ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that there was a tradition of independent radical and working class led written advocacy and campaigning on the issues of land, housing and planning reform, which should also be recognised as an important component of the history of British planning thought and action. Christian Socialists and positivists were both primarily middle class intellectual groups. The Christian Socialist, Thomas Hughes, demonstrated a more utopian tendency with his attempt to recreate the English 'public school' on the American frontier with his Rugby settlement at Plateau City in Tennessee. His work owes much to that of Buckingham and to the practical socialists such as John Richardson, author of How It Can Be Done. The categorisation of any project or movement is contentious, especially in the light of the negative connotations given to 'utopianism' by Marx and others. To categorise a project as 'pragmatic' can also be a conscious critique of a lack of principle.
