Practical utopia : the many lives of Dartington Hall / Anna Neima.

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2022.

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Dartington Hall was a social experiment of kaleidoscopic vitality, set up in Devon in 1925 by a fabulously wealthy American heiress, Dorothy Elmhirst (née Whitney), and her Yorkshire-born husband, Leonard. It quickly achieved international fame with its progressive school, craft production and wide-ranging artistic endeavours. Dartington was a residential community of students, teachers, farmers, artists and craftsmen committed to revivifying life in the countryside. It was also a socio-cultural laboratory, where many of the most brilliant interwar minds came to test out their ideas about art, society, spirituality and rural regeneration. To this day, Dartington Hall remains a symbol of countercultural experimentation and a centre for arts, ecology and social justice. Practical Utopia presents a compelling portrait of a group of people trying to live out their ideals, set within an international framework, and demonstrates Dartington's tangled affinities with other unity-seeking projects across Britain and in India and America.

Cambridge core frontlist 2022.

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June 02, 2022