Walt Disney would probably be disappointed with the Epcot Centre if he visited it today. I bet he’d prefer London Docklands. Waltopia is full of pictures and quotes that outline what he really wanted to build in his 47 square-mile site in Florida, bought piece by piece in secret using assumed names.

Epcot wasn’t supposed to be a theme park. It was to be a city, dominated by a 30-floor hotel, a 1,000 acre industrial district and the nearby Magic Kingdom theme park. The central hub would be housed inside an enormous dome, giving the city planners complete control over the indoor weather. Surrounding this would be high-density apartment housing, and then a band of green land full of parks, churches and recreation facilities. Beyond this green belt would be low-density housing, constantly evolving to incorporate the most up-to-date technology.

Nobody would own their home. Nobody would own the land on which it was built. Nobody would be allowed to live there without working, and you could be thrown out for drunkenness or unmarried cohabitation. Slums would never be allowed to develop.

Everyone would move around using a monorail or the Wedway, a system of small automated trains. Cars would be banished to long tunnels running beneath the complex, and lorries and trucks to an even deeper tunnel network below them.

The size of the project was enormous. The site was twice the size of Manhattan, and Disney himself realised that even his immense corporation was not big enough to take on such an ambitious task on its own. He wanted to partner with other American corporations and build the ultimate showcase of American ingenuity to inspire the world.

Of course, it was all still in a plot of undeveloped land and a collection of blueprints when he died in 1966 from a recently diagnosed cancer. He seemed to be less worried about what death would mean for himself than the implications for his grand project. He investigated the idea of being cryogenically preserved and revived at a later date, but worried that he wouldn’t be able to return in time to undo the damage that those who took over the project would undoubtedly do to his plans.

He wanted to produce a city to inspire the designers of the future, but what transpired in the theme park that now sits on the site was a long way from that. Still, one of his dreams did come true; he wanted to build something that “more people will talk about and come to look at than any other area in the world.”

Another excellent site on the failed dreams of what Epcot should have been, including pictures, can be found here.

Some of the ideas of Epcot were eventually used in the construction of Celebration, the Disney-owned town in Florida, and Disneyworld uses the proposed waste disposal system: dump the waste into collection points around the park and every 15 minutes a vacuum sucks them to a centralised compactor at 60mph through pipes buried beneath the park grounds.

Rainy lunchtimes can be very educational.

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