Queer(y)ing the Garden Cities and New Towns
Back in the spring of 2025, I was working as a research assistant at the Town and Country Planning Association, and part of my role included exploring and promoting the organisation’s eclectic archives.
During my timing shifting through the archives, I came across a picture of a statue of Sappho located in Letchworth Garden City. Sappho was an ancient Greek poet from the isle of Lesvos and wrote lyrical poetry that celebrated love between women. This image acted as a catalyst for my desire to queer(y) the Garden Cities and New Towns, as well as town planning more broadly.
Now on my PhD journey, my work focuses on queer(y)ing the British post-war new towns and examining the social norms that played a formative role in their development. With the Labour Government moving forward with a new generation of new towns, my work also aims to consider what a new generation of planned communities might look like if planned, built and stewarded by and for LGBTQIA+ residents.
The Retreat
Over the summer, I had the pleasure of attending a Queer and Trans Worldbuilding retreat at Durham University. Queer worldbuilding explores the imagination and construction of queer spaces and worlds that challenge, disrupt and exist counter to the social norms of wider society.
The event provided a thoughtful and caring space to explore the concept of queer worldbuilding through a plethora of different workshops. They ranged from sessions exploring how we might queer(y) archives and historic houses to creative workshops focused on bookbinding and cyanotype printing. These workshops demonstrated the multiverse of possibilities that exist when it comes to queer and trans worldbuilding. They encompassed radical everyday acts of care and reciprocity, opportunities for play, creativity, and joy, while enabling vulnerability and openness with strangers about our past griefs and anxieties for the future.
Queer Town Building Workshop
As part of this retreat Dr Catherine Hahn, based at Goldsmith University, and I ran a workshop exploring how town planning can act as an avenue for queer and trans worldbuilding. Catherine’s fascinating work uses creative methods to map the queer histories of South London, showcasing the lives and legacies of queer people in the area. To find out more about Catherine’s work, check out her website.
With paper, pens, and Play-Doh scattered across the table, our workshop provided space for attendees to imagine what they would want from a town inspired by the concept of queer worldbuilding. It was not long before there was a kaleidoscope of ideas being drawn, crafted, and moulded into shape.
Creations included a pipe-cleaner bike, a sculpture of a lido, and an abstract model for governance in a new community. There was also a fascinating array of illustrations and models of cafes, community spaces, shops, health care facilities, green and blue infrastructure, collective farming, surfing, as well as a community memorial using broken pottery.
To close out the workshop, these creations were put into conversation with one another. The group came together to discuss how they wanted all the individual components of the town to come together. There was a myriad of considerations, from how to fairly distribute cafes around the town, to whether governance systems should be located centrally within the community.
In the end we were left with one possible imagination of what a town might look like if designed with queer and trans world-building in mind. Perhaps most importantly, we noted in our conversation at the end of the session that many of our ideas were already happening somewhere in the world and were therefore entirely possible in our town.
Reflections
The time since the queer and trans worldbuilding retreat has been busy, including presenting at the UK and Ireland’s Planning Research Conference and drafting a report to mark the end of the first year of my PhD. Yet the conversations had, artworks made, and books bound at the retreat have all had a lasting effect on my work. Not just by extending my reading lists and further broadening my horizons but by demonstrating that in three days you can create a space in which people can begin or continue to exist and flourish otherwise. As Munzo, says “the future is queerness’s domain”, and I am excited to take the next step on the road to queerness.
Image Credit: Whitbreadtrophy. (2014). Sappho. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sappho.jpg
Cite this Article:
Llewellyn, C (2026). Imagining Queer Worlds: Reflections from the Queer and Trans World Building Retreat. The Centre for Collaboration in Community Connectedness. https://doi.org/10.7190/c4.2026.8939587705
