| To: Retort From: PL I was very happy this year to learn from Iain about Colin Ward. I passed knowledge of Colin Ward's book on 'allotments' to a student who was checking out British history and playing an active role in the urban gardens of Toledo, Ohio. Not often do suggestions take root immediately but this one did, and it speaks to the accessibility of Colin Ward's thinking and writing which was able to cross decades and oceans. Both modest and moving. Peter Linebaugh ------------ Ken Worpole, The Guardian, Feb 22 2010: Colin Ward was the author of almost 30 books on subjects that ranged from allotments, architecture, self-build housing, children's play, education, postcards and town planning to water distribution and anarchist theory, many of which gained him an international following. His book The Child in the City (1978), frequently reprinted, influenced planners and teachers from Liverpool to Latin America. Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape (1984), written with planner Dennis Hardy, opened up a whole new field in 20th-century social history around self-organised communities and the Lockeian belief in the democratic importance of experiments in living. Another book, The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture (1988), with David Crouch, held the line for this uniquely friendly form of local self-sufficiency during the barren years of centralised land use planning, making Colin a hero of today's environmental activists, including the young George Monbiot. Colin was born in Wanstead, Essex, the son of a teacher and a shorthand typist. Both were Labour supporters and Colin remembered hearing the anarchist Emma Goldman speak at a 1938 London May Day rally, and attending the 1939 Festival of Music for the People, in aid of the International Brigades, featuring Benjamin Britten's Ballad of Heroes. On leaving school aged 15, Colin went to work for the architect Sidney Caulfield. Conscripted in 1942, Colin was posted to Glasgow, where he fell in with the city's lively anarchist movement. He was then transferred to Orkney and Shetland for the remainder of the war. In 1945, as a subscriber to the radical newspaper War Commentary, Colin was summoned as a witness at the Old Bailey trial of the paper's editors, John Hewetson, Vernon Richards and Philip Sansom, who were accused of promoting disaffection and received prison sentences. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, while working for the architect Peter Shepheard, he wrote and edited articles for Freedom, the anarchist newspaper, where he developed the abiding themes of his life. He subsequently edited the journal Anarchy from 1961 to 1970. In his editorial and political work, he befriended and cultivated younger activists and writers such as Hugh Brody, Stan Cohen, Ray Gosling, Tony Gould, Richard Mabey, Carole Pateman, Kate Soper, Laurie Taylor and Jock Young. Many of these went on to write for the newly established weekly, New Society, an intellectual home that came ready-furnished as a result of Colin's widening influence at this time. In 1966, he had married Harriet Unwin, a young widow with two children, Tom and Barney, and in 1968 they had a son together, Ben. Colin also acted as a guardian to two other boys, Alan and Doug Balfour, after the Balfours' mother died. This companionable, happy marriage of kindred spirits was longlasting. Colin and Harriet subsequently established a network of international friendships, first from their home in London and, latterly, in Suffolk – Colin spent a small fortune on photocopying in the local public library – as well as by telephone. While working as an education officer for the Town and Country Planning Association between 1971 and 1979 he wrote Streetwork: The Exploding School (1973), with Tony Fyson, and established the Bulletin for Environmental Education. The point of both initiatives was to help get children out of school and into their communities, to talk to local people, and explore their neighbourhood, its amenities and utilities, and understand how buildings, streets, landscapes and social life interact. This led to Colin's focus on the unique world of childhood which, in the end, may prove to have been his – and anarchism's – most enduring contribution to social policy. There were many other collaborations. With the novelist Ruth Rendell, Colin wrote a Counterblast pamphlet in 1989, Undermining the Central Line, in favour of a revitalised local democracy; in 1998 he produced Sociable Cities: Legacy of Ebenezer Howard, with the urbanist Peter Hall, to commemorate the centenary of Howard's seminal work on garden cities. In 2003, the film-maker Mike Dibb recorded Colin in conversation with the writer Roger Deakin, at the Wards' home in Debenham. This is available on DVD. To see Deakin (who died in 2006) and Colin together, talking freely of the delights of the natural world and the varied people in it, is to be reminded of a politics of life and possibility that stubbornly refuses to go away. Colin is survived by Harriet, his son, stepchildren and wards. |