In the early 19^th century, factory owner and social reformer Robert Owen developed a broadly Utopian utopian socialist philosophy. Owen came to influence an increasing number of followers and successors, especially among the growing working class and artisans. Owen’s ideas theorised a radical reform of society, along the lines of co-operation of those producing goods by their labour, from which they would benefit collectively, rather than the fruits of their labour merely enriching the capitalists, while the producers lived in poverty.

Owen and those influenced by him – often labelled Owenites – directly led to the development of the cooperative movement, although by the later nineteenth century, co-operative production had largely been replaced by co-operatives at the point of consumption…

Many Owenites were also involved in early trade unionism, and in political movements for reform (though Owen himself took a dim view of political organising).

The Owenite movement also undertook several experiments in the establishment of utopian communities organised according to communitarian and cooperative principles. One of the best known of these efforts, which were largely unsuccessful, was the project at New Harmony, Indiana, which started in 1825 and was abandoned by 1829, which Owen himself was closely associated with.

More on Owen’s ideas here

In the 1820s, London became a stronghold of Owenism, which flourished among the capital’s artisans and the growing working classes.

One early Owenite project was a short-lived commune, generally known as the Spa Fields Owenite Community.

The community was established in a number of properties at around Spa Fields, Clerkenwell, just to the north of the City of London. The community was based on Owen’s cooperative ideas, but was the immediate brainchild of Scotsman George Mudie (b. 1788), whose main claim to fame was his invention of the word ‘Owenism’ for the collection of co-operative ideas centred on Owen’s theories.

On 22 or 23 January 1821, a group of printers met at Mitchell’s Assembly Rooms, London, to discuss Mudie’s proposals for a community, and at this meeting a committee was appointed. The following day a constitution was drawn up stating that ‘The ultimate object of this Society is to establish a Village of Unity and Mutual Co-operation, combining Agriculture, Manufactures, and Trade, upon the Plan projected by Mr Owen of New Lanark’. The co-operators met thereafter at the Medallic Cabinet, 158 The Strand, to raise money. The plan was soon formulated to create a “Co-operative and Economical Society” of 200 families.

Mudie had almost simultaneously launched an Owenite journal. ‘The Economist’, partly to sell to raise funds for the new community. In the first issue, issued on 27 January 1821, a Prospectus for the proposed community was published, noting: ‘The great majority of the members will continue at their present employments—each male member paying one guinea weekly to the general fund’, for which he would receive board and accommodation for himself and family, sickness benefit and a share in communal property and capital. In the second issue of The Economist it was announced: ‘Poverty must continue, while Production is confined within the bounds of Consumption.’

The new Co-operative and Economic Society went on in the third issue of the Economist to discuss the merits of barter as a means of matching up people’s wants with supply of goods, but it was argued that considerable saving in expenditure would be forthcoming in the proposed community, as goods could be bought at wholesale prices. Each member was to contribute towards shares in units of five shillings and ‘to facilitate the distribution of goods, and for other social purposes, as many of the members as can conveniently quit their present residences, do live as nearly as possible together, in one or more neighbourhoods’.

The male members of the Society had to contribute a guinea to the central fund. There would be a communal kitchen and dining hall, plus there were plans for a school as well. The committee calculated that the community would save around £8,000 per year through its own manufacture of various items that it would use. Mudie believed that the community would be able to become independent. A London builder submitted plans for communal premises, and a lawyer, who was also a member of the Co-operative and Economical Society, advised that the co-operative body could come
within the provisions of protective legislation for friendly societies.

During this period the chairman was George Hinde and one prominent member was the printer Henry Hetherington, active in the ‘war of the unstamped’ and later publisher of the Poor Man’s Guardian, an influential radical unstamped newspaper. However, “disillusionment soon set in at the lack
of progress-a letter from ‘A Few Co-operative Economists’ pointed out that ‘four strangers who jointly bought a sheep at Smithfield had done more than all the meetings during the course of twenty
issues of The Economist.’

By November 1821 a commune had been established in houses at the corner of Bagnigge Wells Road (now Kings Cross Road) and Guildford Street East (now Attneave Street), Clerkenwell. The inhabitants became known as the Spa Fields Congregational Families. 21 families lived in a community, pooling resources and wages, ran a printing press (on which the Economist was printed) , and had a mini-health care system.

Unlike most other Owenite communes the residents, who were typically artisans such as cobblers and haberdashers, did outside work and did not work on the land.

Domestic arrangements were communal and the establishment included a hall used for eating and other activities. Rents were fixed-room charges were to range between two and four shillings weekly, including taxes and the use of dining room, stores, kitchen. Members decided, however, not to pool their incomes. A scale of weekly expenses was drawn up with maintenance for a man and wife at 145 5d; single men would also be obliged to pay 145/5d — the same charge as for a married couple-
because of the ‘communal value of a wife’s industry’.

Other features included a school, dispensary and a cooperative store, from which it was intended to set up a store from which the public were to be allowed to buy goods,

The women worked from 6am to 8pm, and the children were also kept busy “without a moment’s intermission”. The community advertised various services that they would provide, such as cobbling, painting, haberdashery, etc., and they also announced that they would be opening a school run on approved Fellenbergian lines.

The community also set up a “monitor” system whereby each monitor looked after one person and acted as his “confessor”. This was a typically Owenite feature – part of the personal monitors’ role was to admonish ‘bad behaviour’, ie enforce moral codes of behaviour…

The small size and the reduced degree of separation from the outside world were not strictly in keeping with Owen’s own views on such communities: he tended to favour larger communes, and a more detached approach from society.

Some indication of the range of skills of this small group of London co-operators is given in a notice inviting orders for work in ‘carving, gilding, and for boots and shoes, gentlemen’s clothes,
dressmaking and millinery, umbrellas, hardware (including stoves, kettles, etc), cutlery, transparent landscape window-blinds, and provisions’.

The community ran from 1821 to 1824. But George Mudie found himself working very hard to maintain the community, and this affected the quality of his paper, the Economist, and his other job as editor of the Sun [not the scum-sucking Murdoch rag of today, an earlier radical paper.] The publication of the Economist ceased in March 1822 and the community continued for another two years.

The commune was said to have ended when Mudie was forced to leave or lose his outside editorial job, so it seems to have relied heavily on Mudie’s organisational ability to hold it together.

The reasons for its demise are not known. Robert Owen himself had no direct involvement in the Spa Fields Community. Mudie later criticised Owen, alleging he had failed either to back the experiment, or even undermined it, which Mudie suggested had caused its eventual failure. He felt Owen had grown arrogant and refused to tolerate anything but slavish obedience, and had become sidetracked by abstract philosophical questions and attacks on religion… “Even if I had not differed from some of your tenets as to religion and morals and even if I had not been too practical a man for the waste of time consumed in never-ending metaphysical disquisitions and discussions …I was, and am, too
much of a politician not to be aware, that the utmost result of your ‘Views and objects’ would only be the institution of a sect… and even that has not yet taken place; while the cause of co-operation, if it has not been entirely ruined, has been retarded by your mischievous efforts… Now, Sire, and believe me that it gives me real and heartfelt pain to speak thus plainly to one whom I once fervently admired, esteemed and loved—I well knew, what indeed you will find, if you enquire, is well known to every man of any intellect, who has ever been closely connected with you, or who has closely observed your tactics—I well knew that you will act only with blind worshippers.”

Mudie continued to give weekly lectures in London on the subject of co-operation, and later immersed himself in another community, at Orbiston, Scotland, run by Abram Combe, but could not agree with Combe and also left this community after a year or so.