Inspiration

This is the original inspiration – a manuscript tracked down to the bowels of the British Library storage facility near Wetherby in Yorkshire after reading a post on the #diggersanddreamers blog a few years ago. It’s a publication from 1973, put out by BIT Information Service, a kind of organic internet of resources serving UK alternative culture at the time. They held a competition for people to submit ideas for an alternative society and this document – ‘A Book Of Visions: A Directory of Alternative Society Projects’ – collected around 300 of these ideas under headings like education, housing, ecology, alternative technology, the arts, information services, alternative medical and mental health projects, etc.

I found it a fascinating insight into what seemed possible at that juncture of hippy ideology and the subsequent rise of neoliberal thinking. Since stumbling across it, and feeling like we are at a similar juncture, my question has been ‘What would a new book of visions look like?’.

I managed to pick up my own copy (only 200 were printed) a few months ago so I’ll be sharing and looking deeper into some of the original ideas.