A few months ago, with very little fanfare, a small new town opened to the public about 25 miles from the centre of London. The place provided an encouraging spurt of economic growth for the area, and it was swiftly populated by a thriving local community unhindered, it seemed, by social and political divisiveness. Unusually for a new town, the buildings lacked any sense of architectural unity: an art deco vacuum-cleaner factory stood near to an 18th-century French-style town hall, while the new train station had a 1930s modernist look. Elsewhere, traditional business was booming, and there was little evidence of the destructive creep of the digital economy. The butcher was doing good trade, as was the greengrocer, and the people walking around the shops didn’t appear to be addicted to their phones. It looked like a model village – not least because it was a model village. Modern happiness such as this comes at a price, and a scale. In this case, the scale is usually 1:12 or 1:18, and the price £11 for adults and £6.60 for children.

The buildings are a new addition to Bekonscot Model Village in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, which next year celebrates its 90th birthday. Many visitors come for the sense of order and control the model village brings to a chaotic life: the schools are decent, the church is full, and the blaze that regularly engulfs a thatched roof in the middle of town is always dealt with swiftly by the fire brigade. In a way that is both wonderful and unnerving, everything appears to be happening at the very moment we arrive. We are just in time for the chimpanzee’s tea party; the cricket match on the green is only now reaching its nail-biting climax. And we are powerless to resist the terrible puns on the shop fronts: Chris P Lettis the greengrocer, Sam and Ella the butcher, Ann Ecdote the bookshop.

Bekonscot is the oldest continuously open miniature village in the world. Almost 16 million people have visited since 1929, and about 15,000 call in each month. In an age of Netflix, Fortnite and artificial intelligence, we may regard it as remarkable that such a thing has not only endured, but thrived and even expanded. How can one possibly explain the appeal? Nostalgia, certainly, but there are numerous bigger, shinier miniature worlds that Bekonscot has inspired – what about them? Is there something else at play? Something utopian perhaps, or something darker for our troubled and unstable times?

Bekonscot model village and railway in Beaconsfield. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Miniature kingdoms usually have miniature beginnings. No one can say for sure just how Bekonscot came to be, or what its founder intended. The most satisfying story begins with a housebound miniature railway that grew so big, a wife reached for the rolling pin: either it went or she did. The husband, a man named Roland Robert Callingham, a successful accountant, found a third way, and in 1927 laid tracks outside to colonise the garden. The village grew around the railway, but soon became an obsession: after the standard railway buildings came a castle and a church and miniature lawns, followed by the shops, and the population to inhabit them. Callingham did some construction himself, and some with assistance from his gardener and other local modellers. But it was a private pastime, and it only became an attraction after friends suggested that on occasional weekends the public should be allowed in, too. And so Bekonscot opened to all in 1931, and what was a quaint local novelty attracted national press coverage, and then royalty.

Its name is a composite of Beaconsfield and Ascot. The figures are hand-carved from limewood or moulded in resin. There is an agreeable amateurishness about them, but they seem to have an attitude. The caricatures are keen: many of the women have huge busts; many of the men look like bores. The railway runs to more than 1,300 feet, with 20,000 feet of subterranean electrical cable powering the trains and boats that run through or around the village. There are thousands of conifers, and every few years when they grow too big they are replaced by smaller ones. The total area measures about 40,000 sq ft, roughly the size of a football pitch.

A visitor to Bekonscot today may believe that little has changed in 90 years. The architecture has drawn inspiration from quaint suburbia and urban grandeur, from architects George Gilbert Scott, Edwin Lutyens and Berthold Lubetkin. We walk around very slowly, and we can’t help pointing things out to our children. There are clothes on washing lines in back gardens. At the racecourse, a policeman chases a ne’er-do-well across a field.

But things have changed. It is not really the 1930s we see, but a vision of what we hope the 1930s were like (the early 1930s, before the nervousness). For several decades, Bekonscot tried to keep pace with modern life; there were some brutalist constructions placed among the mock-Tudor semis, diesel railways replaced steam, and on the airfield modern jets (including Concorde) made an appearance. New adverts for the latest products began to appear alongside older ones for Colman’s mustard. But then, with the pace of life accelerating, and the historical integrity of Bekonscot looking increasingly confusing, the people who ran the place decided that the model should go back to its roots. So the modern world was banished, or at least repainted.

Most people come to Bekonscot for containment and trimmed privets, for a place forever amber. But the rough-hewn figures also suggest unease. Base human emotions don’t tend to change much from one era to another, or from one scale to another, and so even in miniature it is possible to detect cattiness in the pub gossip, and a twitching of the curtains, and we may speculate whether a certain blankness in the gaze of many hundreds of the figurines (there are about 3,000 in all) isn’t a result of tedium; if they could, would they ask us to spring them free? When the World of Interiors visited in 2007, it photographed a stark row of topless male sunbathers on loungers, with one of them fallen face-down submissively on a stone floor. Bekonscot, the magazine concluded with uncharacteristic anxiety, is possessed with a “special strangeness”. Viewed at an angle, the 1930s may indeed resemble a claustrophobic and deceptive decade. What was the Bekonscot butcher stamping on? Who was being buried in the cemetery, and could we possibly intervene before a bride married a man with red lips and a cold, pinched stare?

So much analytical potential here: neither the youngest child nor the wizened social psychologist will ever leave Bekonscot disappointed. We are drawn to the apparent integrity of the vision, and instead of helping the tiny wooden figures to escape, sometimes we may just want in. Look at that cricket pitch, for example: it’s probably a Sunday, and, judging from the kit, the sun’s out. A hopeful fielder runs to catch a ball in mid-air. He’s looking up, both expectant and anxious, aware that in the next moment he will become either hero or schmuck; for now, forever poised between the two, he’s just like us. Perhaps only a true work of art could withstand this level of scrutiny for almost a century. For the moment, Bekonscot really does look like the full English Brexit: idyllic in its imagination, disillusioned in its present, unfathomable to the outside world.

Model villages were once a disproportionately British obsession. On those mythical golden holidays of the early 1960s, it was difficult not to trip over one en route to the crazy golf. But then the Costa del Sol and the permissive society arrived, and miniature innocence seemed to go the way of the girdle and the trouser press. But a handful remain to offer seasonal delights, including Bourton-on-the-Water in Gloucestershire (not an imaginary model, but an accurate copy of the town at 1:9 scale, which “enables our American cousins to see Bourton-on-the-Water nine times more quickly”) and Babbacombe in Torquay (featuring, in close proximity, Stonehenge and the Shard). Then there is Godshill on the Isle of Wight, featuring a model village in its model village of the model village, scaled at 1:1,000 with a lake the size of a full stop.

Our fascination with miniature objects has been with us since cave paintings, and we will never tire of bringing things down to size in an effort to better appreciate them. The model village has just become the model world. There are few things that Instagram likes more than human giants in a concentrated landscape of Big Ben, Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty. Almost every country offers its own model world these days, and all provide a strategically idiosyncratic combination of nationalistic pride and towering hubris.

We may open the bidding at Legoland Windsor, where 42m bricks have created a world of Canary Wharf Tower, the Angel of the North, the windmills of Old Amsterdam, and – because inexplicable incongruity is the way with these things – Cape Canaveral and the Easter Island statues. We may raise the ante at Gulliver’s Gate, which opened last year in Times Square. Here, much of the focus is on things one can see just a subway ride away: Grand Central Terminal, the 9/11 memorial, the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Bridge. Tiny Beatles bestride the zebra crossing on Abbey Road, which is surprisingly near Red Square, the Taj Mahal and the pyramid at the Louvre. There are 967 buildings to see in 25 cities across five continents. If Gulliver’s Gate reminds you of anywhere else, it might be Las Vegas, where many of the hotel-casinos (Paris, the Venetian, New York-New York) are model cities themselves.

Easter Island statues at Legoland Windsor. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Never to be outdone by America, a major miniature world in Shenzhen has magnificence built into its name: Splendid China. This showcases the terracotta warriors and the Three Gorges dam, and claims in its promotional material to permit visitors to see all of China’s highlights in a day. (You’ll find this a lot: no matter where you are on earth, model worlds offer the possibility of seeing all the sights without actually seeing even one.) Splendid China contains 25 replica miniature villages and 50,000 tiny clay figures. The place opened in 1989 and was such a success that it inspired worldwide franchising. When they opened a Splendid China in Florida in 1993, at a reported cost of $100m, it drew curious crowds eager to see the half-mile Great Wall and a special show featuring authentic, full-size acrobats from the People’s Republic. But it became distinctly unsplendid: many of the acrobats defected, and there were newspaper stories about Communist propaganda efforts in the village’s Mongolian and Tibetan sections. The attraction closed in 2003, although for a while after that it remained a great attraction for looters and rats.

Back in Europe, mini-business is booming. One could quite feasibly spend a fortnight ankle-deep in resin and polyurethane. We could begin at Madurodam in The Hague, a commendable and charitable institution that opened in 1952, inspired by Bekonscot and featuring everything you wanted to know about Dutch buildings and history at a scale of 1:25 (this is the norm for walk-around miniature parks: model people come up to your heels, bungalows up to your ankles and the Eiffel Tower looms at 12 metres). And then we could hop over to Catalunya en Miniatura near Barcelona, a tribute to the dazzling confectionery of Antoni Gaudí and more than 130 other, flatter Catalonian structures including the home of FC Barcelona, Camp Nou, and a miniature of the Dalí museum, Torre Galatea. And from there it’s just a leap away to Minimundus in Carinthia, Austria, a global aggregation of the White House and the Taj Mahal, and then just one skip more to France Miniature, in Élancourt, in the western suburbs of Paris, where the Eiffel Tower finally feels at home.

A replica of Tibet’s Potala Palace at the Splendid China park in Shenzhen. Photograph: VCG/VCG via Getty Images

Or perhaps Miniatürk is your thing, Istanbul’s placid array of more than 100 Turkish buildings and historic shrines from the Ottoman empire. (What it lacks in wit it more than makes up for in its dedication to originality; in place of the more usual Arc de Triomphe and the Statue of Liberty there is the Suleymaniye mosque, the Aspendos theatre and a stone rendering of the ancient city of Ephesus.) And let’s not totally ignore Kiev in Miniature in Ukraine, with 48 local wonders including St Michael’s golden-domed monastery and Boryspil airport.

The cutest of all may be Swissminiatur on the banks of Lake Lugano. In the 1970s, when the exchange rate worked in their favour, this was the most popular tourist attraction in Switzerland for Italians. They hopped over the border with lire that would buy the cheapest booze and fags, and, deciding to make a day of it, then spent many happy hours teetering over the monument to William Tell and an intricately crafted Alpine cheese dairy. These days Swissminiatur struggles to be the most popular tourist attraction even in the region of Lake Lugano, but its models are both quaint and instructive, and, in their earnestness and number, unique. Where else could you hope to find the international headquarters of the Red Cross in Geneva, the Olympic bobsleigh run of St Moritz and the Winkelried monument of Stans? The only incongruity in the whole picturesque scene at Swissminiatur (unless one counts the scale model of the Mövenpick service station overhanging the A1 motorway at Würenlos) is a plaster model of the Titanic.

Models of the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia at the Miniaturk park in Istanbul. Photograph: Murad Sezer/REUTERS

But why go to all the trouble to visit these places if you can just go to Mini-Europe in Belgium and see almost everything in one go? One reason for not going to Mini-Europe is because Mini-Europe is terrible, and you must avoid it even if you have absolutely nothing else to do. Mini-Europe is what happens when a civic amusement is designed by a committee on which all the creative and sensible members have consistently called in sick, perhaps only too aware of what was being constructed on their watch. One is greeted at the entrance of Mini-Europe by a person dressed as a giant orange turtle administering unwanted hugs, and it’s all grimness from there. One walks past a soulless array of more than 300 buildings from all the countries in the European Union, including such cheering resin randomness as the Rock of Cashel in Tipperary, Anne Hathaway’s cottage in Stratford and a North Sea oil platform.

Mini-Europe exemplifies a shrinking vision, a meaningless stamp collection. Even when it opened on the outskirts of Brussels with a certain optimism in 1989, no one could quite say what it was for. The launch brochure asked its visitors whether they were “For or against Europe?” and, on this evidence, I predict you will find yourself 100% against. Mini-Europe is over-manicured and over-sponsored, and it is almost invulnerable to humanity, making you long for the idiosyncrasies of almost anywhere else. And yet the place is a hit. About 300,000 people visit it annually.

What is going on in our world that can possibly explain such a fervent desire to shrink it? The desire began, I think, not with something small but with something colossal. When the Eiffel Tower opened for tourism in the spring of 1889, visitors were shocked to find that the tallest structure on earth appeared to have dramatically reduced the world around it. Anyone possessed of the immense courage necessary to climb the 363 steps to the first platform, and then 381 to the second, saw the world beneath anew. A cliche now, but then it was a revelation: people had become ants. From above, Paris was both map and metaphor. Unless you had previously floated in a balloon, this was the first time the world appeared to scale: Haussmann’s boulevards became visible as grids; the World’s Fair glittered like a bauble below, and its chaos was momentarily quelled. The thrill of the climb culminated in blissful serenity: the stench of horse manure and soot just evaporated. It was a heaven of sorts, and ever since, we have been building approximations of what places could look like if were still up there in the clouds.

The field of studious excellence in this area is, like its subject, not a huge one. But near its apex sits Tim Dunn. Dunn, 37, spent many years working at Bekonscot (a variety of voluntary jobs from the age of 12 – train operator, model builder, and birthday project manager during its 75th year). Most recently he was partly responsible for the appearance of the Bekonscot extension that was unveiled in July. When I asked Dunn about the motivation behind model worlds, he answered without hesitation. “Frustration,” he said. “Modellers may be frustrated about the past or the future. They might be seeking solace. It could be that they’re trying to control the future by building a three-dimensional utopia, a genuine model model village.”

A replica of Rome’s Spanish Steps at Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

When we met, Dunn, who works for the rail booking company Trainline, was “putting the finishing touches” (a favoured phrase of all who work in this field) to a book that got to the very heart of the matter. It was called Model Villages. It covered the tiny waterfront, from one of the earliest model villages (circa 1908) in the garden of a London house, to the more recent efforts at the Museum of Power in Essex. What Dunn liked in particular were the furthest and quirkiest examples, such as the place in Dorset called Tinkleford, which wasn’t on public display because it was made from flaking pink asbestos. He revelled in Little Italy, a private passion in the Welsh mountains in which a man who once went on holiday has created his homage to the Bridge of Sighs and the Leaning Tower of Pisa from mannequins and bits of bread oven.

“I think it’s a bit like gardening – the desire to tame and beautify,” Dunn says. “And you mustn’t deride how people find their happiness. Many people with Asperger’s and autism find pleasure and a level of safety in making or looking at models, and if you’re an introvert, how better to spend your time? But it can also be the most sociable activity, because you’re showing what you can do, asking for conversation, exhibiting and making yourself open to criticism or praise. You could argue that the most reclusive hobby, and the least social, is reading books, but no one regards readers of books as misfits or socially inadequate.”

Dunn’s experience and enthusiasm has made him an obvious port of call when redundant villages need a new home for obsolete models. In 2004 he received a call from a friend who works at Legoland: she said the Model World section at Thorpe Park in Surrey was being closed down and auctioned. This was a chance to acquire one’s very own Eiffel Tower or Nelson’s Column, both of which were evidently less popular than a rollercoaster named Stealth. Dunn was encouraged by the low auction estimates and the possibility of hosting a miniature Eiffel Tower in his front room, albeit at the height of nine feet. It was made of steel. He won it for £50, and set off in a van with friends to bring it home. When they arrived, they found it wasn’t nine feet high as advertised, but nine metres. (Dunn remembers someone at Thorpe Park actually saying to him: “Oh, silly me!”) He and his friends could only manage to transport the top two-thirds, and for the last 12 years the tower has resided in his uncle’s back garden in Buckinghamshire.

Dunn is less interested in the shiny, sponsored giant model worlds built for commercial gain than he is in the tiny cottage industries noodled over by obsessives. He is therefore very keen on the painstaking work known as Pendon (originally Pendon Parva or “little village hall”), which began on a few tables in a youth hostel in 1931, expanded to an ex-RAF hut with leaking roof, and is still far from completion at its present dry home in a concrete dwelling at Long Wittenham near Abingdon in Oxfordshire. It may never be finished, such are the ambitions and dedication of its modellers. It, too, has a model railway, and stunning nostalgic dioramas of the Vale of White Horse and the southern edge of Dartmoor. Once, it suggests, we lived in better, slower times, and the only way to revisit them today is with great concentration and ingenuity, and tweezers and balsa wood and glue.

The Aftermath Dislocation Principle created by Jimmy Cauty, which was on display at Banksy’s Dismaland theme park. Photograph: Courtesy of Jimmy Cauty and The L-13 Light Industrial Workshop

But Dunn is also a fan of an exquisite if violent alternative to the miniature rural idyll called The Aftermath Dislocation Principle. This is a minutely detailed scene of about 5,000 police officers, jams of emergency vehicles with flashing lights, and a mass of media attention from camera crews. The model represents one bleak square mile of ruined scrubland and concrete tower blocks. It is not quite clear what we are looking at, except for the fact that the scene occurs after a traumatic event. But what was the event? Have we just missed a terrible accident or a public insurgence? Or could this be just another ordinary day under a police state? Its purpose, other than as art, is also vague (its location is precise, however: Bedfordshire, at the historic heart of England). The Aftermath Dislocation Principle is the creation of Jimmy Cauty, and was once the centrepiece model village at Banksy’s Dismaland anti-theme park in Weston-super-Mare. It was then split into three shipping containers, the largest 40 feet long, and toured locations in the UK that had witnessed riots (visitors peered in through the containers’ portholes). The model suggests the failure of a nation. Its perimeters are not hedged, fenced or trellised; they just roughly disintegrate, as if its inhabitants are about to fall off a cliff, or perhaps already have. If the thing was a television show, it would be called Good Models Gone Bad. Episode Two would probably feature the Chapman Brothers and their Nazi-infested model Hellscapes.

Cauty was once a member of the provocative band KLF and the situationist art group K Foundation, and it was always unlikely that a model village in his hands was going to be a walk in the park. He says he’s happy for viewers to bring their own story to the scene, aware that any authored explanation may limit the demands of close observation. It’s not a place where women will feel at ease, or anyone else for that matter, but seldom can a police state have seemed so visually compelling. Look, you say – a lorry has crashed into McDonald’s, a cow has wandered into a building, a policeman is attacking another policeman with a pitchfork.

With model villages, intense looking is all. And if you’re looking for a slightly brighter vision of our world, and who isn’t, you could do worse than travel to Hamburg. Here, up several flights of stairs in a disused docklands coffee warehouse, you’ll find Miniatur Wunderland, the biggest model railway in the world. When I called in last year, almost 15 million people before me had paid to view its 16,000 metres (almost 10 miles) of track. Rod Stewart had been in, as had George RR Martin and the former heavyweight boxing champion Wladimir Klitschko.

But a 10-mile model railway can get pretty tedious unless it passes through some stunning scenery, and so this one passes through the tiny landscapes of Germany, Italy, the US, Switzerland and Scandinavia. England, Africa and Australia are coming soon, all at a scale of 1:87. There are roads and an airport, too, and the usual crazy crash of buildings, including the Colosseum, St Peter’s with a tiny pope, and several Las Vegas hotels. Mount Rushmore nestles close by, because why wouldn’t it? An early survey found that the railway itself would mostly attract men, but that women would be more attracted by the exacting detail of the landscapes.

Frederick (left) and Gerrit Braun, creators of Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany. Photograph: Joern Pollex/Getty Images

I couldn’t decide whether Miniatur Wunderland (or MiWuLa as its many fans call it) was stupefyingly impressive or stupefyingly deranged, but of course it was both. Since it opened to the public in 2001, it has boosted Hamburg’s economy and has provided an education of sorts. The twin brothers responsible for its existence, Frederik and Gerrit Braun, speak of a desire principally to entertain. But Gerhard Dauscher, the model-maker employed to lead construction, says there are wider aims too, not least the pursuit of miniature beauty. At the beginning of the venture, he was keen to recruit those whose lives were filled with more than models. “An open mind for human desires and aspirations, for resting and hunting, love and hate – all of this is essential for a model landscape to mirror real people and real life … Only in this way is it possible to build a cliff beckoning for a climb, or to create a meadow [where] one would like to rest.” (Other things are going on near the meadow: the keenest visitors have spotted tiny plastic couples having sex, for example.)

Miniatur Wunderland is the world in a mall. Much of its success depends on our desire to gawp at intricately reduced historical landmarks in a safe, weatherproof setting; it really does make tourism so much easier. To its credit – and as with Bekonscot – its creators have stopped short of building utopia: there are criminals being chased by police, there are traffic jams on the roads, there are fires and loud ambulances. Full-size human beings triumph in the end, however, and it’s too bad they’re of the small-minded, thieving variety: about 3,500 tiny figures get stolen from the model annually. Our desire for control – to set the world to rights by placing model citizens just where we want them at a scale of our choosing – clearly has its limitations.

Adapted from In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World by Simon Garfield, which will be published by Canongate on 1 November, and is available to buy at guardianbookshop.com

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