Thank you, Disney

Jenny Diski

  • The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town by Andrew Ross
    Verso, 340 pp, £17.00, June 2000, ISBN 1 85984 772 2
  • Celebration, USA: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins
    Holt, 342 pp, £18.99, September 1999, ISBN 0 8050 5560 6

For a committed sedentary like myself, one of the most striking aspects of the populating of the town of Celebration, Florida, built by the Disney Corporation in the late 1990s, was the ease with which people made the decision to sell up and move there. In some cases, they crossed the continent, gave up substantial careers, took the kids out of school, put their property on the market, and signed a financial commitment to buy a plot of land on which not a single brick had been laid, in an alligator-infested swamp owned by a corporation which specialised in producing cartoons and simulations of historical and geographical clichés. Some people just popped in after a trip to next-door Disneyland and signed up for a new existence, others packed up and moved to rented accommodation nearby in order to be on the spot when the lottery for the first plots of land was announced.

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