Ben Fogle is about to explore California’s Slab City in his brand new documentary Ben Fogle & The Lost City.
Located in the Sonoran Desert, Slab City is known as “the last free place in America” by the community who live there and practise an alternative off-grid lifestyle, where money, rules and technology are not a major factor.
For many, Slab City is the last resort before being made completely homeless, with people able to set up camp, and make the most of the environment.
However, Ben says that – like “any utopia” – Slab City has “attracted the wrong people.”
Asked how the community survives without written rules, Ben exclusively told RadioTimes.com that rules do exist, and some of them can be very “brutal.”
“You’ll see they do have rules and they’re very brutal,” he explained. “They burn people out and they urinate on people, so they do have rules and they kind of implement those rules themselves.
“They’re very strict on what things are [punished] – paedophilia, rape, wife beating – and the things they say they don’t tolerate. But other people say all of those things do go on there.”
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He continued: “So, I think it’s like any utopia – it attracts the wrong people. And I think if you look at Slab City through the decades, in the ’70s and ’80s, that’s where [Chris] McCandless went when he was heading up to Alaska in Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer’s book. He lived there for a year. It was a place of idealism. It was it was a utopia.
“But with that came an attraction to those with a darker side, who didn’t want to be found, who wanted to escape from the law and who wanted to hide from the law. And unfortunately, that combined with hard drugs has made a pretty brutal place.”
Despite these concerns, Fogle discovered a lot of beauty during his 10-day stay in Slab City.
He added: “When you wade through all of that and when you start to scratch beneath the surface, you do discover a fantastically open-minded, liberal, kind, generous place.
“I only ever really encountered kindness and generosity with everyone that I met. I only saw goodness; I genuinely did.”
Ben Fogle & The Lost City airs Thursday 21st April at 9pm on Channel 5
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