Oh What A Time... - #167 Utopias (Part 1)

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

This week we’re discussing the various attempts through history to create a Utopia right here on earth. We have for you The Diggers of the 1600s, Brook Farm in 1850s America and the story of John Hughes; the man who attempted to make utopia in Yuzovka, Ukraine.Elsewhere, what on earth did people do before the creation of to-do lists? Just wander around aimlessly?! If you know please loop us in: [e-mail] from now on Part 1 is released on Monday and Part 2 on Wednesday - but if you want more Oh What A Time and both parts at once, you should sign up for our Patreon! On there you’ll now find:•The full archive of bonus episodes•Brand new bonus episodes each month•OWAT subscriber group chats•Loads of extra perks for supporters of the show•PLUS ad-free episodes earlier than everyone elseJoin us at 👉 patreon.com/ohwhatatimeAnd as a special thank you for joining, use the code CUSTARD for 25% off your first month.You can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh, Whatter Time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else. Add free. Plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets and access to the O Watertime Group chat. Plus, if you become an O Watertime All-Timer, myself, Tom and Ellis, will riff on your name to postulate

where else in history you might have popped up. For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash O Watertime. Hello, thank you very much at downloading. Oh, what a time, the history podcast that dares to ask the question, how unearthed people survive in the era before to-do lists? I have just written on the big shopping list we've got on our fridge by the peanut butter that my son likes because he loves peanut butter. And today, this morning, was a serious scrape.

It was a couple of teaspoons and a knife. And it was sparing at best, I would say. It was quite a mild. It was quite a miserly serving of peanut butter on his toast, which he has every morning. So I've just written up on the to-do list. If I haven't written that on the to-do list, there's absolutely no way that I would remember to do it. And it would be two years before he ate peanut butter next. The big thing in my life in remembering stuff to do, whether I action it or not is a different cat of fish.

But the iPhone note to-do list, fantastic. And you can't lose it because of the... Eye cloud and all that kind of stuff. You know, if you look at literacy levels, say, in Britain, the to-do list as a mass thing. It's relatively recent. Is that because we have more complex lives, though, now? Yeah, in terms of mass literacy.

Whereas previously, you just have to get to the factory, survive your shift. Get home and boil whatever veg you happen to have in your cabbage, eat cabbage. Number two, survive shift. Number three, get home from factory. Lie down. in a uncomfortable bed with 12 other family members. With eight other members of my family. Remember to not sleep, wake up and repeat.

Exactly. Enjoy my day off a year. Yeah. I'm a huge fan of a to-do list. So much so that if I'm constantly doing them, but do you do this thing where if you're doing a to-do list and there's something that you've just completed but you've forgotten to put on the to-do list,

I will then add it to the to-do list, simply so I can have the pleasure of crossing it off. You're nodding, Elle, so that means makes some sense to it. You're such a glutton for recognition, even if it's from yourself. Do it all the time. Whatever it is that's wrong with me, it's wrong with Tom as well. And that's so good to know. It's why we're so close.

But I occasionally do look at my to-do list and think, bloody hell. Look at that. Yeah, yeah. Fill the dishwasher, Pratt turned it on and then emptied it all in one day. I'm like Bill Gates. Completing a to-do list as well in a day. It's never happened. Once in a blue moon, I manage it,

and the feeling is like, I don't know, winning the Nobel Peace Prize or something. It's insane. The feeling of self-worth I get from highlighting in red the final thing out of five things. Yeah. I use the tick emoji. Oh, do you?

Okay, yeah, yeah. Occasionally, when I do to-do list for packing, this is so pathetic. You do a to-do list for packing? Of course. Yeah. If I'm going away. Where are you going to? War? If I was taking my kids to visit my mum, for instance,

there'd be a to do list of all the stuff like, you know, books for them to read at night and all that kind of stuff. I'm with you on the skull. I think personally that you can vibe that stuff a bit more. You can vibe that. Oh, yeah, yeah. You can vibe it. Oh, you can vibe it, yeah?

I mean, Skull, possibly. I'm looking at Tom Crane as if he is, it's anything to do with him. It's Claire is doing 100% of that stuff. Because, for instance, my son, if he has to use adult tooth-based, he goes ballistic and says that it's too spicy. Like you're trying to wash his teeth with Vindaloo. But you've got to remember that stuff. But what I do is say I'll put down my phone charger,

because it's a ballick to go somewhere without your phone charger. If I know where my phone charger is, but I haven't put it in the case yet, I'll put a green tick and they're cross next to it, as if to say, you're halfway there, man. That's so sweet. You're so close to putting that charge in the case. Nearly there. Nearly there, man.

Although I say you could vibe it, I have immediately just remembered the time we went to the Hendon Aviation Museum. And my one job basically was to make sure the kids' shoes were on. We drive all the way there. We looked at the backseat. Two children under the age of three. Neither of whom have shoes or socks. Don't you ever, ever tell me you can vibe anything?

Because that's a utter fucking bollocks. Now there's a two-year-old. facing a day in a museum not wearing any shoes in January. So what did you do? We drove to a large mall. I sort of rushed around and managed to get some clerks at the last minute. Izzy would have gone absolutely ballistic if that was like a lot. Claire's just used to it now, to be honest.

Yeah, that saddens me. But I'm a big fan of it. I completely agree, Al. I genuinely think it's one of life's great pleasures as a do list. I think also I'm sort of a bit easily distracted ADHD, all that sort of stuff, whatever it might be. It was undiagnosed. Shit. I find breaking up things into that sort of list is quite manageable.

But I think genuinely I do think there is a reason. I think in the past people probably had less splintered days. They really were, you know, you simply get to work, get back and rotate, wasn't it, in a very simple way. Survive, exactly. That's all it was, to-do lists in like the 18th century, just one word survive. that you tick at the end of every day. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of the past,

I don't know if you've picked up on this. There's a big trend at the moment people talking about old caravan holidays they would have been on in the 90s. Baby Spice talked about this recently. There's a big thing on social media at the moment. And I can't help but feel like it was so much better a caravan holiday

than a modern existence. Because it's very, you're literally, you're in a caravan park, You're surrounded by walls. You've got the arcade. You've got the little dance bit. You get a pound. You go get an ice cream.

Just freedom to roam around. Do you know what? The caravan holiday needs to come back. I know Danny Diary is trying to bring it back. But I was thinking about this either day, right? I cycle past an old-fashioned caravan on someone's drive, which was a very, very common sight in the 1980s. Yes.

We went on caravowing holidays where there would be a static caravan. And you stay in the static caravan. In fact, I did it in France last year, Euro Cup, my sister and brother, it's basically, it's a shalette, it's a static car. But the actual caravan that you would tow yourself, that you'd attach to the back of your own car, that has completely gone out of fashion, it would seem. And this one was rusty, like it didn't look particularly homely.

But you had ones, do you, Chris? Yes, not only did we have a caravan you would stick on the back of your car, we also had a static caravan latterly in Clacton. Cockneys. The Cockney culture. Not only did we have a caravan you stick on the back of your car. My dad was a member of the Caravan Club. What is he?

I don't know if you know about the Caravan Club. I don't really understand what it was, except that you would get a monthly video of different caravan parks around the UK. And being so starved of content as we were in the 90s, as a family, we would often watch the Caravan Club videos and pick where in the UK

we would go next. So we went all over to like Cornwall Framlingham. I loved a caravan holiday. Then eventually we went to this caravan park in Clacton and my dad was like, it's just not getting any better than this. He found his own caravan utopia.

And so he then converted to a static. We've just done a week in centre parks which is essentially a week in a static caravan type situation in a way. What are those sort of static homes? The difference being, It costs nine and a half billion pounds for the week. That is the difference.

And everything we did was financially ruin us. It's been years since I went into one of the little caravans you tow. Because they are quite small, aren't they? Yeah. And it is one of those things where everything has to turn into something else. Otherwise, modern day life is. And they all seem to lose the battle to rising damp and just despair after about 10 years. They really get really gross quite.

quickly. My dad had a hack. He would leave, when we weren't using the caravan, little bowls of salt everywhere. Have you heard of this? No. I don't know if it was just nonsense or what, but it would stop it getting mouldy and like you'd come back after not using it for a couple of months and all the bowls would be like the salt will have gone solid. Wow. I have no idea this is an old wife's tale. Please do email in. But like, that was my dad's hack for stopping the caravan going moldy. That's amazing. Bowls of salt everywhere. The sea isn't moldy, is it? It holds famously. Couldn't be fresher.

Oh my God. Yes. Is that right? Saltax is a natural low-cost de-humidifier that helps prevent mould by absorbing moisture from the air, particularly around windows and in damp rooms. My daughter's got that issue. Her bedroom is getting salted tonight.

It reduces condensation. That's in a pre-in-age age as well. My dad figured that out. By trapping water vapor preventing the humid conditions that allows mould to grow. Amazing. Please balls of salt. On windowsills, bind curtains

are inside wardrobes to absorb excess humidity. Tonight, I've got a gig tonight. I'm doing a charity gig at the Union Chapel. I'm about to text Wilbriggs a promoter to say,

sorry, I can't do tonight. You need to get a replacement. I know it's late noticed. I have to salt my house. Care of, Chris, Scull. That's fantastic. Once the salt saturated moisture should be replaced with fresh dry salt.

Well, there you go. And actually a genuinely useful take-home fact from, oh, what a time. 140 episodes in, we've done it. I love the fact that sounds like bollocks. And that actually turns out to be true. Okay, let's get on some actual history. Chris has talked about the utopia of a British campsite, the ability to get fresh air, travel, see the country.

Well, today is all on that subject, utopias. At the end of the episode, I'm going to be to be to. telling you all about quite an unusual utopia from the 17th century, some brave souls. Did they make it work? No, they didn't. Spoiler alert. And I'm going to be talking about Hues Town, which happens to be in Ukraine. Oh, and I've got another utopia that doesn't work. The Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, often referred to simply as Brook Farm in the 1840s in the US. We'll be hearing all about that a bit later.

But shall we kick off with some correspondence? Let's do that. So, you sent us some correspondence, have you? Well, let's take a look at you then. Today's email comes from David Beardle. Museum of Failure slash Things We Don't Have Anymore. Hi, guys. Newish listener, first time emailer.

Hi, David. Thank you very much for getting contact with the show. I'd like to put interactive TV games into the Museum of Failure of Things We Don't Have Anymore. This is actually quite an old-school format point we had. But it's nice to hear it again, which is basically a list of things that didn't work out. The ones on C-Fax and stuff. Yes, well, it says here, games like the 80s TV show Nightmare, which I actually loved, or the bit at the end of the 90s CBC, Maggot moments where a cooler, I've never heard of this.

Have you heard of this? Where a cooler would have to guide an on-screen maggot around a maze by saying north, south, east or west, golden shot style. I do remember that, actually. I do remember that. And who could forget, as Ells just mentioned there, the teletext game Banboozled. I really enjoyed the pod. I binge it at work.

I've no idea how far behind I am. You have recently been talking about the general election 2024, so by the time I catch up, a chom probably be 50p. I do hope the museum of failure. Things you don't have any more are still relevant. Keep up the good work. Dave, 39 from Kingslin.

Oh, it's an extra point here. I go lips of teeth with a seal. I hear they have the best milk. A lot going on with this email. Let's step through it all. First of all, interactive TV. That is a good one. That is a good example of something that should have caught on,

and I felt would have caught on, but just hasn't, really. There was a TV show, and I'm going to have to Google this, where with the copy of your weekly copy of possibly the Radio Times or maybe a kids magazine, like Fast Forward, you were given a scratch and sniff panel. Yes. And so it was comic relief. Yes, and the theory was,

then that they would go into rooms that smelled fusty for parts and some feature or writing and then he'd go scratch panel number one and then you'd scratch it and it would be fusty and then the presenter would say that's what we're smelling right now

and it was just sort of a bit shit and they all smelt the same from how I remember it I remember doing that I remember having that scratch card and watching it and it was underwhelming yeah it didn't really work

but I admire the effort and the thought process behind it, the creative endeavour has to be admired, I guess. Well, oddly, see, everyone thought that everything would go through our tellies, and actually they're going through our phones, which no one predicted. Right, yes.

So everyone thought that you'd have your credit card attached to your TV and that you'd be able to select TV programmes and stuff via your credit card that way, which is sort of what's happened, but no one anticipated, there'd be much easier to do it on your phone, which would be just in your pocket.

Because you can't carry a TV around with you. If your TV had vents and a setting where it would pump out the smells of what was happening on screen at any point. I would turn it off immediately because it would be horrendous. Exactly. Do you remember as well, wasn't there a big move at one point towards like 3D telly? Yeah. That never really caught on. No, thank you.

We keep trying to do 3D telly. No one's that bothered. There's the occasional movie where you're handed goggles and you go in and it's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm fine. I'm so fine with 2D. Don't need it. Jack, you used to have a really funny material about sort of 3D telly and stuff.

And he's like, have the sex pistols in your living room. I can't think of anything worse than having the sex pistols in my living room. I think I'm not rushing to put on a human centipede, but then I'm not anyway. But I don't think that's one I'm going, oh, that'll be good for all the senses. Saw. Yeah. Yeah. But there's nice ones.

Things like Amel. You know, is Amelie where she's a chocolate maker? Yeah. Sound of music. Yeah, some great ones that you could really enjoy. It's a bit freshist. Don't want them in the house. But my problem is with their views, Elle, not how they smell.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, good point. I don't really care how Fatchett's smell. It's more what they stand for. The way they smell is the least of their problems. Yeah, yeah. Probably smell a few good boss. Oh, very nice. Right.

Thank you for that, David. Let's quickly mop up the other thing He'd go lips of teeth with a seal I hear they have the best milk I mean I suppose that's a reason As a responses we're going to get on that subject So fair enough I'd like there to be a conduit

Between the seal and me drinking it Yes Although they do sort of recline And sort of quite a leisurely way on a beach Very heavy That feels like a cold badly wrong But you could lie next to them in a way That like a pig suckles against its

Yeah My point is hell There's ways of getting it done I'll do that. Exactly. Thank you, David. And stick with the show. There's loads of great episodes to come.

In fact, I think there is actually an episode on Smellivision in cinema. I remember rightly, I think you may not have got to that one yet, and that is to come. If any of the rest of you, wonderful, wonderful people, have anything you want to send to us, here's how you do it. All right, you horrible look. Here's how you can stay in touch with the show. You can email us at hello and a... Oh, what a time.com. And you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter at Oh, What a Time pod.

Now, clear off. And one of the benefits of subscribing to the Oh, What the Time patron, amongst all the bonus episodes and ad-free episodes and early released episodes that you get is that, if you subscribe to our top tier, we will speculate where in history you may have been before. And up this week, lads, is Karen Watson. The person who gets none of the credit that Alistair Campbell gets, if you know right. That's good. So that was, like Tony Blair will say actually, it was Karen Watson the winner's the 1997 election. The real strategist.

The real strategist behind it all, yeah. Yeah. The person that Peter Manderson looked up to. Yes. Not now. Britain's number two tennis player at any point, basically. Oh, very good. Who's the number two, Karen Watson?

Yeah, she goes out second or third round in Wimbled at each year. She's the second best in the country, though. And Emma Raducano often says she was my real inspiration. Yeah. Because I saw her play when I was 15. And I thought that Karen Watson. The way she struck the ball was beautiful. So sad what happened to her knees.

Sue Barker famously never beat Karen Watson. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Virginia Wade refused to play her. There you are. I think it's one of those two. It's either new Labour or it didn't quite make it top-level tennis pro.

Karen, you choose. name you choose. Not the we're saying you can't, Karen. It's just the way the ball and it's just the way the ball and did. Well done Karen. And if you want to subscribe to the patron here's how.

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was Tom Crane looking at fitness in the past. And I'll tell you what, it is nothing like a David Lloyd. But if you want to learn more about that, you can go to patreon.com full slash oh, what a time? But today we're talking about utopia. Before I get into my section, what are you boys talking about today? At the end of the show, I'm going to be telling you about this brave maverick group and their 17th century utopia that, I'm afraid, did not work out. I'll be talking about who was turning in Ukraine.

But first, let's go back to 1841. Let's go to nine miles west of West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Let's meet a Unitarian minister called George Ripley and his wife, Sophia Ripley. And they are going to build something radical. Not just a farm, a whole new way of living. They call it the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, though most people refer to it simply as Brook Farm. And they conceived basically not necessarily an escape from civilization,

but a correction of it. So George and Sophia are part of the Transcendental Club, a Cambridge-based circle of thinkers that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other reform-minded intellectuals of the 1830s and 1840s. In transcendentalism, at his core, had several interlocking beliefs, and I have a big problem with one of them, see if you can guess which one it is. Number one, that individuals possess an inner moral compass superior to external authority, Number two, that nature is inherently good and spiritually revealing.

Number three, that society, particularly industrial and urban society, corrupts both spiritual and the inherent good and moral compass, and also that divinity resides within human beings and the natural world. And you have a problem with one of those, yeah? Yeah, yeah. I assume one of them is going to be like, I don't know, West Ham won't win anything for the next. Thought we were heading towards something far more on the nose. That would be mad if that was one of the beliefs of the transcendental.

I think you like cities on urban living. So I'm going to say it's that one. But that nature is inherently good and spiritually revealing. And urban living is sort of decadeous. Well, yeah, the society, particularly industrial and urban society crops. Yeah. It's actually that nature is inherently good and spiritually revealing. Okay.

Because is nature inherently good? Parasitic worms. Yeah. You know, going to Spain and the 80s, getting the shits. All that stuff. The way my cat's do with mice is not inherently good at all. Have you ever seen an orca with a seal? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

As it's flipping it like it's a three-point shot with a second to go for the Chicago Bulls. Yeah, I'm not convinced nature is inherently good. Most of the time, if you're getting ripped apart by lions and you're like a zebra, I think it's bad. Or at the very least, it's neither good nor bad. I'll go that. But I'd say you could probably, you probably can't assign a moral value to whether a lion is killing an antelope or you. It's just being aligned, just doing what a lion does, isn't it? All right, then, Immanuel Kant.

Would you call me? You completely Emmanuel Kant. That's a family podcast, hell. So back to our Transcendental Club. So one of the members, Ralph Waldo Emerson, he expressed this idea through the idea of the over-soul, which is a shared spiritual unity linking all people. To harm others, enslave them or diminish them, was to fail to recognize the unity of the soul. And these were not abstract philosophical musings.

Many transcendentalists were abolitionists, educational reformers and social critics. De Rose experiment at Walden Pond, which began in 1845, embodied the individualist strand of this philosophy, to retreat to nature, simplify life, rediscover moral clarity. And Brook Farm was an attempt to do something more ambitious. I mean, on paper, I kind of, I don't mind. A commune is a fairly good idea. I'm up for it. You know, retreating into nature, a simple life.

It's a caravan holder, isn't it? I have some friends who, with a group of like six other friends, couples, all bought a big house together. They live out in the countryside. Really? Yeah, they've lived that life. They have crops in the land and all this sort of stuff. They still work normal jobs. They're up developers.

Exactly. But yeah, they live a communal life out in the countryside with the element of this sort of communal farming stuff. And I think it's, you know, I think I can absolutely see there's something good for the soul in that. It's not for me. So this is what George Ripley wanted to do. He wanted to build a communal society in which labour education and intellectual life would coexist. And the aim was simple in theory. These are the four bullet points. One, to combine physical labour with intellectual development. Two, to abolish class hierarchy. Three, to create equality without destroying refinement and four to remove drudgery from work.

Now, there's a to do list, L. There's one you're going to struggle to get through. Yeah. I'm not ticking those four off. I'm not ticked any of these, yeah. I don't know. I'm sorry. Him adding at the top, pair socks or something like that,

just so he can sort of tick one of them off. Reply to text. Yeah. So Brook Farm was organised as a joint stock company. Members bought shares and were promised either a 5% annual return or tuition for a child at the community school. Residents agreed to contribute roughly 300 days of labour per year in exchange for accommodation and participation in the experiment.

Why do I have a strong feeling this isn't going to work, by the way? The 5% return aspect is already setting alarm bells ringing. And also the designated number of hours, it feels like that's probably going to go up as well. That's not a fixed point. So the idea is if you were part of Brook Farm, you would be subjected to like balance, basically. You'd have a well-balanced life.

So you might farm in the morning and then lecture in the afternoon. And one might teach children and then help harvest the crop. So in theory, no work was inferior. But whether you were working the land or you were educating. The land, unfortunately, did not share the vision. Brook Farm's soil was poor. So the farming proved, harder and less profitable than hopes.

Greenhouses had to be built so that required more investment and income just lagged consistently behind expenses. The community never reached a kind of financial stability. It closed in 1847. And when it did close, it was about $17,000 in debt, which 1847

is a lot of money. Wow. Idealism is expensive. Among the early members was the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne joined him. Do you know Nathaniel Hawthorne? Yeah, I'm aware. I couldn't pick his book out, but I definitely rings about. So why lie?

No, it does. Manuel Hawthorne is a name that I recognise. Well, his name is Nathaniel Hawthorne, not Emmanuel. You fucking idiot. You can't even repeat it. Don't try to look clever in front of the listeners, Tom. Listen, Samuel Drawbridge has been one of my favourite or writers. Hawthorne joined in part because of the interest of his fiancée, Sophia Peabody and her sister.

Oh, she'll be a Peabody, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Peeps. Daniel Hawthorne invested money and was elected treasurer. For a time, he participated fully in the agricultural labour, but Hawthorne struggled. Manual labour, he later wrote, was the curse of the world. And he found

that farmwork dulled his literary imagination. He had hoped for moral elevation, but he just got exhaustion instead. And by November 1841, barely a year after arriving, he withdrew from the community and requested the return of his investment.

It's funny that though Like occasionally I have to do something quite physical And for the couple of hours you're doing it You're like yeah I should be doing this This is the real me actually I should be getting back to the land I should be I should be living a sort of more traditional life I mean this is what my forefathers did

Yeah this is this is better than podcasting And then you've got to tell yourself If I did this I do this tomorrow I would be in pieces And extremely grumpy It was like my friend Dan had a load of firewood delivered to his house and I to help him get it

from the front of the house to the back of the house which took about an hour and a half he had loads of it and he was heavy obviously and there's lots of splinters and for about 90 minutes you know I'm actually a kind of

forest woodsmann more than a comedian I was meant to be a lumberjack I was meant to be a lumberjack yeah and then he yeah absolute nonsense Nathaniel Hawthorne

if I remember rightly his works often focus on history, morality and religion and he was born July 4th, 1804 and lived until May 19th, 1864, if I remember right. Yeah, that's it. And you love all that stuff, don't you? I love morality guy. Tom, you've got that exactly right. He was an American novelist and short story writer, yeah.

You're the moral compass of this podcast, I think, because you never lie. And he married Sophia Peabody in 1842 as well. I remember. Yeah, it's just weird how this stuff comes back to you, doesn't it, just what you need to. Good old peeps. Oh, dear. So a decade off. leaving. You probably know what this, Tom, but a decade after leaving.

Tell you can tell now. Brook Farm. Horthorn transformed his experience into literature in 1852. He published Tom. A short story. Or possibly a novel. He published the Blythe Dale romance, a novel set in a utopian community which closely resembled Brook Farm. So though he insisted it was fiction, contemporaries recognized the parallels immediately. It was in effect a thinly veiled portrait of the experiment, exploring idealism, jealousy, romantic entanglements and the fragility of communal living. Brook Farm, in his story, became a cautionary tale.

One of the key things about Brook Farm, and this is why I kind of don't think Utopia is ever really possible. But one of Brook Farm's core principles, as we mentioned, was the abolition of social hierarchy. So it was meant to be that intellectual labor and manual labor were to be valued equally. But in practice, this proved impossible, because those engaged in brainwomenes. like writing, lecturing, teaching, often regarded themselves consciously or not as more refined than those digging soil or tending livestock.

Resentments emerge and this dream of a level society collided with a human ego. See, I think I've got the opposite. I've got enormous respect for anyone who's good with their hands. And don't think that what I do has any value or merit at all. and routinely imagine that, you know, I don't know, we're at war or something. And everyone's got, I've just read that book about austerity Britain in the 50s, 40s and 50s.

And that we've all got to pitch in and use our skills. And I'm like, okay, I could make a light-hearted podcast about this. But I can't do anything. I can't even grow potatoes. So if you're good at that stuff, I just, I've just got such respect for you. Yeah. Absolutely. And also, if you want to be recognised for being clever,

while you stood in your teaching room, your classroom looking out at people digging in the soil and the blistering heat, keep your mouth shut. You don't need to show it. You don't need the credit. Just keep your head down. Teach the kids. It wasn't only this collision between the labour workers

and the thinking workers. There was also political tensions which surfaced within the utopia. So George Ripley increasingly embraced the ideas of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, whose theory of a socialism proposed self-sufficient communities called phalanxes, and Fourier imagined communities... Oh yeah, I have actually heard of this.

Yeah. No, that's not a lie. That I genuinely have. Have you actually? I'm aware of that concept, yeah. Phelanxes. Furié imagined communities of around 1,620 people housed in large communal buildings, divided into spaces for quiet and noise,

and labour would be organised to align with natural human passions. So Brook Farm began shifting towards this. model in the mid-1840s. So if you wanted to be a podcaster, you could go pursue a podcasting labour. Oh, wow. Plans were drawn for a grand communal structure, but construction costs mounted, and the building was just about finished in 1846 when it burned to the ground. Oh. Before they could fully do the experiment. So the shift towards forreism, deepened divisions within the community even further. But despite its struggles, Brook Farmers not joyless. A typical day began

around 6 in the morning. Residents worked 8 hours in winter, 10 in summer. And after dinner came leisure, so you could have music, dancing, theatre skating, and an intellectual discussion. The central building known as the hive served as the community's heart. And there was lots of

bee imagery all around the hive and that was deliberate because he was showing like collective labour shared purpose. Interesting. And at the centre of the experiment was a ritual known as the symbol of universal unity. Members and visitors joined hands in a circle and pledged devotion to God and humanity.

So for a brief period of the 1840s, Brooke Farm was a beacon for those who believed society could be remade through cooperation rather than competition. It's interesting that this is happening in the 1840s when it's got a real kind of 1960s vibe, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Hippie movement, like 120 years

before it actually came about. But at the industry, even at the height of the Industrial Revolution, there were people, they were thinkers and philosophers saying this is an unnatural way of living. Yeah. That's quite common that people are saying we need to get back to the land

and this just isn't normal for people to work in factories or to work in coal mines or whatever it might have been. This is just we should go back to all being farmers. Yeah. I wonder if we'll all go back to being farmers after the AI apocalypse.

Look forward to finding out. Brooke Farm did not collapse because its ideals were mocked. it failed because the land couldn't sustain this vision. They never stabilised the finances, the big one. The social hierarchy never truly dissolved in the way they wanted to. And ideological divisions widened over time. So by 1847, the experiment ended.

But its legacy endured in literature, in reform movements, and in the broader 19th century search for alternatives to industrial capitalism. So Brook Farm stands as one of America's most serious attempts to build a moral community and one of its clearest demonstrations that good intentions alone cannot overcome economics. Would you, Craig, would you sue a commune? Would I suit a commune?

I do like the idea of quieter existence away from, you know, modern trappings of social media and all these things that we all know in some level are not good for us. Yeah, yeah. So I think, yeah, there are elements of it. I would, definitely, I can see, would be pleasing and calming and probably are good for the soul. So, yeah. I mean, I'm not going to do it, but yeah.

I'm quite an egalitarian person. I don't mind sharing. Get it in. Get around it. I don't mind. Stepping out of your bathwater going, this one's free now. Naked as the day I was born. Come on, everyone. Who wants to get in my old bathwater? So that's it for part one of Utopis. If you want part two right now, you can subscribe via Patreon. 4th slash show Watertime you get part two, and in fact probably next week's episode as well.

Or you can wait to Wednesday. We'll see you then for part two. Bye. Oh, what a time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else. Add free, plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets and access to the Oh, What a Time group chat. Plus if you become an Oh Whatter Time All-Timer, myself, Tom and Ellis will riff on your name to postulate where else in history you might have popped up. For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash oh what a time.