Alternative settlements (2)
I have blogged before about Chartism, the working-class movement of the 1830s and 1840s that campaigned for electoral reform and set up settlements where people could live in decent accommodation with a plot of land to cultivate. A number of Chartist villages or colonies were established in the late-1840s – Heronsgate in Hertfordshire, Snig’s End and Lowbands in Gloucestershire, Great Dodford near Birmingham, and Charterville, at Minster Lovell in Oxfordshire.
Charterville was founded in 1847 on 300 acres of land divided into some 57 smallholdings and so, while in 1848, Europe’s year of revolutions, campaigning Chartists marched in support of such demands as universal suffrage for men over 21, a group of their fellows in Oxfordshire settled down to a quiet agrarian life. They built the standard Chartist bungalows, generously laid out with oak floors, good-sized windows, and bookshelves, that still survive today.
In spite of setbacks – the colonies were declared illegal by a Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1851 and there were difficulties repaying the loans that had been taken out to buy the land – the smallholdings continued to function and many of the bungalows remain. Their typical layout – central gable with flanking rooms – makes them easy to spot in Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, and here not far from the Witney bypass in Oxfordshire. Here amongst the trees it is not difficult to imagine the attractions they held for their first occupants.
