Lets start with what has worked – its not a long list and even the successes are relative or need qualifying. Early potatoes like Charlotte and Rocket have been pretty good. In early, out early, before too much damage could be done. Later ones like Desiree and Pink Fir Apple have been a disaster. In the case of Fir Apple I actually got out less in bulk than I planted. Just, on average two tiny spuds per plant, so small that an entire rows produce fitted into the top pocket of my shirt with room to spare. Garlic, one of this years successes, it liked the early damp and the later heat. Tomatoes – pretty spectacular, still cropping well in October along with a couple of experimental tomatillo plants. Salads, stews, and plenty to freeze too. Basil, a glorious fragrant delight. Both green and purple have thrived, though like the tomatoes have needed constant attention especially regular watering. If that has at times in the sweltering heat felt like outdoor house work, at least there has been plenty of aromatic leaves to make up for it. Those other salad staples, cucumbers and lettuce, forget it. The punishing watering regimes from June through August meant some things never got planted and others – like cucumbers just never made it. Same was true of onions and shallots. They are water heavy and never thrived. They soon fell victim to the enforced triage of the watering rota. Beans were a curates egg, if that is possible. Broad beans did OK enough for a few meals before the heat got to them, but not enough to freeze as in most years. Runner beans, poor things. They don’t like the heat at all, their flowers don’t set. Note to self. Runner beans are a victim of climate change. 2025 will be last year I ever successfully grew some of my favourite vegetable.

It isn’t just the fruit and vegetables that were finding the heat challenging. The wild life was too. Most of the time (squirrels excepted) I can manage the tithe that wildlife take from the plot, ‘the angels share’ as whisky distillers put it. But this year drought brought forth a new boldness, from Muntjak, pigeons and even foxes. Anything green leafy was fair game, but even the spikyer leaved plants like courgette and squash fell victim to hungry and thirsty deer who ate the courgettes like they were ice lollies, and grazed the squash plants to within an inch, and beyond of their lives.

So what about those blossom-laden fruit trees? Yes they matured into decent fruit thanks to the bees, in very large quantities in fact. Two top scorers were cherries and greengages. I had the foresight to pick the only partly ripe greengages before going on holiday for two weeks in early June.T hey ripened at home and were absolutely delicious. Plenty to give away even. It wasn’t exactly foresight that led to a good cherry crop. In previous years the birds (did I mention pigeons?) ate them all before they were ripe enough to pick (I hope they got tummy aches), but this year I invested in sleeves to protect cherry laden branches. It mainly worked, but the pigeons worked out that if they stood on a strong enough branch they could peck through the sleeve and eat the cherries underneath anyway. Luckily they only managed this with one branch, and the shocked manufacturers supplied a new sleeve for free when presented with the photographic evidence. Pears and apples there were in abundance and juice makers Tiddley Pommes came by in early August and took two trees worth of crops, producing 45 bottles of juice. Not bad, but less than last years fifty one. Why less with such a good crop? Because the James Grieve were basically over and rotting on the tree or on the ground by early August. It was too hot for them. The other apple trees produced substantial quantities but the quality was poor, a high proportion had what Lady Muck calls ‘visitors’. That rather charming characterisation disguises the destructive power of the beasts, and nigh on 75% of the crops has been damaged. The same applies to pears. They look wonderful until they start to ripen and suddenly the rot has spread from the middle.

Which leaves ‘The Muck Report’ to round up on the soft fruit. Here too disaster reigned. The raspberries couldn’t stand the heat, and neither could the red and blackcurrants. None produced anything of significance and around half of the currant bushes died. The only exception were gooseberries – I got in just before the squirrels got to the crop (they took about 20%) somewhat over 3kg, but it was 13 kg last year. Consolation prizes: blackberries which were super abundant and juicy, but needed to be picked in June and July, and grapes, twenty three bunches of superlatively juicy ones from a single vine which has never produced anything seriously edible before. Some fairly obvious pointers to the crops of the next decade in this years successes. And time to put the thinking cap on about what Muck should grow to make that transition.

Mike Osborne is an experienced writer of county military histories. This is his twelfth volume since he began the series in 2010. He obviously enjoys writing them because the subject could be quite dry, but is in fact peppered with little asides, jokes, and curious anecdotes. The book is what the title says it is, but it is more than just a book about the military landscape in the topographical sense. It covers a huge range of subjects which inform the reader as to just why Oxfordshire has such a rich history, from Queen Matilda’s escape across the ice from Oxford, the Levellers rebellion, the various imperial adventures of Oxfordshire forces, to the activities of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the development of ‘secret weapons’ during WWII.

The book is set out chronologically from the prehistoric forts and defended settlements that the Roman invaders encountered, to the nuclear age exemplified in USAF Upper Heyford, and the role of RAF Brize Norton today. What this says is that despite England being an island nation constantly under threat (real or imagined) of invasion from the sea, land locked Oxfordshire had a pretty important role in the military history of the island. The River Thames and some of its tributaries played a crucial role. In Saxon times Oxford lay on the very border between Wessex and Mercia. Boundary Brook which winds its way through Cowley and is referenced in local street names, marked that border, and in 1940 the principal anti-invasion defence line traversed the county along the course of the River Thames from Kelmscott to Pangbourne.

Four Harcourt brothers

Oxfordshire’s relative proximity to London has always been a factor in its historical development whether that be its ancient University, or as Charles I’s capital during the English Civil War. Oxfordshire in Medieval times could be a place that was both dangerous, rewarding and challenging, and Osborne illustrates this with an account of the four Harcourt brothers who accompanied William I on his invasion in 1066. Their successors established what would become a prominent Oxfordshire family, while some would return to Normandy. Those that stayed were granted lands in Leicestershire and inherited lands around what became Stanton Harcourt. Those that returned found themselves in a more conflicted situation. As Osborne puts it, With a foot in both French and English camps the Harcourts fought to preserve their lands in Normandy by siding with whichever side could offer them the greater benefit. It didn’t end well as (the French) Geoffrey de Harcourt became a member of the Woodstock-born, Black Prince’s body guard at the battle of Crecy, while his brother Jean IV Compte de Harcourt was killed fighting on the French side. Changing sides yet again, he ended up dying in an ambush in Normandy in 1356.

Oxford was in early Medieval times the sixth largest town in England, with a population of around 5,000 guarding the route from London to Gloucester and South Wales, and Oxfordshire’s strategic importance at the time was reflected not only in the castles at Oxford and Wallingford, but also at Deddington, Chipping Norton and Mixbury. Indeed Deddington Castle was held by Bishop Odo of Bayeux, half-brother of William I. Oxfordshire’s proximity to London meant that Woodstock Palace, which originated as a hunting lodge in the Forest of Wychwood, became one of Henry 1’s favourite royal palaces and an important centre for his spreading bureaucracy. The site of what is now Blenheim Palace, it was an early indicator of the significance royals considered Oxfordshire had in their kingdom.

One Legge

Its role in the Civil War was another example of the military and political significance of Oxfordshire. Driven out of London by Parliamentary forces, Charles I established his court in Oxford and closely surrounded the town with fortifications and an outer ring of fortified strong points. The city itself benefitted from having strong defensive walls and access through just five gates dating from Medieval times. Maps, diagrams and photographs of what remains of the fortifications add considerably to the text which rehearses the story of the City’s role in the Civil War and details which colleges were re-purposed for which activity, including where the munitions were stored – in the tower of New College. This is interspersed with lively anecdotes of life in the city. Bored soldiers took to drink. Their equally bored officers quarrelled and duelled, while insanitary conditions and food shortages caused discontent and outbreaks of diseases. Osborne drolly captures the moment, ’Miseries were compounded for citizen and soldier alike by the psychopathic Governor Sir Arthur Aston…Showing off in front of a group of ladies on Bullingdon Green he was thrown by his horse, breaking his leg which then had to be amputated. His successor, one Legge, afforded ample opportunity for court wits to gloat. Few tears would subsequently be shed when Aston was said to have been beaten to death with his own wooden leg at the siege of Drogheda in 1649.’

Life was hard in the besieged city, but the surrounding countryside had to contend with warring armies and their demands for taxes. Some unfortunate communities occupying the no-mans-land of disputed areas ended up having to pay twice. The impact resonated down the centuries. As a child in the 1960s I recall visiting Chastleton House with my parents. Still lived in by the impecunious Clutton-Brock’s, the house was in an advanced state of decay, and when my mother admired some piece of furniture they immediately offered to sell it.  ‘You see we lost all our money in the War’, they explained. The Civil War.

Other aspects of change in the landscape had an impact on the military organisation and   infrastructure of Oxfordshire. Enclosure was one. Combined with rising prices this led to unrest amongst the rural population. Local magistrates were unwilling to convict for acts against enclosure and it became impossible to recruit special constables owing to conflicting loyalties. Anti enclosure groups escalated their activities culminating in a crowd of 1000 people destroying the fences on the newly enclosed Otmoor in September 1830. Forty-two activists were arrested and conveyed from Islip to Oxford under armed guard. They hadn’t accounted for this coinciding with St Giles Fair and the crowds attending it ensured the escape of the prisoners. Despite yeomanry and regular troops being deployed to patrol the Moor it took a further five years to enforce the enclosure, a campaign commemorated in the popular local ditty, ‘The fault is great in man or woman who steals the goose from off a common: but who can plead the man’s excuse who steals the common from the goose?’

Totes Meer

Not being under direct threat of invasion, Oxfordshire’s involvement in WWI was relatively limited. Any invasion was expected to be from the east coast and evacuation routes from the Essex coast leading through Hertfordshire and Oxfordshire were physically marked with arrows painted on buildings. More significant were the location of POW camps, including at Enstone, Hook Norton, Banbury and Deddington, while Oxford became a significant centre of care for the wounded in military hospitals with the 3^rd Southern General Hospital being established in the Examination Schools as early as 16 August 1914. But the rapid advance in aviation technology and the establishment of the RAF after the War led to Oxfordshire being identified as a site for bomber airfields – established at Abingdon, Bicester and Upper Heyford. This became very significant with rearmament and the outbreak of WWII in 1939.  Oxfordshire was in certain respects on the front line, with the Thames acting as a key defensive line in the event of a ground invasion and the River Cherwell/Oxford Canal acting as part of a ‘stop line’ in the defence of Birmingham’s vital industrial centres. Morris Motors at Cowley was repurposed to produce military vehicles and later, aircraft. In 1939 it became the HQ for the Civilian Repair Organisation which repaired damaged aircraft and collected non re-useable parts for scrap and recycling. The Metal Produce and Recovery Unit covered 100 acres and is immortalised in Paul Nash’s classic wartime painting Totes Meer.  Equally important was the role the county played in ‘the secret war’ with Thame Park becoming the training school for the SOE, Oriel College hosting MI6/SIS training courses, MI5 moving to Blenheim Palace, and Mansfield College and Oxford University Press taking on staff from Bletchley Park, working particularly on codes and ciphers for naval use. Medical research and development played no small part either, with Howard Florey and others developing the mass-production techniques for penicillin. Post war activities and infrastructure are covered too with the continuing use of RAF bases at Benson and Brize Norton for military use worldwide, and the use and eventual closure of the USAF base at Upper Heyford, site of controversial nuclear weapons in the 1980s.

The subject matter is necessarily bloody, but this military history of the county is comprehensively researched, well referenced and illustrated, and written with a light touch that will appeal to a wide readership.

This article first appeared in the Bulletin of the Oxfordshire Local History Association. October 2026

The Government’s COBRA committee has today, finally sat up and taken notice. In a cost of living crisis the price of food is about to go through the roof as crops fail both in the UK and across the continent, which is where we import most of our fresh fruit and veg from most of the year. As the Starmer Government was in its final days and the King of the North was preparing to ride into town (on a train, not a horse) to assume the crown, his team reached out to Muck in mid May seeking views on five Climate and Nature policies that were high priorities for early implementation. One of them was: ”Focus on food security to tackle  the cost of living crisis. We need to grow far more of our own food, especially horticultural produce  as climate breakdown and the  increasing difficulties of international supply chains make our strategy of ‘cheap’ imports unsustainable, and risk sudden and substantial price rises for foods people rely on (its already happening). The horticulture sector needs significant investment and guaranteed prices to make that investment viable”.

In the intervening three months since I wrote that, it has proved it to be both appropriate advice, and startlingly risky too. Growing our own food in the current conditions as farmers all over the country will attest, has become extraordinarily difficult. But importing it from wildfire-ravaged Spain or other parts of southern Europe which are far better prepared for these climatic conditions? Well, that looks like a challenge too. And a very expensive one for consumers across the continent and beyond. The cost of living crisis and the water shortages/drought and excess heat of the past few months (and for how much longer?) are inextricably bound up, whether that be people struggling to survive in over heated flats without access to shade or parks, or the prices we will all have to pay for basic foodstuffs. Who knew that the climate crisis had massive today, right now, impacts on ordinary people’s lives. But who took any notice when 30 years ago scientists warned that by the mid-2020s this would be the likely scenario if nothing was done. Well we are in the mid 2020s now, and that mere 30 minutes of rain is really is the news story.

‘Nature writing’ is the publishing industry’s ‘sweet spot’ at the moment. Such is its popularity that one well known writer in the genre said to me recently ‘People seem to think they can take a ten minute walk and then write a book about it’. The subject isn’t new, Gilbert White’s ‘Natural History of Selborne’ published in 1789 is probably the origin of the species, with luminaries such as Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth and Nan Shepherd in the twentieth shaping the agenda. But its popularity has exploded in the past twenty years; Robert MacFarlane, Helen McDonald, Nicola Chester, Ian Sinclair and Robin Lane Fox all having distinctive takes on the subject. History, memoir, adventure, mysticism, edgeland, the derive of the urban explorer, it’s all there. What this seems to say is that there is a yearning for something missing in many people’s busy, stressed, urban lives – a connection with nature and the earth which reading about it can sometimes be a substitute for, and sometimes an inspiration to get stuck in too.

For me the Lord Muck blog feels like an online diary which I can share with other gardening enthusiasts. If I wasn’t a keen gardener and observer of nature in the garden I wouldn’t have anything to write about.  Looking back over the thirteen years I’ve been blogging the focus has shifted somewhat – at least in part because recent health issues have curtailed my digging, pruning, and composting exploits. There has been a shift to a more arts-based perspective, the exhibition on Soils at Somerset House (not at all what you might expect – that’s artists for you!) another on decolonising Jamaican flora, and a visit to Ian Hamilton-Finlay’s garden-cum-sculpture park at Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills outside Edinburgh. A couple of favourites penned a decade apart, were about a visit to a permaculture festival in rural Iceland – rock music in an abandoned fish processing factory, midnight feasts under the midnight sun; and a history of the turnip-as-insult. Remember that tabloid headline ‘Swedes 2 Turnips 1’ after the England football team’s defeat by Sweden in 1999? Neither had very much to do with the gentle art of gardening as commonly practiced, but they were huge fun to write!

This article first appeared in The Oxford Writer no 96, March 2026.

A substantial spell of cold weather matters for many plants. That term vernalisation is the process where the cold is key to successful germination in a wide variety of plants. Traditionally garlic is ‘planted on the shortest day and harvested on the longest’. Why? Because garlic needs the cold of December-February to trigger the seed clove to produce a number of cloves in the new plant as it grows. The same applies to soft fruit like blackcurrants and gooseberries, and ‘top fruit’ such as apples and pears. All of them need about six weeks of consistently cold weather each winter. This not just to kill of bugs and pests – though that helps, but because they need a ‘chill factor’ as part of their seasonal renewal. And these days we aren’t getting it. How long ago is it since we consistently had six weeks of cold frosty and snowy weather in southern England each December-February? Quite a while. So much so that a 2-3 week spell seems both unusual and a cause for gardeners and growers to breathe a sigh of relief. And its not just fruit trees and the like that are affected; there is a tradition that root crops like parsnips are best not lifted until there have been a few frosts on them. Why? Because the frost encourages the plants to break down starch into sugars, and makes them all the tastier for us when harvested.

Meanwhile the cry goes up that as a nation we need more food security. Global instability and climatic changes that lead to crop failures in countries we increasingly rely on to feed us, are driving up food prices and with it a critical element of the cost of living crisis. So we should grow more ourselves and import less. While we do grow most of our food – just, arounf 53% , that proportion has dropped significantly since a high point in the early 1980s. Far more focus on horticulture as opposed to arable crops will help on the food security front. Meantime we just have to hope for less winter rain and their accompanying devastating floods, and a few more of those cold frosty winter days instead. The hedgehogs will thank us too.

This being the 100 anniversary there was a talk in the house after lunch by early printing collaborator Michael Hamish Glen who worked with Hamilton Finlay when he was very young. Charming, amusing, and informative. A fascinating coda; he is now (relatively recently) the partner of Sue Finlay who was H-F’s wife, and mother of his two children, and left him in 1990. I dont think he was the easiest person to live or work with. Michael was keen to point out – correctly I’m sure, just how important Sue was as a collaborator, particularly in relation to the construction of the garden. Hamilton Finlay had ideas, many of them good ones, but needed people to make them happen. The story of many great artists down the ages. Both of these two in different periods of his life and in relation to different art forms very much did this. Michael’s insights in to Hamilton-Finlays work and methods really made the day.

The garden is a bit of a walk from the car park, so the day managed to combine a stimulating talk (with souvenir print keepsake), a garden visit like no other, and a spectaular country walk from farm cottage and garden to car park in late summer sunshine. A combination that surely Ian Hamilton Finlay would have approved of, and no doubt enjoyed himself on many occasions. Cheers to his memory!

It is a big subject, slavery was a really important engine of wealth creation for the British Empire, not least for the merchants of Bristol. But this is part of the problem with the exhibition. It has been squeezed into a relatively small space in the museum. The result is that it promises more than it delivers. Ashman’s insight is to foreground the minute illustrations of African figures in Lindsay’s illustrations of his book, so creating an alternative narrative that explores how indigenous and African-Jamaicans used plants to resist their enslavement. It is certainly enlightening to discover what enslaved Africans and indigenous Jamaicans would have used as a form of resistance and connection to spirituality. So, Bellyache Bush was used as an abortifacient. The leaves and uncooked tubers of the Cassava were used to assist for both birth control and poison, while the Antidote Caccoon was considered an antidote to poison.  Plants with a spiritual dimension included Spiritweed – said to protect from malevolent ‘duppies’ or ghosts. The magic of horticulture is a key element of the work – plants as resistance, growing as rebellion. All this is stated and explained in the exhibitions accompanying explanatory texts, but in terms of source materials or responses to them there isn’t the room (or perhaps the funding?) to provide something that really seizes the imagination. Glimpses yes, a case made for sure, but a sense that there is so much more to explore that we don’t get to see.

I had a preconception that I’d be mucking around in something muddy and interactive and wondered if it would be quite small and a bit errr…. grey and dusty.  Not at all! This has to rate as one of the more extraordinary and revelatory exhibitions I’ve been to in some time. Now I know  something about soil… or I think I do. After all I’ve been digging, growing, composting, mulching and generally enjoying the Muck in soils for decades. They can’t tell me anything new. But actually it opens up a whole set of new vistas and understandings of a subject that collectively I sense we both feel we know a lot about – after all we stand on the stuff a great deal of our lives, and often not so much – we don’t examine it all that closely, except when we do.  So seeing it in a completely new context, an exhibition space, and  presented in ways that definitely aren’t grey and dusty  gives anyone, including Lord Muck, a completely new perspective.

Kicking things off are a series of photographs  by Frances Bourely of creatures that live in the soil and contribute so much to it – dung beetles and the like, highly magnified,  images somewhere between horror and surrealism. Jo Pearl  has a  wonderful collection of strange creatures hanging from wires, drifting in space,  an installation she describes as ‘oddkin’,  ‘…an attempt to overcome squeamishness and germophobia about soil’. So lovely, they look like something from an unusual Christmas tree decoration box. And of course they are all fashioned from clay.

The exhibition is staged over several floors and this is put to good use for example in a wonderful set of photographs  by Jim Richardson titled ‘Big Bluestem’ of the prarie plant.  Basically its ‘just grass’ on the American Praries. But look underneath in the soil. No wonder the ‘Dust Bowl’ occurred. This grass, so unprepossessing on the surface  has a rootscape  documented over six lightbox panels (three more are above ground) stretching down over four metres. No chance of being blown away or struggling in drought. Until  ‘civilisation’ got to work. Some of the ideas are so simple; a series of what look like they could be photographs of distant planets turn out to be  the result of soil  interacting directly with moistened colour film, soil and chemicals producing dramatic multicoloured images.

Fungus gets a big shout out too. More stunning photography  from Jo Pearl and even more extraordinary,  a collective called Marshmallow Laser Feast  who take us on a  filmic underground journey to reveal the way fungi roots break down and recycle dead plant and animal matter. The network  nourishes the mushrooms above ground which  in turn shed their spores out into the air. It’s no accident that the film is continuous – just like the ecological cycle it records.

Not everything about the soil is underground though. The utterly charming photographs by Ken Griffiths  ‘A country cottage calendar 1974’, records in  a dozen monthly snapshots the rebirth, growth, flowering, harvesting and return to dormancy of the garden of an elderly couple, the Sweetman’s  across a year. It is touching  not least because they aren’t recorded doing any actual gardening, but rather stand proudly in it just knowing what they and nature have created. More  troubling is a film originally shot in the 1930s and 40s in what was then the Holy Land  by a Scottish missionary seeking to record the flowers of this even then contested land. The original film – shot in colour, unusual for that time itself had lain unwatched for decades  until it was restored and reframed as  an elegy to something past and yet not forgotten. The beauty of Palestine – mainly as far as I could tell shot around the Sea of Galilee, was obvious; lake, landscapes, flowers and the friends and family of the minister picnicking, walking, and examining and picking the flora in an unhurried and unselfconscious way – little realising  the dystopian horrors of what was to follow. Locals got practically no look in – so some things never change –  a point made in the remake. Despite its surface beauty a difficult and moving watch,  and a different take on the meaning and significance of soil. And finally .. a chance to get  hands dirty. Almost.  A highly amusing  installation, a kitchen where nature cooks up the soil.  A  tap drips onto limestone, the content of a fruit bowl rot,  a mixer  plays with river sediments. What a discovery ”Soil” is.  And yet  there it is, underneath us every day. As the exhibition sub-title puts it, ‘A world at our feet’. A joy!

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.

Why was Ward so taken with these unplanned and largely unloved spaces? His intellectual journey  was influenced by a number of anarchist and utopian writers, notably Peter Kropotkin, especially his books Mutual Aid (1902) and Fields, factories, and workshops of tomorrow  (1899), which Ward re-edited and introduced to a contemporary audience in 1974,  the philosopher Martin Buber, who set out in Paths in utopia  (1949) the difference in the space between what the  political power of state needed to be and what it often was, in the process squeezing out what he referred to as ‘social spontaneity’, and the writings of planners  and educationalists Paul and Percival Goodman whose books Communitas (1947) and Growing up absurd (1960) articulated a view of childhood and the spaces children inhabited, which advocated a more informal  learning environment for children and which was at odds with the rigidity and conformism of the educational system as they knew it.

Ward’s biographer Sophie Scott-Brown (1) sets out the social vision underpinning his anarchism in her Introduction, ‘For Colin Ward, anarchy was ordinary, everywhere and always in action. It happened on our city streets, allotments, around kitchen tables, in village halls, town squares and pub snugs.’  The decentralist and localist impulses, the advocacy of mutual aid, and the focus on human need are what she refers to as ‘an ethics of practice’, the anarchy of everyday life.  This approach led to a world view that did not always sit easily with the anarchist and other countercultural trends that exploded around him from the 1960s onwards.  As Scott-Brown puts it: ‘There were significant differences between his invocations of ‘everyday life’ as a sphere of meaningful political action and the ‘personal politics’ of for example feminist activists. Where he laid much stock in invoking ‘common sense’, the latter sought to challenge and disrupt the very notion of it […. ] His favourite characters, allotmenteers, art teachers or housing co-operativists, may have been on the fringes of society but they were not social outsiders; if anything they were quite the reverse.’  To Ward these were people who practiced the anarchy of everyday life and did so in spaces that they carved out themselves from a more conformist mainstream society. As a young man in his early writings in Freedom he celebrated the occupation of disused military camps by homeless families after the War as a form of instinctive mutual aid which he characterised as ‘the practicability of anarchism’ in the face of a serious shortage of housing. Over time this morphed into a fascination with the area between country and city where a wide range of spaces and settlements and newer forms habitation and livelihood transformed the landscape, what Raymod Williams referred to as ’border country’, and what has more recently come to be known as ‘edgelands’.  Ward explored these spaces where he and fellow writers including Dennis Hardy and David Crouch found caravan sites, plotlands, camping grounds, smallholdings, allotments and children’s dens and hiding places.

The attraction was not just to these intermediate physical spaces in themselves, but also to the activities, or ’social space’ that Buber identified, and that they frequently engendered. It is this which Jeff Bishop and Paul Hoggett (2) analysed and celebrated, that of the unexplored world of the hobby or enthusiasm, of how people organise their joint activities in their spare time, and the vast myriad of everyday cultural and leisure activities and the clubs, groups, associations and federations created to sustain them.  These activities are about communication, neighbourliness, sharing and mutual support, rather than competition, whether that be cricket clubs, model railway enthusiasts or ballroom dancing.  While many like upholstery, snooker or drama, are physically quite bounded, many others such as canal or railway preservation, metal detecting or orienteering take advantage of the same intermediate physical spaces as well as enhancing that social space in their locality too.  The further the authors delved into the subject the more they felt that they had stumbled ‘into an area of social life which was massive in its proportions, rich in detail and of fascinating complexity, but almost completely overlooked.’ For Ward this was an infectious delight in the ordinary; anarchy in action.

Ward’s interest in the land and its opportunities whether that was for squatting, self-build, or small-scale agriculture have lengthy antecedents. One of the many themed issues of Anarchy under his editorship between 1961-70 was one on ‘The Land’ (no 41, July 1964). The issue focuses mainly on agriculture and he wrote (under the pen name of John Ellerby) on the importance of small-scale agriculture and industrial production, reprising Kropotkin’s ideas in Fields factories and workshops (which indeed doubles as the title of his article). Kropotkin, way ahead of his time in many ways, emphasises that humans are an intrinsic part of nature – ecological sensibility – and that soils could be improved in terms of productivity by human activity as small-scale agriculturalists and allotmenteers well know.  In this context he also emphasised the importance of intensive agriculture, horticulture, market gardening, intensive field cultivation, greenhouses and kitchen gardens. He prefigures the more recent concerns around organic growing, ‘human scale technology’, permaculture and community gardens, all of which Ward champions. One of Ward’s most insightful analysts is Stuart White (3) who connects his Town-Country ‘social vision’ through garden cities, housing coops, community gardens and allotments to small scale industrial production in community workshops, and the mutuality of Local Exchange Trading Schemes.  While this can, with a little imagination, be seen as a vision of a possible future society, Ward is generally more concerned with what people can and do experience right now.

His interest in self-build movements in housing, he was a great admirer of Walter Segal’s methods and successes in south east London, was most fully articulated in his work with Dennis Hardy on ‘plotlands’ (4) where he traces their history starting at the end of the nineteenth century when working class people began to purchase land within a reasonable distance of cities such as London at depressed prices. The term ‘plotlands’ came about because when land was ’dirt cheap’ in the agricultural depression which lasted from the 1870s to 1939, it was parcelled up into ‘plots’ by speculators and sold off, often for £5 or less per plot. The purchasers built on the plots and in doing so new communities, most famously Peacehaven in Sussex and Jaywick Sands in Essex became established. They weren’t exactly loved by local planners or their neighbours, but rather seen as ‘bungaloid growth’ in a pristine landscape. As White puts it: ‘Many middle class observers viewed the developments at the time with alarm and disdain, and post war planning legislation was motivated in part by a desire to prevent them happening again. Ward however is deeply impressed by the episode. Where others see an unpleasant untidiness, even a ‘vast pastoral slum’, Ward sees a prime example of creative direct action by which working class people crawled out of the very real urban slums in which they lived and found for themselves a modest place in the sun.’  A ‘peopled landscape’ was what Ward called these places, somewhere that low income families ‘gained the freedom to move into a more spacious life that was taken for granted by their betters’. Ward describes the process (5) ‘Mr Fred Nichols of Bowers Green in Essex was in his seventies. He had a poverty-stricken childhood in East London and a hard and uncertain life as a casual dock worker. His plot 40ft wide and 100ft long cost him £10 in 1934.  First he put up a tent which his family and friends used at weekends, and he gradually accumulated tools timber and glass which he brought to the site strapped to his back as he cycled the 25 miles from London. For water he sank a well in the garden. His house was called ‘Perseverance’.’ It reminds me of the ‘horticultural strips’ I came across outside Bidford on Avon when I was working for Warwickshire county council and responsible amongst other things, for their farms and smallholdings. These, eight in all, are an extraordinary remnant from the medieval strip farming systems, long, narrow and typically about 0.5 hectares each. A cross between an allotment and a smallholding they support a thriving community of part-time farmers who have developed an extensive system of sheds and barns where they engage in everything from motorcycle and farm machinery repair to large scale home brewing, as well as the small-scale commercial cultivation of their plots. Marion Shoard poetically refers to these kind of encampments as ‘self-seeded dreamscapes’.  ‘Wildlife diversity here is often far greater than in the surrounding countryside and many of the structures are more fascinating than those of nearby towns and cities.’ (6). Heaven on earth for Ward.

Dreamscapes, self-seeded or not are what attracts many an allotment plot holder to their plot and what Ward and his fellow author David Crouch home in on in their book The allotment, its landscape and culture (1988). For them the allotment is a marginal but vital place where people of modest means can reclaim something of their own lives and where old patterns of mutual aid still flourish, where the ‘gift relationship’ is simply part of the fabric of life. What plot holder has never given away to neighbours lovingly tended veg in a time of glut, or gratefully accepted seedlings after their own were ravaged by slugs? The allotment is not just about food production but a cultural freedom that has thrived on official disregard and neglect. The image of the allotment as tatty old eyesore is correct, if that is what the viewer wants to see, but Ward and Crouch insist that it be granted the dignity of its own unique if accidental aesthetic. Many a photographer over the past thirty years has come to the same conclusion, with moving and insightful results. This is a peopled landscape undesigned, diverse and rooted in a history which seems to run back over five hundred years, as the Bidford plot holders attest to. Ward and Crouch celebrate the immigrant in the tapestry of allotment history, men such as Sebastien Espada the anarchist refugee from the Spanish Civil War who in the 1940s used his training in horticulture to grow peppers, aubergines, and even Kentucky tobacco on his plot in Ealing, until the Excise Man came calling.  That tradition of immigration driving innovation, learning, and reform on allotment sites continues to this day. The Chair of my own site is a young Palestinian woman, while other plot holders are Kurdish, Algerian, Chinese, American, Serbian and Polish. An Iranian refugee currently housed on the Bibby Stockholm barge visits a British family and is to be found helping with the pruning, mowing, and weeding on their plot. Trained as a carpenter in a previous life, he has constructed a series of raised beds on their plot that are the glory of the site. The nature and composition of the working class that Ward and Crouch refer to has changed in the nearly forty years since they wrote The Allotment, but the allotment still represents, for them and us a particularly vital landscape. As they put it: ‘..a working class landscape, a productive landscape, conforming to no ‘style’ … found in conditions of need and poverty… it is an intensive and inventive landscape, free from everyday outside controls and forced by necessity towards initiative and invention.’

In a sense this is what Ward recorded in Cotters and squatters (2002), marginalised groups setting about creating their own futures under the noses of authority. He describes the ‘free miners’ in the Forest of Dean who in the nineteenth century existed as ‘a community of small proprietors [with] a considerable degree of independence and freedom from authority’, and the history of popular squatting in Royal forests, something refugees were reported to be doing in the New Forest in 2023, and more extensively in the Calais ‘jungle’ at Sangatte as they attempt to reach the UK; ‘people’s history’ being played out in real time.

In my experience, allotments these days rather than being the preserve of the stereotypical male, the old man cycling home with a bunch of carrots over the handlebars,  are as much or more for children, especially as families, perhaps reinterpreting the aspiration of Harry Thorpe’s advocacy of  allotments as ‘leisure gardens’ in the 1960s, are to be found  ensconced on their plot appreciating the sunshine and birdsong,  while their children are making mud pies, chasing pigeons, finding little spaces of their own between the hedge and their parents shed, gleaning harvest leftovers, or helping with the barbeque on a weekend evening as friends join them for  music, beer and song at the end of a long day.  For children allotments are a safe space, and a recurring theme in Ward’s The Child in the City (1978) is children’s creative appropriation of city spaces. Ward contrasts American playgrounds ‘designed for insurance companies’ with what he argues all urban children should have access to, ‘gardens where they can keep their pets, and enjoy their hobbies, and perhaps watch their fathers working with real tools; secret places where they can create their own worlds; the shadow and mystery that lend enchantment to play.’

In a way allotments can be described as quintessential Ward. Scott-Brown quotes Ward as saying ‘I am not a utopian anarchist – I look for day to day anarchist solutions.’   and she goes on to say ‘If the utopian pursued anarchism as an entire social design the latter [Ward] took it as a multipurpose gadget for loosening the restraints of everyday life. As a propagandist, he championed the designs, but by personal and intellectual convictions he was a gadget man, presenting ideas as resources to be picked over for the bits that could be used in the present.’ Ward himself in his book Influences (1991) in summing up why Martin Buber was so important to him said, ‘Buber’s exploration of the paths to utopia, far from confirming an acceptance of the way things are, confirms, [….] that the fact that there is no route map to utopia does not mean that there are no routes to more accessible destinations.’ What Ward found on allotments and similar places of escape or play were those ‘accessible destinations’ for an anarchist, right in our midst.

References:

1. Sophie Scott-Brown: Colin Ward and the art of everyday anarchy. Routledge 2023

2. Jeff Bishop and Paul Hoggett: Organising around enthusiasms; mutual aid in leisure.  Comedia 1986

3. Stuart White: Social anarchism, lifestyle anarchism and the anarchism of Colin Ward. Anarchist Studies Vol 18 no 2 2011. pp 92-104

4. Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward: Arcadia for all: The legacy of a makeshift landscape. Mansell 1984

5. Colin Ward:  A peopled landscape, in Richer futures fashioning a new politics ed Ken Worpole Earthscan 1999.

6. Marion Shoard: ‘The age-old appeal of living life on the edge’.  Observer 6 March 2011.

This article first appeared in the July/August 2024 special issue of  Town & Country Planning to mark the 100th anniversary of Colin Ward’s birth.