Gillian Darley studied art history and then, twenty years later, politics and administration. She was born on the Essex-Suffolk borders and a near flat landscape is still her ideal, with its promise of something intriguing on the horizon. She has been an architectural and landscape journalist, lecturer and broadcaster, and strongly believes that an interest in the past does not preclude an active engagement in the present, both in architecture and beyond.

Mark Thwaite: Why did you initially want to write Villages of Vision? How long did it take you to write and research your book?

Gillian Darley: I started work on the first edition of this book in 1973 and finished it the following year. It was first published in 1975. I seem to remember the idea took shape after visiting various places around the country (Milton Abbas and Port Sunlight spring to mind) and noticing that they were, oddly, built in a single period and that there were lots of them. This got me thinking why this should be so. For the previous year or two, a group of us had been doing freelance art historical research and the work provided the travel opportunities as well as, often, the frustrating business of handing over intriguing things as notes for other people to write up and develop. I also took photographs as I went, so the proposal to the Architectural Press was for both text and most of the images (which even then must have struck them as economical).

MT: What underlying vision and aesthetic unites the villages of Portmeirion, Port Sunlight, New Lanark and Bournville?

GD: The underlying vision is both architectural and idealistic, sometimes both. The 18th century estate village was primarily an aesthetic exercise, part of the landscape around the great house, but it also housed, or rehoused, the estate labour force or, more rarely as at Blaise Hamlet, retired employees. Compared to the run of workers' housing, early model industrial villages provided exemplary conditions, education, social amenities and decent housing as at New Lanark, Saltaire or, later, Bournville and New Earswick. These places tended to be built by non-conformist industrialists, who brought their humanitarian concerns to their business enterprises. The most intriguing but smallest category, utopian political or religious settlements, were set up by visionaries who then attracted self-motivated people, Moravians, Chartists or Tolstoyan Anarchists. Here and there villages were designed to be visually entertaining, such as the holiday villages of Portmeirion and Thorpeness.

MT: What personally did you learn and/or find most surprising as you were researching your book?

GD: I think, especially when I returned to the revision of the gazetteer for this edition, that it was the sheer scale and variety that most surprised me and, as I wrote in the new introduction, the "delicious stew" -- both of motives and outcome -- that these villages and hamlets represent. Also my admiration for those Quaker titans, the Cadburys and the Rowntrees, grew enormously when I realised that in the first decade of the twenty-first century their charitable trusts are still at the forefront of enlightened social thinking, planning and building new models for the future.

MT: You've written about John Soane and John Evelyn before -- what drew you to those two!?

GD: I've actually written three biographies; Octavia Hill came out of Villages of Vision, via Henrietta Barnett and Hampstead Garden Suburb. John Soane whose fantastic autobiography, his house/museum, was just down the road from home, making writing a book while toing and froing from school entirely feasible. I also feel strongly that to see the history of architecture -- as I was taught it -- as a simple progression of stylistic influences and the creative impulses of geniuses, without reference to the framework of education, patronage and politics of the period, is to be half blind and definitely uninformed. John Evelyn had always seemed half-hidden behind the formalities of the diary and the Victorian reading of his character and with an amazing archive newly arrived at the BL I dared to enter yet another century and try to find my way through. It was the steepest learning curve of all but I loved being there! In all three cases I embarked on their lives because I couldn't find the answers to my questions about them.

MT: How do you write? Longhand or directly onto a computer, straight off or with lots and lots of editing?

GD: Largely on computer (touch typing is the single skill of which I am proudest, learned at 17) but I often find a bit of hand written draft can move things along. Lots of editing (often too much).

MT: What were the principle challenges of writing your book? What were you hoping to achieve by writing it?

GD: Well, I initially wrote Villages of Vision a long time ago, but I do remember organising the material was a struggle. Obviously back then I typed it out, and then retyped, retyped and retyped. Makes me feel dizzy to think about it. I sometimes find old carbons of journalism and remember just how much time it all took, simply to put a clean sheet of text in front of an editor.

MT: What do you do when you are not writing?

GD: I love exploring (going to walk Barking Creek with Ken Worpole in a couple of weeks), film, making myself understood in another language (well only French and Italian), eating, cooking when in the mood, being with old friends and being alone. I have a passion for the desert. I am also about to find myself perching on the edge of an empty nest and can't believe the joy bringing up a feisty, lippy, funny girl has been.

MT: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

GD: For Villages of Vision my ideal reader popped up in the Guardian: unknown to me David McKie began to write about my book, saying it was terrible that it was out of print and he made it all happen. Not long ago I finally met him and he is, in person as much as on the page, my absolute ideal reader. Limitlessly curious, witty, happy to take the most obscure turnings off the highways of knowledge and, can you believe it, a writer who even professes optimism about the future for new books and finding publishers for them.

MT: What are you working on now?

GD: I am enjoying an interval and clearing out my workspace, meanwhile reviewing. I've also just contributed an essay on landscape, "Greening the Grey", for Design for London's forthcoming exhibition. Plans? I want to write about my father's war (I was a very late child so we are talking about WW1) and my perceptions of that, perhaps in time for the 90th anniversary of the Armistice, and also am toying with something, linking places and people, as Villages of Vision does, which relates London and its surrouding countryside, along the lines of a review (of the new Essex Pevsner) I wrote for the LRB. Or I may delve into the Green Belt.

MT: Who is your favourite writer? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

GD: I read a lot fiction as well as non-fiction. I find Andrew O'Hagan has a marvellous eye for overlooked places -- his picture of a Scottish new town (I think Livingstone?) in The Missing is utterly compelling. I think Rosemary Hill's Pugin is a biography to beat all-comers; to keep me reading the story of anglo-catholic schisms as if I couldn't wait for the next page is certain skill. I don't even much like the Gothic Revival but her book has everything, acerbic wit, wonderful scene setting and a faultless grasp of her subject. Middlemarch, well it's probably the greatest novel of all (though Mrs Gaskell gives George Eliot a run...) Jeanie: An "Army of One" life of Jeanie Nassau Senior is a fabulous story - she was the first ever woman civil servant and a hundred other things too - this has just been published with Sussex University Press, by author Sybil Oldfield. She is convinced and makes the case convincingly that Dorothea was modelled on Jeannie, a great friend of George Eliot... And, if this doesn't sound too cloying, I think my love of measured language and well-placed and chosen words started with Beatrix Potter. Peter Rabbit felt a little soporific -- I remember rolling the word around and around.

MT: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer?

GD: Keep your eyes open, and follow John Evelyn's (Latin) motto, "explore everything, keep the best," but more strictly than he did. And if writing the book isn't worrying you, not keeping you awake at night (sometimes), then something is wrong. And for god's sake, avoid cliches!