Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream

In the turbulent late 1970s, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside.

 

They would share their new home with over fifty other residents  - idealists from all over the world - armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism and drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world. 

They did not leave for fifteen years.

 

This was not a hippie commune or a new age retreat but a community run on radical socialist Marxist principles.  Yet, however noble the intentions of the adults, was this suitable place - a suitable home -  for a child to grow up?

Susanna wrote a book to try to answer that question and came to the Bureau to tell us all about it - and about the pleasures and perils of growing up in the fallout of the Utopian Dream.

 

More on Susanna

More on her book  Home Is Where We Start

More on British Intentional Communities

 

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