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Simplify your life

Simplify your life

Nudism, camping, and vegetarianism: the Life Reform movement explained.

Arts & Ideas · BBC Radio 4

January 15, 202053m 13s

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Show Notes

Laurence Scott hears about a pioneer of vegetarianism and advocates for nudism and camping as the academics Elsa Richardson, Annebella Pollen, Ben Anderson and Tiffany Boyle discuss the Life Reform Movement. Ideas included arguments for a basic income, healthy eating, gymnastics, world peace and what a perfect body looked like. The movement emerged in the second half of the 19th century and was a loose collection of groups and individuals who pursued social reform of all kinds and their ideas were mainly Utopian, but had a darker side.

Annebella Pollen teaches at Brighton University and is the author of The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians

Elsa Richardson teaches at the University of Strathclyde and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and AHRC to promote research on radio

Ben Anderson teaches at Keele University and is also a New Generation Thinker

Tiffany Boyle is a curator, researcher and writer at The Glasgow School of Art and her interdisciplinary doctoral research examines the visual representations of artistic gymnastics