bourton-on-the-Water recalls the town of Vilkovo in Odesa, where he fished as a boy. At Hay-on-Wye he finds Soviet-era guidebooks; the wine he drinks in a Welsh hotel reminds him “of the Crimean wines of my Ukrainian youth”. The Robert Owen Museum at Newtown brings back memories of a visit to Chekhov’s house outside Moscow; Letchworth Garden City combines elements of an urban dream with “features of a Soviet-style totalitarian conurbation”.
In the end, then, this isn’t really a quest to find British utopias. Instead, it’s primarily a book about exile, and the complex love-hate relationship which exiles have with the land of their birth. “All utopias come at a cost,” says Vitaliev. So do all quests.
Adrian Tinniswood’s books include Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the Post-War Country House. Trucks in the Garden of Eden is published by Amberley at ￡22.99. To order your copy for ￡19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
