Play, education, creativity and activism: the legacies of Colin Ward
I first came across Colin Ward, as so many people did through his writings, as a teenage school student. I was sixteen when his Penguin Education topic book Violence was published in 1970. In the context of everything from the Vietnam War to violence on the football terraces, the connections made were inspiring, and terrifying. Work which came out a couple of years later, had even more of an impact, introducing me to William Morris (‘A factory as it might be’) and all in an accessible, informal, and thought-provoking way. So in 1978 when I started working at the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) after graduating in geography and training in town planning, I could hardly believe my luck to be pitched into an organization where geography, planning, the built environment, and a certain kind of anarchic informality, infused the organization. I was knocking around the left libertarian circles of south London at the time, setting up and co-editing the magazine South Circular a thorn in the side of the local Labour Party establishment, and sharing with TCPA colleague Rob Cowan a ‘hard to let’ flat on the 15th floor of a tower block on the Brandon Estate in Walworth, which ended up being the set for anti-hero Ray’s flat in the cult punk rock movie about The Clash, Rude Boy (1980). At the time I was learning to navigate both London and independent living, and the diary I started the previous year was a useful way of processing the experiences and practicing my writing.
Not surprisingly I was drawn to Colin Ward, then well into his stride at the TCPA’s Education Unit. Between the excitement of watching editions of BEE being put together and undertaking various dogs body roles for the Association, such as helping organize conferences and launch events – including for Colin’s The Child in the City (1978), I was roped into writing occasional short book reviews and similar for BEE – well I was, at 23, a representative of ‘youth’. Long lunch hours, smoking breaks and good conversation were very much du jour. So Colin took me under his wing and plied me with back copies of Anarchy – my diary from the time records him giving me ‘about a dozen copies’ over lunch, he being ‘quietly reflective on life’, in the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) café – conveniently located just underneath the TCPA, on 8 April 1978, and over the next 18 months or so he gifted me copies of books he thought it important for me to read, including his own Anarchy in Action and Housing an anarchist approach. I was in a position to report to him from the front line of the burgeoning anti-nuclear, anti-racist, green, and peace movements including the Anti-Nazi League march to Victoria Park in 1978, skirmishes with the National Front in Walworth, and the occupation of the Torness nuclear power station site in Scotland in 1979, with its various ‘affinity groups’ and non-violent direct action training sessions. My book The nuclear controversy was published by the TCPA in 1980.
Colin and his Education Unit team mates Eileen Adams and Tony Fyson inhabited a strange (for a conventional office – but then this was no conventional office) mezzanine area in an otherwise open plan space in the rather grand surroundings of Carlton House Terrace, and what I recorded as ’superb banter’ could be ‘carried on over the balcony’ (1 November 1978) or even, on the death of TCPA guiding spirit Sir Fredric Osborn (FJO), ‘some ribaldry’, as attempts were made to find out how to organize a memorial meeting for an atheist, with ‘Colin producing gems on FJO and his life, and also on previous memorial meetings he had been to.’ (2 November 1978).
The ICA was a source of cultural enrichment that complemented the TCPA, as well as the two in those days being joined by a narrow stairway not accessible to the public but offering free access – presumably a fire escape. So a lunch time talk there by Raymond Williams, was followed by a trip to the cinema in Wardour Street that evening with Colin, to see Mike Dibb’s newly released film version of The Country and the City (15 February 1979). That spring and summer as Colin’s involvement with the TCPA wound down before retirement from the Education Unit, our many conversations revolved around the wider anarchist movement, the emerging Green Movement and planning and the built environment. A steady flow of books from his library were pressed upon me including Murray Bookchin’s Post scarcity anarchism, Paul Goodman’s Communitas and Growing up absurd, and Martin Buber’s Paths in utopia to supplement and illustrate the points discussed. William Morris made an appearance too and it was fitting that a major exhibition at the ICA in 1984, William Morris today, included in its accompanying publication an essay by Colin entitled ‘Morris as anarchist educator’. One day in mid-1978 Colin came into the office and called to me in some excitement, clutching an Italian anarchist-inspired rural development magazine, and pointed to an article of mine in it about agriculture in China. Much amusement followed when we realized that it was an article lifted – without permission of course – from the TCPA’s own Journal that I had written the previous year.
While writing my book for the TCPA I was also trying my hand at shorter pieces for the TCPA Journal, and BEE, and as I gradually grew in confidence both as a writer and in the clarity of my opinions, for other green and radical publications including Vole, Peace News. Undercurrents, The Leveller, Coop News, Marxism Today, Built Environment and of course South Circular where I reviewed The child in the city. Colin’s guidance on tone, length and style were invaluable. One watch word of his about book reviewing has stayed with me: ‘If you can’t find anything positive to say about a book Martin, don’t say anything at all. Return it and get the editor to ask someone else to review it. Put yourself in the authors shoes.’
Around the same time as Colin left London for Suffolk I moved too, to Oxford, to work for the Political Ecology Research Group. As a worker coop it too was pretty free-wheeling and allowed me the space both to continue writing and to explore some of the ‘life themes’ I had absorbed from my time at the TCPA with Colin. Looking back two stand out, and overlap, exploring ‘makeshift landscapes’ or ‘edgelands’ as they later became known, and children’s self-expression and play. My much-thumbed copy of The Child in the City was an essential guide and inspiration – not least for its photographs, and it wasn’t long before I had established with fellow co-op and peace activists, a thriving set of Woodcraft Folk groups. They allowed opportunities for adults and children to explore the local townscape and landscape: spotting gargoyles town trail-style on the university’s colleges, political education at the annual ‘Levellers Day’ festival in Burford, day-long hikes and wild camping in the Cotswolds at a time when ‘right to roam’ was a salient issue, and discovering the joys of growing and nature on local allotments. As well as cultivating one, I took to photographing them, and material from my 1991 exhibition Earthly Paradise: people and landscapes on allotments was used by Roger Deakin in his Anglia TV programe ’The ballad of the ten rod plot’. For me, play, education, creativity and activism merged as my daughters grew; freedom as a social activity in practice. I was fortunate.
Distance and parental responsibilities – not to mention a new job in the emerging environmental field in local government, led to a rich correspondence on these subjects over the next couple of decades, supplemented by occasional visits to Oxford by Colin, usually to lecture to his friend Nabeel Hamdi’s classes on informal settlements and the like at Oxford Polytechnic, by me to Suffolk, or more often at get-togethers in London on the fringes of TCPA events. Writing too remained an important element of my life nurtured by Colin, including a column in the TCPA Journal, still going after thirty seven years, and an edited book with David Crouch, City fields, country gardens: allotment essays which I somehow managed to eke out between other commitments, and which Colin joyfully reviewed in Freedom.
Looking back to those days at the TCPA and in south London in the late 1970s I had no idea just how significant and formative they would be. Many people and events have influenced me, but Colin Ward was the person who gave them a focus and coherence that has lasted the whole of my adult life.
This chapter first appeared in Mutual aid, everyday anarchy: essays on Colin Ward published by Five Leaves in 2024. The book is available from Five Leaves or you local bookshop for £10, or from you local library.
