ABSTRACT
Thomas More believed that England under the reign of Henry VIII was developing commercial capitalism and that this was replacing the traditional agrarian society. Businesses, such as the production of wool, were changing the rural landscape. In Utopia Hythloday claimed that sheep, ordinarily so meek and requiring so little to maintain them, now ‘stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches and enclosing grounds that they would lodge the sheep in them’. 1 Nobleman, gentlemen and even some abbots were enclosing fields for the production of wool. The inhabitants of the villages not only lost their houses, but also their livelihoods. They flocked to the city in the hope of finding employment. One of the most significant motivators of philosophies and design for a utopian city in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries was what are now called the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. With the rise of the urban population in Britain there was a need for increased food production. This was achieved in two different ways; first, through an increase in available land under agriculture, and second, through improved techniques and the mechanisation of farming.
