AT the time of the great industrial revolution, artist, designer and socialist thinker William Morris dared to dream. His utopian vision for the future, where society was based on common ownership and the democratic control of means of production, and authority, big cities, courts, prisons, class systems and divorce were no more, was documented in his 1890s novel News from Nowhere, in which the narrator falls asleep and wakes up in 2100.

Described by many as a “book of our time”, Walthamstow artist Brian Daubney and American architect Jeremiah Sheeham have returned to the book for a new exhibition, News from Nowhere Revisited, at the William Morris Gallery. Using archive material and contemporary photography, the pair will explore just how much of modern London Morris correctly envisaged.

“On architecture, on politics, in fact in all fields he was a stunning prophet of London change,” Brian enthuses. “He was the prophet of E17.”

The insightful show features the often humourous, always thought-provoking commentary of Morris. For example, under three contrasting images of women’s fashion – one showing a modern dancer in a tight-fitting costume, the other a women dressed in a crinoline, and the third a Rossetti print of Morris’ wife in a flattering, loose-fitting gown – reads the quote: “Women should be clothed like women, not upholstered like armchairs.”

Brian, a former BBC director and Sunday Times journalist, also draws parallels between Morris’ ideals for a green world in which small, integrated communities thrive and historical buildings are conserved, with Prince Charles’ commitment to creating traditional-style eco-towns.

(Prince Charles was, until recently, patron of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which Morris founded in 1877.) On a more tongue-in-cheek note, it is Brian’s images of Westminster that help illustrate one of Morris’ more flippant prophecies, in which he predicts Parliament has been “turned into a manure house”.

“I was at a reception on the roof of Parliament not long ago and all the waste from Chelsea and Westminster was being transported on a barge along the Thames,” Brian wryly comments. “I sniffed the air and thought, he is right again!”

News from Nowhere Revisited runs at the William Morris Gallery, Lloyd Park, Forest Road, from Saturday, August 15 until Sunday, September 27. Details: 020 8496 4390, www.walthamforest.gov.uk