Morris apparently disliked urban living before he became a socialist, and he appears to have carried over this attitude into his socialist activity. In an early article in Justice, entitled Why Not? (12 April 1884) he lamented that under capitalism, “it is difficult to see anything which might stop the growth of these horrible brick encampments; its tendency is undoubtedly to depopulate the country and small towns for the advantage of the great commercial and manufacturing centres; but this evil, and it is a monstrous one, will be no longer a necessary evil when we have got rid of land monopoly, manufacturing for the profit of individuals, and the stupid waste of competitive distribution”. (Salmon 1994 p.24)
Nowhere was this hostility expressed more clearly than on London. In a lecture The Depression of Trade, (12 July 1885) he said: “While I speak to you London is practically undrained: a huge mass of sewage, which should be used for fertilising the fields of Kent and Essex now and especially the latter actually passing out of cultivation, a wall of filth is accumulating at the mouth of the Thames garnering up for us who knows what seeds of pestilence and death.” (Lemire 1969 p.121)
Morris had just finished reading the novel After London by Richard Jefferies. He wrote to Georgina Burne-Jones in April 1885 that, “I read a queer book called After London coming down: I rather liked it: absurd hopes curled around my heart as I read”. The story involved a cataclysmic meteor strike that affected sea levels and wiped out cities and most of the population. According to Paul Meier, “the description of the former site of London was especially impressive. The ruins are buried in a pestilential swamp where there is nothing but decay, fever-laden miasmas, choking phosphorescent mists, where the stagnant water, penetrating deeper and deeper into the ground, brings up as foul gases the contents of millenary sewers replete with excretion of hundreds of millions of human beings. In this vast accused region no life can exist dreams of venturing there”. (1978 pp.68-70)
As far as his vision of the future is concerned, he dreamed of the countrification of the capital. In Society of the Future, (13 November 1887) he imagined “a few pleasant villages on the side of the Thames might mark the place of that preposterous piece of folly once called London”. (Morton 1973 p.197) In News from Nowhere, London had completely changed and was covered in forests.
His communist fiction also expressed his preference for the countryside. He wrote: "The change," said Hammond, "which in these matters took place very early in our epoch, was most strangely rapid. People flocked into the country villages, and, so to say, flung themselves upon the freed land like a wild beast upon his prey; and in a very little time the villages of England were more populous than they had been since the fourteenth century, and were still growing fast. Of course, this invasion of the country was awkward to deal with, and would have created much misery, if the folk had still been under the bondage of class monopoly. But as it was, things soon righted themselves. People found out what they were fit for, and gave up attempting to push themselves into occupations in which they must needs fail. The town invaded the country; but the invaders, like the warlike invaders of early days, yielded to the influence of their surroundings, and became country people; and in their turn, as they became more numerous than the townsmen, influenced them also; so that the difference between town and country grew less and less; and it was indeed this world of town-bred folk which has produced that happy and leisurely but eager life of which you have had a first taste. (Morton 1968 pp.253-254)
Under communism, Morris favoured the interpenetration of the town by the countryside, and vice versa to some extent. In one of his later lectures, Town and Country (1892) he expressed this more theoretically: “Town and country are generally put in a kind of contrast, but we will see what kind of a contrast there has been, is, and may be between them; how far that contrast is desirable or necessary, or whether it may not be possible in the long run to make the town a part of the country and the country a part of the towns. I think I may assume that, on the one hand, there is nobody here so abnormally made as not to take a pleasure in green fields, and trees, and rivers, and mountains, the beings, human and otherwise, that inhabit those scenes, and in a word, the general beauty and incident of nature: and that, on the other, we all of us find human intercourse necessary to us, and even the excitement of those forms of it which can only be had where large bodies of men live together.”
However it would be a mistake to interpret these comments as making Morris wholeheartedly opposed to urban life. In Society of the Future he recognised that “the aggregation of the population having served its purpose of giving people opportunities of inter-communication and of making the workers feel their solidarity, will also come to and end”. (Morton 1973 p.196)
Of course these factors are precisely those that make urban living so significant for workers and for socialists. It is hard to imagine this being much different under socialism. It is a tribute to Morris’ vision that he tried to conceive of a different relationship between town and country – though I’m not convinced he was able to work it out.
However it is clear that Morris did not envisage socialism as isolated rural living, preferring it seems small town communities. In Commonweal, (17 August 1889) he argued that “the living in small communities is not in theory an essential of this great change though I have little doubt that it would bring about such a way of living and abolish big cities, which… I think much to be desired.” (Salmon 1994 p.445)
Instead he advocated town planning under socialism. In the lecture Makeshift, (18 November 1894), he argued: “the centre with its big public buildings, theatres, squares and gardens: the zone round the centre with its lesser guildhalls grouping together the houses of the citizens; again with its parks and gardens; the outer zone again, still its district of public buildings, but with no definite gardens to it because the whole of this outer zone would be a garden thickly besprinkled with houses and other buildings. And at last the suburb proper, mostly fields and fruit gardens with scanty houses dotted about till you come to the open country with its occasional farm-steads. There would be a city for you.”
And despite his personal tastes, Morris came to see that under capitalism, some reforms should be advocated to alleviate the worst excesses of the system. In Communism, (1893) he said: “Who can quarrel with the attempts to relieve the sordidness of civilised town life by the public acquirement of parks and other open spaces, planting of trees, establishment of free libraries and the like?” (Morton 1973 p.228)
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