Over the years I have written and edited a number of books as well as contributing chapters in quite a few edited books.
From May 2020 to 2025 I was the Chair of Writers in Oxford.
My Books
The Cowley Road Cookbook
This wasfun book to write. it is a social and cultural history of the Cowley Road area of Oxford through food, from the 12 C to he present day.
.Cowley Road, Oxford, is a wonderfully chaotic, cultural and culinary crossroads. Geographically adjacent to the university’s dreaming spires, ethnographically it might as well be on another planet.
Spilling the Beans
This is probably my best known book. In fact there are four words cited in the Oxford English Dictionary identified as ‘first use’ in the book. It is out of print but available through Abe Books.
English Worker Co-operative Movement 1980s – Photobook
A photobook in zine format published by Cafe Royal Books in 2021. The photographs give a sense of the dedication, commitment and fun that these experiments in new ways of organizing working relations and re-framing the nature of work, provided.
The Nuclear Controversy
My first book. It came out of my MSc thesis at LSE. The issue of the link between nuclear power and the proliferation of nuclear weapons was current then, when it was pubilished in 1980 and it still is. In the age of renewables – still a distant dream then, nuclear power remains just as controversial.
City Fields, Country Gardens: Allotment Essays
This is a collection of Michael Hyde’s articles on allotments that appeared almost every Saturday in The Guardian between 1968 and 1993. David Crouch and I selected highlights and wrote an introduction.
Mutual Aid, Everyday Anarchy: Essays on Colin Ward
Colin Ward was probably Britain’s most influential anarchist writer, educator, and urbanist. This book, published in 2024 to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth, is a collection of essays looking at the range of his influences, by authors including Ken Worpole, Sheila Rowbotham, Patrick Wright, his biographer Sophie Scott-Brown, and myself.
The Routledge Companion to William Morris
For anyone interested in William Morris this is a really wonderful book, and the paperback is reasonably priced. Edited by noted Morris Scholar Florence Boos, it covers the whole gamut of Morris’s life and its multifaceted impacts on contemporary life. My chapter is on Morris and Iceland.