Today, Great Big Story is excited to bring you a new video on a Scottish village in…Italy. That’s right, Gurro, a picturesque town in northern Italy is famed for its Scottish heritage.
It’s not the only ‘imposter village’. This is Thames Town (hint: it’s quite a long way from the shores of the River Thames).
Welcome to a quaint British village with a fish-and-chip shop, cobbled roads, terraced houses and red telephone boxes. There are statues of famous Brits such as William Shakespeare, Florence Nightingale and James Bond. Fancy a visit? Just hop on a flight to Shanghai.
Thames Town spans various British eras – there are neat Edwardian and Victorian terraces, classic black and white Tudor homes and pubs. Nothing was overlooked in this peculiar project, reported to have cost as much as $650 million (£500 million), yet it hasn’t been much of a success since construction finished in 2006.
Abandoned high streets might seem quintessentially British, but they’re not ideal if the entire project is designed as a tourist attraction. It is part of Songjiang New City, a suburban district easily accessible from downtown Shanghai.
Atkins, a British firm, was behind the development, and many of the buildings are like-for-like imitations, such as the towering Gothic church (Christ Church in Bristol) and the pub and fish-and-chips shop modeled on Lyme Regis, a town in Dorset.
READ MORE: Inside London’s Super Sewer | The mammoth new tunnel under the River Thames
“We are aware of the Disneyland implications,” Paul Rice, the principal architect of Atkins consultancy told The Guardian back in 2004. “This could become a joke if built in the wrong way. But this is a working community. Compared with other Chinese towns, it will be a pleasant place to live.”
This was a sentiment echoed by Liu Wei, who worked for area’s the municipal management company. “People in Shanghai are looking for something different. Our target is young, wealthy consumers who can adapt easily to a new lifestyle.”
What happened instead, however, was wealthy Chinese people bought the properties as investments, creating a real estate bubble and pricing out any prospective middle-class residents. Nowadays, most of the visitors to Thames Town are curious tourists and newlyweds, the latter choosing a strange version of traditional England as the backdrop for their wedding photos.
Thames Town was only one of a series of international towns proposed in the Songjiang New City, and it actually had a better fate than some of the others. There were Spanish roofs, Dutch canals, Parisian buildings as well as German and Scandinavian-inspired villages also in the works.
“Visitors will soon be unable to tell where Europe ends and China begins,” the Shanghai Planning Commission claimed at the time. It didn’t quite work out like that.
