Ken Worpole and Owen Kelly discuss the question: why do we always need 'experiments in living' to see what works and doesn't work in how people live and work together? And why do these experiments never seem to reach a conclusion?

Their conversation begins with a book of Ken Worpole’s called New Jerusalem: the good city and the good society, and moves to discuss the social origins of the model towns and garden cities that spread across England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They ask what effects these had on people’s living circumstances, their culture, and their belief in democracy.