The unlikely job of being asked to design a future dystopian London, from its walkways and municipal buildings to its leisure spaces, has fallen to a firm of British architects who have been working on the project in secret. And at the centre of their radical plan for the new capital are “hatcheries”, for the controlled scientific reproduction of human beings.
Finding a coherent look for the city of the future proved intense work for the team at Studio Evans Lane – and no less so because it was all being done for a new version of Aldous Huxley’s disturbing classic novel Brave New World.
The new drama, which stars the American actress Demi Moore alongside British co-stars Jessica Brown Findlay, Harry Lloyd and Nina Sosanya, starts next month and will launch the new streaming service Peacock, set up by the American broadcaster NBC as a rival to Netflix, Amazon. The series tells the story of life in a post-disaster “New London”, where monogamy, privacy, money, family and history have all been banished for the overall good of the populace.
“We were creating a city that might have been built all at once, through some form of artificial intelligence,” said Tim Evans, of Evans Lane, as the shape of the new design was unveiled to the Observer. His company has been working on the look of the show and of the buildings it will feature in collaboration with an American production design team led by David Lee and special effects expert Tom Horton.
“This is the postdiluvian world that Huxley imagined when he wrote the book in 1931. Unlike most cities then, this one has not evolved over time. Everything else had already gone,” said Evans. “So we looked at some of the great modernist, experimental cities for inspiration, places like Brasilia and Valencia, but also at some of the garden cities in Britain. We had to find an idea of the future, but one that had come from the past.”
Evans worked with Industrial Light and Magic, the company behind the Star Wars movies set up by George Lucas, and he designed a series of tall, lily pad-like structures that would cover the city. Part of his job, like any urban planner in a real city, was to keep an eye on the way the buildings, homes and transport systems might actually work together. “Tim reminded us all that as an architect their approach was to design spaces and places that people could actually live in and so needed to work with the interior spaces first, as these would inform the design of the outer skin of the buildings,” said Horton.
Evans says he enjoyed the freedom of designing something that would never actually have to be built.
• This article was amended on 2 July 2020 because an earlier version said that Peacock was set up by NBC “as a rival to Netflix, Amazon and Sky”. In fact NBC has stated that the service will be available for Sky customers in Europe.
