Searching for the best of all possible worlds – in London

Utopia can never exist, literally, since the word, which Sir Thomas More coined in his 1516 book of that name, comes from the Greek for ‘not’ and ‘place’. For the avoidance of doubt, More doubled down on the wordplay, naming the governor of his fictional island Ademos, meaning ‘no people’, and the river that runs through it Anyder, meaning ‘no water’.

Yet there’s more to it than this, because it turns out that one man’s idea of an ideal society is often very different from another’s. More’s vision was proto-communist. Houses in his Utopia are allocated by lot, and re-allocated every ten years. Each morning the citizens rise early and devote themselves to study before the real work starts.

As Niall Kishtainy points out in his excellent history of London-based utopian thought, this fictional creation has much in common with the ‘contented solemnity’ of More’s own home life in the City of London and later Chelsea.