A pedestrian’s dream
“There will be neither books nor newspapers, nor theater nor cinema—there will only be television.” Remember the way the protagonist of a well-known Soviet film voiced that barely restrained optimism? In some ways it came true: television captured people’s attention, though no one could have predicted the scale or consequences. And then the internet arrived.
“No foot of any person will step where cars will drive. And no car will encroach on the area designated specifically for pedestrians,” said British architect, landscape designer, and urban futurist Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe to an Associated Press correspondent in 1960—around the same time as that Soviet vision of television. Picture a city where cars don’t roam and residents move freely without worrying about traffic lights, jams, or intersection controllers. A true pedestrian paradise. Well—cars were part of the plan, just on the roofs of buildings. The city would be called Motopia. You might laugh at that name now, but the idea was taken seriously by the British government.
But first: who was the man behind this bold idea? At the time Jellicoe was 58, a respected architect known for landscape design. In the mid-1950s he created a rooftop garden at Harvey’s department store in Guildford.
At the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire—a site associated with the Rutherford laboratory’s atomic research—he created the artificial hills “Zeus and Themis.” Also in Oxfordshire, he worked on the park at Ditchley House, a country estate known for hosting famous guests including Winston Churchill and members of the royal family. The film “The Young Victoria” (2008) was filmed there.
In Runnymede, Surrey, along the River Thames, local authorities set aside about a quarter of a hectare for a memorial to John F. Kennedy. Jellicoe described the memorial as “allegorical”: a stone-paved path leads through dense woodland to the monument.
He also designed the water garden at Shute House in Shefford—a musical cascade he worked on for 23 years.
Shute House
So what exactly was Motopia, why did it cause such a stir in the early 1960s, and why do Jellicoe’s ideas still get referenced and applied today?
Don’t forget to look up from time to time
In 1946 Britain passed the New Towns Act, giving the government the power to quickly allocate land for new developments. Even before World War II ended, planners were already discussing how to rebuild London, with the central idea of relocating people to less crowded suburbs and new towns outside the metropolis. The rapid construction of these towns aimed to relieve overcrowding: in the first four years after the law passed, fourteen new towns were built. Visually they resembled one another and did not impress many leading architects. Interest cooled in the 1950s but returned in the early 1960s with Britain’s baby boom.
Jellicoe’s Motopia—note the nod to “utopia” in the name—was intended as an experimental settlement about 17 kilometers west of London, with a projected population of roughly 30,000. The idea was that residents would live in symmetrically arranged buildings whose roofs would carry highways. Pedestrians would be entirely separate from cars. On some 400 hectares, planners envisioned all the necessary urban infrastructure: shops, restaurants, schools, churches, and theaters. The project was estimated to cost about $170 million at the time—a figure widely seen as uneconomical and equivalent to a much larger sum today.
The plan intentionally separated humans from machines: all transport would run on special tracks suspended above pedestrians, and the tracks could move and connect in different configurations. Pedestrians would use sidewalks below and could stroll safely—so long as they remembered to look up now and then, since a car hurtling overhead would be a new kind of risk. It sounded like a scene from Luc Besson’s “The Fifth Element.”
In an interview with the Associated Press, Jellicoe argued that Motopia was not only possible but practical and economical; housing there, he said, would cost no more than apartments in high-rise municipal buildings. Another appealing feature was a city without heavy industry—no factories, no plants. Motopia was planned as a commuter community: residents would work mainly in intellectual or service-sector jobs.
“At the crossroads there should be a roundabout, but no traffic lights,” Jellicoe told the BBC. “Inside the circle we created what we call a ‘neighborhood circle’—a mini-center for the local population with clubs, pubs, a market, shops, newsstands; in other words, a favorite meeting place.”
When a BBC correspondent asked, “Let’s say I live on the outskirts of this city and want to get to another part of it—what’s the best way to do that?” Jellicoe replied calmly, “I really hope you’ll leave your car and become a pedestrian. If the weather permits, walk through the attractive scenery that makes up the city, and if it rains, walk under cover through the arcades that connect the streets to the center.”
Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe
Motopia remained a utopia
One other notable name connected to Motopia was American illustrator Arthur Radebaugh. He was an artist, designer, and futurist, but he is best remembered for his witty, widely read comic strips.
Historians argue that no one shaped Americans’ expectations of the future quite like Radebaugh, and the magazine Wired later called him the “Da Vinci of retrofuturism.” From 1958 to 1962 he published a weekly Sunday comic strip titled “Closer Than We Think,” which visualized the future in an easily accessible way. In Radebaugh’s near-future, mail carriers had jet packs, school desks featured button-controlled automation, and autonomous carts delivered groceries to people’s homes.
On September 25, 1960, Radebaugh published a “Closer Than We Think” strip dedicated to Motopia. He made some adjustments to Jellicoe’s plans: his cars looked more like mid-century Detroit models than the teardrop shapes in Jellicoe’s drawings, and the moving sidewalk appeared more prominently. Across the ocean, people learned that big changes were being imagined on another continent.
From 1961 to 1970 the approach to planning new towns in Britain grew more creative and ambitious. Projects included private cars, monorails, and even hovercrafts. But Motopia—the rooftop-car, pedestrian-paradise—was never built. It became one of many mid-century futurist proposals, alongside projects from Americans like Harvey Corbett, who planned spaces for cars in skyscrapers, and R. Buckminster Fuller, who sketched floating cities; British visionary Ron Herron imagined a walking city (sleep in Kyiv one night and wake up in Budapest the next), and Soviet architect Georgiy Krutikov proposed a flying city.
Jellicoe also anticipated the deindustrialization of major cities in the U.S. and Europe—a process that began in the 1970s. A faint echo of Motopia reached Paris in 2017, when activists and landscape designers pushed to return the banks of the Seine to pedestrians. Proposals included moving traffic underground and repurposing riverside space for shops, exhibitions, libraries, and leisure.
Sir Geoffrey Allan Jellicoe died just before the new millennium at the age of 95, having seen much of the future he imagined begin to take shape. Last year the National Motor Museum in London opened an exhibition titled “Motopia? Past Future Visions,” which paired retro cars that might have driven on rooftop tracks with a tribute to the man who conceived the idea.
