The Garden of Forking Paths*

Who is Iain Sinclair, and where did he come from? That’s what people in London wanted to know in the early 1970s, east of Liverpool Street Station. His formative years were gradually disclosed in instalments on the covers and fly-leaves of small poetry collections and the bylines to essays in journals and magazines, as he began to make an impression on the little press scene and the world of low-budget film-making. He grew up in Wales, was educated at Trinity College, Dublin (soon to interview former Trinity alumnus Samuel Beckett in Paris), and was familiar with Black Mountain College and West Coast America ‘Beat’ culture (and said to be on first name terms with Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti).

For Sinclair’s eightieth birthday, writer, editor, event and film producer, Gareth Evans, has now produced this illuminating compendium of appreciations by many of the writers, artists and others associated with Iain Sinclair’s prodigious output over the past fifty years. They are the result, as Rachel Lichtenstein describes, ‘of so many fantastic collaborations and memorable events along the way, with performances in in subterranean basements, slaughterhouses, ancient crypts and under Victorian railway arches.’  This festschrift tells us much more now, though readers are advised to bear in mind that in the world of psychogeography the unreliable narrator is king, so the reader still has to add their own interpretation and read between the lines.

When I think of Iain Sinclair in the early days I also think of B.S.Johnson, another writer and film-maker making waves at the same time. One of Johnson’s short films in particular has always stayed with me: a short film about stick insects, a creature Johnson adopted as his familiar. Why so? Because, he explained in his voice-over narration, the stick insect contorts itself into such alarming postures that would-be predators tend to give it a miss. B.S.Johnson wanted to be unassimilable. So did Iain Sinclair.

However, his early psycho-geographic ruminations complicated this refusal to find a niche. There were tensions with some local historians when he started his walks and expeditions around Stepney, Whitechapel and Hackney. The prevailing tradition still foregrounded Jewish communist and anarchist topographies and mythologies, as in the work of Bill Fishman, Arnold Wesker, Simon Blumenfeld, Willy Goldman, Joe Jacobs, Alexander Baron and others.  Sinclair’s early interest in Jack the Ripper, The Krays, and pub culture gangsterism, was regarded as suspect, as were forays into mysticism, ley lines, and pagan aetiologies. All this is picked up in Jenny Turner’s insightful LRB review of Sinclair’s novel, Radon’s Daughters, her essay an invaluable tour d’horizon reprinted towards the end of the collection.

Around this time a new generation of historians – often fanning out from the Spitalfields home of Raphael Samuel and his then partner Anna Davin in the early 1970s – were more interested in housing conditions, and the lives of working-class women and children. Landmark monographs were Raphael Samuel’s East End Underworld (1981), Jerry White’s Rothschild’s Buildings (1980), Anna Davin’s Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870 – 1914 (1996), multiple works on women’s history by Hackney-based Sheila Rowbotham, Rachel Lichtenstein’s and Iain Sinclair’s Rodinsky’s Room (1999), and Sarah Wise’s The Italian Boy (2004). All were part of an extensive network of ‘barefoot’ historians associated with the Ruskin History Workshop – indeed Samuel, Davin and Rowbotham were founder members – and their approach was admirably collegiate, and their achievements mark the high tide of post-war ‘extramural’ adult education and democratic working practices.

Out in the territory: Hackney Wick, 2023 © Ken Worpole

Sinclair’s methodology was collegiate also, but in his own way: the early essays and books were frequently based on ‘lighting out for the territory’ with an entourage of friends and fellow spirit diviners, and exhibited a distinct Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters vibe. Central to this new aesthetic, was the act of walking, famously advocated by the Situationists a decade before, though not to the same compelling effect, which Sinclair’s adoption, and sometimes febrile extrapolation, achieved.

Despite other recent forays into the territory, notably by the pseudonymous chronicler, The Gentle Author, on the website Spitalfields Life, it is still Sinclair who commands attention, and exerts the most influence. Gareth Evans’s editorial epilogue – together with Patrick Keiller’s affectionate tribute – both highlight the key question raised by the collection: did Iain Sinclair and his acolytes create a wholly new school of urban literary aesthetics? This festschrift is the first proper exposition suggesting that Iain’s version of psycho-geography – a form gaining much of its suggestive power from anthropological ‘thick description’ – really did create one of the most significant literary endeavours of the past 50 years. There now seems agreement – endorsed here by Robert Macfarlane and Michael Moorcock – that Sinclair’s achievement was in essaying a new literary style, part anthropological and part mischievous, which not only magicked up a world of urban entropy, but often named the guilty parties.

The influence of Sinclair’s oeuvre on so many others is proven from the testimonies of more than 180 enthusiastic contributors to IS 80. Furthermore, the book represents a persuasive case study of the ‘mycorrhizal’ or rhizome network (in Rob Thirtle’s formulation), based not on shared institutional, political or regional attachments and identities, but extending horizontally underground, without fear or favour. As digital networks expand apace to trap us all in their nets, IS 80 offers an alternative model for collaboration in the culture of dissent. The image of the writer as a hermit, isolated in a room of their own with just a wastepaper basket for company is passé. If you are not outdoors, in company, and on the qui vive, then you can’t be serious any more.

*IS 80: a festschrift for Iain Sinclair, Haggerston Hound Printworks, 2023

KW

A House at the End of Life

 

The much-expanded new edition of Modern Hospice Design: the architecture of palliative and social care, will be published on 29 September 2023. The first edition sold well and was widely cited in the professional literature, leading to conference invitations and talks, which in turn meant I realised how much there was still to be discovered. In the years since the book’s first publication in 2009 a lot has happened in the provision of residential care for older people and those suffering from terminal health conditions, so an update was badly needed. Routledge were keen on this to happen, and now it has, and it looks terrific.

At the heart of the new edition are case studies detailing four very different but bold and imaginative approaches to social care: an impressive retirement village for more than 400 residents in Nottingham with an ambitious programme of communal activities; an inspiring new hospice in Eastbourne with its own orchard gardens and inviting atrium café and facilities for patients, visitors and the local community; a new ‘woodland’ Maggie’s Centre in the grounds of Southampton’s large general hospital; and a stunning new almshouse in Southwark with a focus on a welcoming public lounge and extensive courtyard and rooftop gardens.

All were the result of independent ‘not-for-profit’ organisations – with well-established roots in their communities – working with sympathetic architects to develop sensitive approaches to local needs, but with an eye on a long-term ability to adapt as local conditions require. Such experimental approaches are needed now more than ever, as the dominant trend today is, unfortunately, for the residential care sector to be taken over by large private companies which rely on standardisation in design and management as the only way to survive. These are not the best conditions for care, especially for the elderly and vulnerable.

It is intended that the book will encourage more local, independent ways of thinking about residential and palliative care provision, ones which reflect the specific needs and interests of the communities they serve – including innovative ways of funding them – rather than the one size fits all model which is coming to dominate the care sector in a never-ending ‘age of austerity’. This is particularly urgent given the serious problems visited upon the social care sector during the Covid epidemic. Institutional resilience and responsiveness come through community and place specific design, management, staffing and public accountability, not through boardroom fiat and low-cost standardisation.

Here is what the publishers have written:

Rooted in the social history of the care of the elderly and terminally ill, Modern Hospice Design: The Architecture of Palliative and Social Care takes cognisance of the new conditions of social care in the 21st century, principally in the UK, Europe and North America. It does so with regard to the development of new building types, but also in response to new philosophies of palliative care and the status of the elderly and the dying.

Benefitting from a clearer methodological approach and conceptual framework, the expanded book allows a broad section of readers to navigate the text more easily. At its core is a public discussion of a philosophy of design for providing care for the elderly and the vulnerable, taking the importance of architectural aesthetics, the use of quality materials, the porousness of design to the wider world, and the integration of indoor and outdoor spaces as part of the overall care environment. In doing so it advocates care settings that, in the words of Maggie Jencks whose life and ideas inspired the Maggie’s Centres, ‘rise to the occasion’. Including new chapters and new in-depth case studies, complete will full colour illustrations, this book is for architects and interior designers and their students, healthcare professionals, social care providers, estate and facility managers, hospital administrators and Healthcare Trust Boards.

It was a joy to visit the new case study projects, as can be seen from the photographs that follow, of which there are many more in the book.

Courtyard garden at Appleby Blue Almshouse, Southwark

Street-style public atrium at St Wilfrid’s Hospice, Eastbourne

More details about the book can be found here:

I was pleased to see a double-page spread in the Financial Times at the weekend focusing on one of the case studies: Appleby Blue Almshouse in Southwark, commissioned by United St Saviour’s Trust and designed by Witherford Watson Mann Architects. This is an outstanding building and I am sure will become a model of how to respond to local needs with a highly sophisticated, place-based design, involving much consultation with local people and community care organisations.

https://www.ft.com/content/a63bf568-53e5-4020-98f7-9ae34d526232

The point of this new edition is to help raise expectations about what is meant by good quality care in the 21st century, when at present the omens are not hopeful.

KW

Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Grayson Perry

St Peter-on-the-Wall, 7th century chapel at Bradwell

Two buildings dominate the flat, estuarine landscape of the Dengie Peninsula in Essex where the River Blackwater meets the sea: the austere 7th century chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, and the decommissioned 20th century Bradwell power station, the latter wrapped up like a monumental installation by the artist Christo. Both are somewhat forbidding in their austere muteness, and during the controversy over the building of the power station, some supporters of the development suggested they shared similar architectural and symbolic characteristics – a hard stretch by any criteria. But there they are, and there they will be for a long time to come. When Bradwell A was being developed no thought was given to the possibility that one day it might need to be decommissioned, let alone demolished.

This and many other stories are told in a new collection of essays called St Peter-on-the-Wall: Landscape and Heritage on the Essex Coast, edited by Johanna Dale, now published by UCL Press. Having contributed a chapter to the book on the Othona Community – which now occupies the former Roman site – I should declare an interest. Nevertheless, that chapter is only one of many, making up a wide-ranging collection of new and fascinating material, sure to become the definitive work, giving St Peter’s the religious and cultural importance it deserves.

The subjects covered start with the story of the original Roman fort at Othona, and its place in a European network of such impressively built, shore forts. Apart from acting as military command centres, the forts also served to store and process provisions (meat, grain and other food products) for the extensive Roman army, often on the move. Following the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain, the story turns to the evangelising mission of St Cedd and ‘the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England’ in the 7th century. This led to the construction of St Peter’s, in large part from the remains of the Roman fort. Further chapters go on documenting the Victorian excavations and subsequent suppositions as to the chapel’s original design, and then on an appreciation of the place of St Peter’s chapel in contemporary theological understandings of sacred places, together with revived traditions of pilgrimage and human and ecological sanctuary.

The fourteen highly detailed and fully annotated chapters are not dry, academic essays, but vivid reconstructions of the Roman and Anglo-Saxon worlds of sea-faring warriors, colonisers and settlers, but also of footsore missionaries tramping from one sainted landscape to another. Several historians challenge the contemporary trope that the site of St Peter’s is an ‘edge of the world’ setting – an assumption I am certainly guilty of – by reminding readers how vital was sea-going in the time of St Cedd. David Petts writes convincingly that ‘rather than framing (Bradwell) as somewhere on the edge, I want to place it, and other medieval monastic sites, as places at the centre of things.’ We are reminded that many monastic settlements chose to establish themselves on islands, or on coastal promontories, because of the need to move as easily as possible in their Christianising endeavours (or on some occasions to facilitate the need to escape).

Pilgrimage to St Peter’s chapel in the mid-1950s, courtesy of Katherine Weaver

Since Victorian times and the growth of public interest in archaeology and other ‘origin stories’, the shallow remains of the Roman fort, and the simple four-square structure of St Peter’s Chapel, have aroused widespread interest, and some controversy. Having reached some agreement on the basic floorplan, side elevations and roof of the original chapel, debate has continued as to the most appropriate schemes for restoration: basically, whether to glam it up or keep it simple. I suspect most of those who have been to the chapel, and are entranced by its gaunt asperity, would incline to the ‘less is more’ persuasion. As to the power station it has become an immoveable object. Perhaps it too will grow into understated eminence, as it endures many decades of future ‘stasis’ that Gillian Darley’s chapter envisages.

In an age of anxiety about climate change, and the long-term future of human habitats across the world, the Othona site, along with St Peter’s chapel, now stands as a beacon in the landscape for other reasons. The Othona Comunity has now been there for more than seventy years as a quiet retreat, operating today largely off-grid. The chapel itself is a site of pilgrimage – a destination for some, but also a landmark on the longer Essex Way. In that role it is now joined by the neo-baroque ‘House for Essex’ designed by artist Grayson Perry in collaboration with FAT Architecture, whose fairy-tale back-story is told by architect Charles Holland in a concluding chapter.

A House for Essex by FAT/Grayson Perry at Wrabness

Located overlooking the River Stour, Holland writes that ‘A House for Essex was conceived as a contemporary form of pilgrimage chapel, and its site at Wrabness in north-east Essex forms the end point of a notional pilgrimage across the county.’ The building’s exuberant detailing and colourful interior belie the role it plays as an emblematic mausoleum to a make-believe character who now inhabits Essex mythology as powerfully as any former Saxon villein. In its entirety, this collection adds a major contribution to the historical record, and is beautifully edited, and handsomely produced. It would be great to see this book in every public library in Essex, so if you live near one do order it for their shelves.

St Peter-on-the-Wall: Landscape and Heritage on the Essex Coast, edited by Johanna Dale, is published by UCL Press.  There are hardback, paperback and free PDF downloads available. For further details go to: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/211165

KW

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cinematic Skies and Revolutionary Winds

This month marks the tenth anniversary of The New English Landscape blog, now running to seventy-five short essays, reviews and commentary, or 70,000 words. It was started to promote the book of that name published by photographer Jason Orton and myself in autumn 2013, collaboratively exploring in words and photographs the unique topography of the coastline, estuaries, islands, and riparian passageways of Essex. The first edition of 1000 copies sold out within a year and was reprinted, selling out again. Since then, our interest in landscape and history has continued, though Jason’s travels have taken him and his camerasto many places beyond.

The title of this anniversary blog is taken from Chris Petit’s foreword to Est: Collected Reports from East Anglia, published by Dunlin Press in 2015, which captures the spirit of our endeavours, and which was reviewed here at the time. In the past ten years subjects covered have included: walks, cycle rides and talks, and thoughts on artists such as Prunella Clough, Jock McFadyen, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sarah Pickstone, John Christie, and the East London Group. There are also notes on the writings of Arthur Morrison, Helen MacDonald, David Matless, Georges Perec, Margaret Willes, John Boughton, Orhan Pamuk, Thomas Laqueur, J.A.Baker, Alex Niven, Anna Neima, John Berger, Raymond Williams and Colin Ward, amongst others, as well as short essays on the 1953 floods, Detectorists, plotlands, FratingHall Farm, new towns, Focal Point Gallery, the Roding Valley, seaside surrealism, The Law of the Forest, the Peculiar People, Rainham Marshes, the Kindertransport, Henry George and the land question, Tolstoy in Essex, the ‘Threepenny Doctor’, Cedric Morris at Benton End, and, in September 2021, at the more arcane end of the spectrum, ‘The 1946 Conference on the Post-War Loaf’.

My interest in the back-to-the-land and settlement movement in Essex soon had to accept that religion was often as important as politics. There was William Morris and Henry George, of course, but there was also George Lansbury, the ‘Thaxted experiment’, the Salvation Army and the Quakers. Consequently, when I came across the Red Heaven podcast earlier this year, a major new stream of evidence in this inspiring chronicle of radical endeavour suddenly ran clear.

The Red Heaven podcast opens up a compelling portal into the story of the religious movements or the ‘social gospel’ that linked London’s east end with rural ‘radical Essex’ throughout the 20th century. This emerged famously through the life and work of Conrad Noel (aka ‘The Red Vicar’) at The Church of St John the Baptist with Our Lady and Saint Laurence in Thaxted from 1910 until his death in 1942, when he was then succeeded by his son-in-law, Father Jack Putterill, who carried on the revolutionary social justice tradition until 1973. But there were many others, as the series of fascinating interviews reveals.

The story of revolutionary Anglo-Catholicism and Christian Socialism – once strong in Essex- was informed by sympathetic connections to agricultural trade-unionism, the Workers’ Educational Association, pageant theatre and urban music hall, as well as to the Edwardian folk revival, the arts and craft movement, Catholic processionals, Morris dancing and choral music (courtesy of Imogen Holst). This is told in the course of 26 episodes of the podcast to date, though I have now been asked to provide the 27th, which can now be found via the link below. All of this is thanks to Dr Simon Machin who has developed, hosted, recorded and broadcast this uplifting story.

Link to Red Heaven ​https://www.redheavenproject.com/

The illustrations are taken from the allegorical map which acts as the frontispiece to my copy of General William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out, first published in 1890. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Salvation Army, as did my father, ‘because at least they go into the pubs’. As he often did himself.

K.W.

Dig Where You Stand ‘The Threepenny Doctor’: Doctor Jelley of Hackney

In 1973 I was involved in an oral history project in Hackney organised under the title, ‘A People’s Autobiography of Hackney’. We put notices in the local newspaper and sent leaflets to tenants’ associations in the borough, asking if older residents wanted to share their memories of growing up and living in Hackney in the decades at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. There was a good response and a number of recordings were made, a lot of the material eventually finding publication in one form or another. One figure stood out in many people’s recollections, and that was Dr Jelley, otherwise known as ‘the Threepenny Doctor’, who rode the streets of Clapton and Homerton on a horse before and after the First World War, dispensing medical advice and medicine to the poorest in the district.  He was remembered with admiration and affection by most, and some scepticism by a few.

These reminiscences were in a small pamphlet under the title, The Threepenny Doctor, and it attracted a lot of local interest, as Jelley had by now gained almost mythological status. Ten years later this material was worked up into a play created by The Inner City Theatre Company, touring Senior Citizens’ Clubs in Hackney in 1983, with freshly composed music and lyrics. A touring musical was highly appropriate, given that Jelley himself was the subject of a popular music hall song, ‘Doctor Shelley’, written by Edgar Bateman and Huntley Trevor, and sung by one of the great names of music hall: Harry Champion. In recent years there has been a renewal of interest in this pioneering if controversial figure, Dr Jelley, with a learned essay by Dr Andrea Tanner in the Journal of Medical Biography, and some new material on his early life, published at the beginning of this year on the website: https://edwinbutlerdiaries.com/the-history-of-mr-jelley/

Henry Percy Jelley was born in 1866 in Totnes, Devon and was a medical student in Edinburgh during the 1880s. In 1911 he opened a surgery at 172/174 High Street, Homerton, Hackney from which he built up a large clientele of patients unable to afford the fees of other doctors. He claimed at one point to be treating 18,000 patients a year, riding from one slum street to the next, sometimes with jeers and taunts from children playing out, to which he did not take kindly, often appearing in front of the magistrates for abusive behaviour. On one occasion, fined seven shillings and sixpence for offensive behaviour, he paid the fine in farthings. A difficult man who had the best of intentions in treating the poor, his prickly behaviour often undermined his reputation outside the borough, particularly in the medical and legal professions.

In the year he arrived in Hackney he was married for the second time, to Florrie Glenham, at St Barnabas Church, which was filled with crowds of women and children cheering wildly and scattering confetti everywhere. Irascible to a fault, he nevertheless won hearts and minds by frequent acts of unexpected generosity and kindness. People recalled that on some occasions he visited homes where patients lay sick, bringing his own coal and firewood, and would get down on his hands and knees to light and tend the fire himself. On other occasions he brought food to homes where starvation threatened. Unsurprisingly, as Dr Tanner records ,‘’His behaviour attracted the attention of Parliament, where it was interpreted as the result of severe over-strain and under-payment under the new (National Insurance) Act.’ However, Dr Jelley could not be legislated out of existence. The Times came to the support of Jelley on the 8th February 1913, writing that he was a man who could not be stopped by legislation, and that ‘All the people who used to go to him in troops had gone to him again. They had faith in him.’

Having opened a surgery in Homerton High Street he then went on to take over the former Berry’s Boot Polish factory close by, turning it into a lying-in hospital for women about to give birth. He charged one shilling and sixpence for a week’s stay, a lot less than the standard two-shillings and sixpence other doctors charged for single visit. However, the authorities had suspicions that he performed abortions there. After the police had watched the comings and goings for more than a year, and following the inquest of a woman who had died there, he was charged in June 1916 with ‘wilful murder’ and retained in custody. At his trial three women, other than the deceased, gave evidence that he had performed abortions at his ‘hospital’, and he was sentenced to three years in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight by an all-male jury.

Henry Jelley was struck off the Medical Register. On release from prison, it was clear he had been missed.  According to one interviewee, ‘When he came out of prison, his heart was still with the people of Homerton although he knew his ruin had been caused there. The people were very upset, there was a great gloom over Homerton.’ Unable to earn a living as a doctor, he opened a shop in Bridge Street, Homerton, from which he sold meat, and clothes tailored by himself (a skill he had learned at Parkhurst). In the window of the shop he posted a notice: ‘As I’ve been struck off the register I am no longer able to write death certificates – but why worry, my patients never die.’ Another interviewee recalled: ‘He had several people working for him there, doing machining, making suits and clothes, and I had a nice ‘made to measure’ by him…I also remember him looking after his Christmas puddings boiling away on a coal stove up in the corner of the surgery, watching his puddings at the same time as he was seeing his patients.’ A number of the people we interviewed related stories of miraculous recoveries resulting from Dr Jelley’s treatments to the extent that he became something of a mythological figure. ‘I wish he was alive today,’ one woman told us, ‘I’d go to him.’

He had one more notable operation up his sleeve in his later days in Hackney. He bought an old charabanc and organised trips to the seaside for the older women of Hackney. ‘Now this brake was a tragedy to look at,’ according to one resident who remembered Jelley clearly. ‘It had two sides and it was a shambles…The coach had to be weighed and this weight had to be kept strictly in line.’  This was done at the weighbridge in the ‘dust destructor’ (council rubbish depot) in Millfields. ‘The sight of the coach coming down the road at about ten miles an hour to pull into the dust destructor and go on the weighbridge with the cream of Homerton in it – it was a sight that will live with me forever.’

Without these abiding, detailed, and no doubt at times embellished memories of everyday life, social history would be much poorer – and less true to the felt experience of poverty and injustice.  The Hackney project was inspired by the early days of the ‘History Workshop’ movement based at Ruskin College in Oxford. If my memory serves me correctly, it was at roughly this time that the phrase ‘Dig where you stand’ came into parlance. I remember Anna Davin and Raphael Samuel using it frequently, alongside ‘history from below’, as the two key maxims of the new movement. It had been imported from the work of Swedish political activist Sven Lindqvist in the 1970s, and who published a book under that name in 1978, referred to in the blog preceding this.

Sven Lindqvist’s seminal work on the re-making of social history as a collective, self-conscious exercise, is the subject of a public discussion at the London Review Bookshop on 22 March, 2023. The event marks the publication – finally – of an English translation of Gräv där du står (Dig where you stand) by Repeater Books. In conversation at the event will be Vron Ware, author of Return of a Native and the book’s editors, Astrid von Rosen and Andrew Flinn, with myself in the chair. There is much to talk about!

Time: Wednesday, 22 March, 2023​​​ (7pm – 8.30pm)

Venue: London Review Bookshop, 14 Bury Place, London WC1A 2JL​

Information & booking: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sven-lindqvist-dig-where-you-stand-tickets-524722227307?_eboga=1061121380.1665336484

KW

Club Nights (or Watching the Detectorists)

Toby Jones in ‘Detectorists’

Just before Christmas, Historic England posted a blog, A Brief History of Community Centres in England, illustrated by contemporary colour photographs showing modest and occasionally eccentric buildings scattered across the country. While of minor interest to some architectural historians, attention is now being paid to buildings that have nevertheless played a social role out of all proportion to the modesty of their design and function. From Quaker meeting houses, parish halls and charity settlements, to Labour Clubs, British Legion Halls and Women’s Institutes, the variety is fascinating.  Equally numerous are village halls commemorating the First World War or the 1953 Coronation, along with a lively mix of independent religious and ethnic minority community centres.

Many years ago, I spent a fortnight cycling from John O’Groats to Land’s End on a charity bike ride. What I remember most from that journey was the endless succession of First World War Memorial Halls we passed, as we pedalled from one village to the next. A number played host to us, acting as pit stops, providing tea, sandwiches and cakes. Some were little more than breeze block halls with a cloakroom, toilets, kitchen and a serving hatch; a couple no more than corrugated tin sheds.  Others, though, had full blown raised stages, proscenium arches, pianos, along with fully stocked licensed bars, mirror balls, and PA systems. Yet none would have cost more to build than a suburban family house, though their social role was invaluable.

Just before Christmas I gave a talk in one such hall, two hundred yards from where I first went to school at Davis Lane Primary, just off Leytonstone High Street. The plain brick church hall attached to St John’s Church has been home to a series of monthly Saturday evening talks for nearly 25 years, under the rubric of ‘News from Nowhere’: a regular and popular gathering for the discussion of radical ideas about how we live and how we might live (to cite the words of the forum’s guiding spirit, and local hero, William Morris). The setting reminded me of an aphorism coined by the contrarian, Stuart ‘Whole Earth Catalogue’ Brand, in his polemical architectural treatise, How Buildings Learn, where he asserted that new ideas only come from old buildings, suggesting that new buildings wipe historical memory clean. The atmosphere was suitably low-key and modest, yet wonderfully convivial, with tea and cakes served from behind a traditional serving hatch.

General Browning Moth Club © Bridget Smith

Such buildings, while basic in construction and fitting out, are frequently rich in interior decoration and memorabilia. Nowhere has this been better documented than in artist Bridget Smith’s collection of photographs of London club interiors in her book, ‘Society’, published some years ago by General Public Agency. In his appreciative Afterword, cultural critic Sukhdev Sandhu writes of the ‘pocked notice-boards, national flags, shimmer curtains and mirror balls that evoke stage sets for future debates, but also a provisional and tentative unity underpinning seemingly unconnected organisations.’ He goes on to cite the motto of the Women’s Institute, to ‘make a difference – to the life you lead, to the community you are a part of and to the world you live in.’

Smith’s succession of forty-six colourful club tableaux evinces a profound range of attachments, to identity, shared aspirations, and belonging. These are the clubs of the ‘small platoons’ of society, to cite Edmund Burke’s words – as Sandhu himself does. In her introduction to ‘Society’, Bridget Smith describes the wish to commemorate and celebrate ‘where I live my life, the people and places I encounter and the worlds they create for themselves’, employing the phrase: ‘Dig deep where you are’. This was once a watchword in the community arts movement, and originated as the title of Swedish book by Sven Lindqvist first published in 1978, Gräv där du star, literally ‘Dig where you stand’. By happy coincidence this pioneering work of ‘history from below’ is finally to be published in an English translation in March 2023 by Repeater Books.

Digging deep is taken literally in the BBC television series, Detectorists – for some time a cult programme for landscape enthusiasts. Three series since 2014, and a Christmas Special just broadcast, follow the trials and tribulations of two enthusiastic members of the fictional Danebury Metal Detecting Club (DMDC) and their fellow detectorists, whose weekly meetings are held in the local Scout Hall. While a number of conventional tropes of situation comedy are lovingly employed, underlying each episode is a haunting awareness of the fragile bonds of friendship and community, in a moving excursion of bitter-sweet, open-air theatre.

An absorbing collection of essays about the making of Landscapes of Detectorists, has now been published by Uniformbooks, one of the most original and elegant small presses currently at work in the UK. It is a must-read for those interested in how landscape aesthetics can be explored in popular form while remaining true to the ideas and traditions of human topography. As producer Adam Tandy mischievously writes in his Afterword, ‘BBC Four was basically invented to allow comedies to reference the Venerable Bede.’

Until reading this book I hadn’t realised that writer and actor Mackenzie Crook was inspired to write Detectorists after playing a leading part in Jez Butterworth’s impassioned 2009 play on contemporary rural life and mythology, Jerusalem. Cook’s original vision of the series was, he recalls, initially a much darker vision, more bleak-midwinter (when most metal detecting goes on) than a summer idyll: and more a story of mistrust and in-fighting than friendship. But as the storyline developed, and the characters began to take life, something deeper was brought to the surface: one of amiable ‘citizen-scientists’ taking history back from the professionals, and in doing so weaving a study of modern-day rural life, its social upheavals as well as its pastoral compensations. I loved the series and I loved this book – a real Christmas treat. Happy New Year.

KW

Very pleased that No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen: back to the land in wartime Britain, has already been reprinted. More details: https://www.littletoller.co.uk/shop/books/little-toller/no-matter-how-many-skies-have-fallen-by-ken-worpole/

I’ll be giving a talk about the book at the Essex Record Office in Chelmsford, on Tuesday, 7 February 2023.  For more details and booking: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ero-presents-no-matter-how-many-skies-have-fallen-tickets-459925608877

An Innocent Abroad: The anarchism of Colin Ward

A favourite novel of the late, and much-loved writer and anarchist, Colin Ward, was Huckleberry Finn. Huck’s common-sense decency and independent spirit led him to become one of the great moral heroes of world literature. Another of Mark Twain’s books nevertheless provides the best title to describe the public persona of Ward himself: An Innocent Abroad. For Colin was a self-effacing man who claimed little originality, yet whose influence still resonates in public policy across the world. Talk to anybody concerned with children’s play and his name is mentioned within minutes; the same is true of those involved in squatting and self-build movements, in town planning as a form of civic democracy, in environmental education, and, of course, in the history and practice of anarchism.

Sophie Scott-Brown’s admiring but even-handed and thoughtful study of Ward, Colin Ward and the Art of Everyday Anarchy, starts wonderfully with an emphasis on the ‘ordinariness’ of its subject’s resilient ‘weak power’:

‘For Colin Ward, anarchy was ordinary, everywhere, and always in action. It happened on city streets, allotments, and around kitchen tables, in village halls, town squares and pub snugs. It went about its business quietly, beneath and beyond official notice.

Beneath this calm orderly façade lay startling claims. Schooling is organised mass ignorance. Centralised welfare is coercion by stealth. Ramshackle shanty towns contain more human dignity than the palatial creation of feted architects.’

Claiming to have been bored at school, outdoors Ward was curious about everything. Later on, he became a keen advocate of the idea of ‘schools without walls’, in which students found out how everyday life worked by direct study – trips to the local fire station, sewage farm, rubbish tip, railway station and signal box, farm and factory. In such school trips the inter-dependence of us all in the well-being of each other and society was made concrete. He wasn’t even apologetic about the idea that on occasions letting children or young people work for money, was no big deal, as long as it put none in harm’s way. The title of the book he wrote with Anthony Fyson on this approach to education, Streetwork: The Exploding School, mischievously alludes to stereotypes of anarchists as men in black capes carrying bombs. He was early in espousing the idea that ‘small is beautiful’, for as Scott-Brown writes, ‘Human scale was, for Ward, anarchism’s basic conceptual and methodological principle.’

Luckily he lived during a period when curiosity about human relations was a widening field of discussion and influence, notably in the turn to social psychology and social history in academic and journalistic worlds, so that the writings of people like Langston Hughes, C.Wright Mills, Margaret Mead, Jane Jacobs, Erving Goffman, Studs Terkel, Sven Lindqvist, Richard Hoggart, Richard Titmuss, Josephine Klein and the work of many documentary photographers, were popularised and debated. The 1960s ‘Penguin Revolution’ in paperback publishing strongly aided this informal education process. When the weekly magazine New Society was started in 1962, Ward was, Scott-Brown tells us, ‘an instant fan’. In fact, many of the young writers Ward had published at Anarchy, the magazine he edited for many years, went on to write for New Society.

I first met Colin in Spring 1973, when he came to an in-service training course I attended, then an English teacher in Hackney. At that time, I and other teachers were trying to get pupils out into the streets and parks as much as possible, as well as collecting the reminiscences of their parents and grand-parents of their early lives (our keen interest not always welcomed I soon discovered). We started corresponding and became friends. Those who got to know Colin soon got to know Harriet Ward, about whom Scott-Brown writes warmly. We also shared a common enthusiasm for adventure playgrounds, as Larraine Worpole and I had been involved in setting one up in Brighton in the late 1960s.

Yet they were other times with other priorities and attachments. For example, Scott-Brown finds Ward’s sense of Englishness understandable, if today more problematic. She also draws attention to his assumption of a ‘universal human subject’, now diversified in its multiple identities as to become sociologically beyond reach. On this I am with Ward – in what Scott-Brown calls his ‘hapless everyman’ guise – not yet relinquishing the belief that there is something universal in the human condition, despite so many differences.

Memorial meeting for Colin Ward, Conway Hall, London, 10 July 2010. Photograph: Larraine Worpole

This is a terrific book, in which a writer whom I suspect never met Ward, has nevertheless portrayed him with insight and empathy. There is one Wardian understanding that I have come to value most of all, which alas is not mentioned.  That is his warning against the common assumption, particularly on the left, that ‘the social’ and ‘the political’ are one and the same thing and inter-changeable. They are not. The social is much larger, more inclusive, more porous, more informally constructed and sustained than the political – and less easily captured by vested interests. We make and unmake the social world each day, and that is why it is so flexible and resilient. Which is why for Colin the education process was a lifelong endeavour, preferably learned ‘on the job’, alongside and in co-operation with others. Scott-Brown’s study is wide-ranging, thoughtful and much to be admired.

Colin Ward and the Art of Everyday Anarchy is published by Routledge, July 2022. Buy it from your independent bookshop or order it from your local library.

New podcast: Experiments in Living

Frating Hall Farm, 1950: a pacifist community. Photographer unknown.

Colin Ward’s ideas feature in this new podcast, in which Helsinki-based writer Owen Kelly and I discuss the rise and fall, and rise again, of intentional communities or co-operative housing and work settlements. Free to listen.

Why do we keep returning to experiments in living?

When we build again

The annual Davidson Prize for the best new ideas in housing has just been won by a small consortium including architect Charles Holland, artist Verity Jane-Keefe, the Quality of Life Foundation and Joseph Zeal-Henry. The theme of this year’s prize was co-living – more collective and flexible forms of communal housing design – and the winning team focused on rural renewal on brownfield sites. Here’s their pitch:

Rural areas in the UK suffer from a shortage of affordable housing and are overly reliant on a narrow but ubiquitous development model – often leading to atomised communities of single-family units in car-dependent cul-de-sacs.

Co-Living in the Countryside proposes instead a new type of shared, communal housing to re-invigorate rural communities and attract new and more diverse residents. Addressing community, character, governance, affordability, sustainability, employment, health and wellbeing, the design focuses on solutions for a typical site for new housing within the South Downs National Park. In a new model of co-operatively managed and owned co-housing, individual units are connected by shared facilities such as kitchens, dining rooms, offices, studios and gardens.

The idea is that residents share space, resources and household tasks including gardening and childcare, with shared space and facilities for visiting friends, extended family members and social and community use. The design aims to reduce the need for car ownership and the stress and loneliness of commuting by providing shared working spaces and transport.

A new approach to architectural language encourages owner-adaptation, customisation and personal choice as part of the design process. Takings its cue from experimental rural housing such as the plotlands and other self-build communities, the aim is to establish a new, dynamic model of co-living in the countryside.

Davidson Prize Winner 2022: Detail by kind permission of CLIC (Co-Living In the Countryside)

Both Charles Holland and Verity Jane-Keefe have been involved in a variety of Essex projects over the past decade – Charles famously with his design for Grayson Perry’s A House for Essex, and Verity for her many projects in east London, including her outstandingMobile Museum in Barking and Dagenham, one of the most exquisite celebrations of popular history in a long time.  But neither of them are resting on their laurels: each has had separate exhibitions of their own at RIBA in the past year. If Essex is the social laboratory of modern Britain, then Charles and Verity are currently in the engine-room.

This turn to the rural indicates that while theories of urban regeneration have dominated planning and social policy in recent decades, the climate crisis has refocused attention on what is happening in rural Britain, especially with regard to food production, the industrialisation of the landscape, factory farming, second home growth, the flight of young people to the cities, the pollution of rivers and seashores, and much else. This is evident in the current proliferation of books about rural regeneration: Bella Bathurst’s Field Work: What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land, Marina O’Connell’s Designing Regenerative Food Systems, Dieter Helm’s Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside, John Lewis-Stempel’s The Running Hare, George Monbiot’s Regenesis, James Rebanks’ An English Pastoral, Neil Ward’s Net Zero, Food & Farming, Isabella Tree’s Wilding, amongst others. But the question left unanswered is: what about the people in rural Britain – where and how will they live?  A recent RIBA report on age-friendly housing worried that, ‘Our small towns and villages are set to become retirement communities.’ Yet much existing village infrastructure – social housing, schools, churches, care homes, libraries, shops, voluntary organisations – is going to struggle to survive with a population consisting mostly of older people or second home owners. The social mix and resilience of rural life is as much an element in the sustainability programme as land use and biodiversity.

*​*​*

So much has happened in the past year since No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen. The first edition has now sold completely out and a new edition will be back in print soon. The public interest in the story has been gratifying, most recently being BBC Radio 4’s broadcast of its ‘Open Country’ programme devoted to the history of Frating Hall Farm and a nearby companion settlement, the Othona Community at Bradwell. The programme is now available here.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0019rcl

One of a variety of self-build initiatives at the Othona Community, Bradwell

Also available online now is a short film of a walk from Wivenhoe to Frating I did with artist Michael Landy, part of a series commissioned by Firstsite Gallery, with other contributors being Maria Anastassiou, Gillian Darley, and Elsa James. It was great fun to do and on the day the weather held – just. This particular walk has become rather special, and when visiting Frating, I always walk there from Wivenhoe station: trains, bikes or walking boots being all you really need to travel these days on the mainland. Michael Landy was a terrific walking companion, and the film crew enjoyed it as much as we did.

With Michael Landy at Frating Hall Farm ‘Video still courtesy of Firstsite and Aura Films.’

The lessons of Frating Hall Farm and The Othona Community suggest that if serious social and environmental changes are needed, then party politics alone cannot create, let alone sustain, the forms of collective endeavour needed to tackle the enormous problems associated with climate issues, social inequality, and a more meaningful rapprochement between town and country. The pioneers who established the Frating and Othona communities were sustained by a rich ply of political, social and religious beliefs, each one reinforcing the other. Tackling climate change is a moral issue as much as an environmental one. The title of the posting is taken from a book by Colin Ward, who would have been delighted I am sure to have been alive to catch up with all these initiatives.

KW

Under East Anglian Skies

Covid precautions and then Covid itself prevented me from getting to the ‘Life with Art: Benton End and the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing’ exhibition at Firstsite Gallery in Colchester until its final week. But it was worth it. I am sure there will be much more about Benton End in the future, as the original farmhouse (including its three-acre walled garden) in Hadleigh on the Essex/Suffolk border has been bought by the Pinchbeck Foundation, and the foundation are now working with London’s Garden Museum to renew it as a meeting place for artists and gardeners and others drawn to the synergy between the two. It was after all Cedric Morris, the man who created the art school, who insisted on describinghimself as an ‘artist and plantsman’.

Benton End was not the first iteration of the bohemian, artistic enclave. In 1937 Morris and his life partner Lett Haines had opened the school in Dedham in Essex, but that burnt down in a fire in 1939. The entourage – no longer including Lucien Freud – moved across the River Stour to Hadleigh. In the Firstsite exhibition there are two vivid paintings of the burnt-out wreckage of the Dedham buildings, one by David Carr, the other by Cedric Morris. Yet as a marvellous ‘Spider Map’ drawn specially for the exhibition by Melvyn King clearly shows, the Dedham and Benton End settlements were only a small part of an extensive network of artistic, religious and political gatherings and communities across East Anglia in the first half of the twentieth century. Looking back, it was a time of enormous imaginative ferment, much of which was a profound reaction to the catastrophe of the First World War and a longing for a more pastoral way of life – and art and music.

‘Frating Barn’ by Roderic Barrett, 1943

This is the theme of a talk I’ll be giving at the Garden Museum on Tuesday, 10 May, 2022, details below. I’ll be making the case for the inclusion of the Frating Hall Farm communityinto this rich constellation. In addition to its agricultural and pacifist ambitions, it was also an important gathering place for artists, as well as writers and musicians. What many people forget that is that members of the Frating Hall Farm community –  which had emerged from The Adelphi Centre in Langham – had already established connections with Cedric Morris when he was at Dedham.  People forget too that the next door to the Adelphi Centre was the farm of the Jewish chronicler of East Anglian folklore, S.L.Bensusan, whose sister Esther hadmarried Lucien Pissarro, who also lived and painted there. Artists such as Roderic Barrett and John Vostatek both worked and painted as part of the Frating community.

At some point, and most probably on a number of occasions, the paths of Cedric Morris, Lett Haines, John Nash, John Middleton Murry, Vera Brittain, Lucien Pissarro, Imogen Holst, Roderic Barrett, Jack Common, George Orwell, Ronald Blythe, Beth Chatto and Shirley Williams, Maggi Hambling, and many others, crossed, supporting and taking strength from the energy and work of each other.  London was still, for a lot of the time, even then, another country.

Under East Anglian Skies: the back-to-the land movement amongst artists and intellectuals between the wars

A talk by writer and social historian, Ken Worpole

Tuesday, 10 May 2022 (7pm- 8pm)

The Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Road, London, SE1 7LB

Tel: 020 7401 8865

For booking and further information: https://gardenmuseum.org.uk/events/ken-worpole-under-east-anglian-skies/

If on a winter’s night: Raymond Williams in Hackney

Raymond Williams, White Cottage, Hardwick, Cambridgeshire, 1969

Almost exactly forty years ago, on the 8th of January 1982, the writer and critic Raymond Williams gave a talk for the Hackney Workers’ Educational Association on the subject,‘Popular Forms of Writing’. It was a great scoop to have got him as a guest lecturer, but Williams was generous in this regard, as many came to know. Less lucky that evening were the conditions. Early that afternoon a scattering of snow turned into a full-blown blizzard, of the sort that led to train cancellations, cars stuck in snowdrifts, and an eerie silence in the gloomy, sodium-lit streets of Dalston. The talk was held in the unheated basement of the Centerprise community bookshop, which in the daytime was used as an Under-5s nursery, but when the play equipment was packed up could be used in the evening for events.

Raymond and his wife, Joy, were wholly unperturbed by this or the scratch meal we gave them beforehand. Starting on time, Williams spoke for exactly an hour without notes to a wet, bedraggled but intent audience, creating one of those evenings you remember for the rest of your life. After questions, now standing in the driving snow on Kingsland High Street, we finally managed to flag down a taxi, and Raymond and Joy disappeared into a snowstorm, heading towards Liverpool Street Station and the train back to Cambridge. Everybody else went to the pub.

Just over a year ago I got an email from Phil O’Brien, Secretary of The Raymond Williams Society, telling me he was editing a collection of unpublished talks and essays by Williams, one of which – to my surprise – was based on that talk. Unknown at the time it had been recorded, presumably by Joy, and discovered only recently. The book has now been published by Verso, Culture and Politics, with the Hackney lecture included.

The talk given that night in Hackney is now one of ten newly published essays. To my mind it has an unusual, engaging directness, opening with a warm and dry-witted reference to the conditions of the talk and its unusual venue. I am sure it is the only essay of Williams that starts with an observation on the weather – remarking on the railway station notice referring to ‘due to adverse conditions’ – and going from there to develop a close exploration between formulaic official language, forms of writing, and the complicated relationship between writing and speech.

In this warm tribute to the circumstances of its radical bookselling and publishing setting, Williams went on to address many of the questions raised by the community publishing movement in the 1970s, in which Centerprise was involved, focusing on the relationship between speech and the printed word, which the Ruskin oral history movement had highlighted at this time but which was becoming fraught and contested.

Everybody learns to speak and to listen to other people speaking within familiar communities, without needing any formal instruction, Williams began. The problems start when you try to give that speech the ‘authority of print’, and then all kinds of cultural and political taboos come into play. He referred to the work of the poet John Clare, the gifted poet and close observer of the natural world, whose spelling and punctuation were condemned at the time as evidence of stupidity. There were also major barriers in the field of fiction, where the novel was highly formalised around certain plot devices – false inheritances, arranged marriages, fake wills, virtuous women compromised by scheming parvenus – which made a novel set in a close-knit, working class community unthinkable, formally regarded as having no narrative drama. Hence, Williams said, while we have extremely well-written working-class autobiographies in the 19th century, we have no novels.

Yet, as in some of those novels of hope delayed, the cassette tape recording of Williams speaking re-appeared after forty years, and like the mislaid letter in Middlemarch, it all moves on again.

KW

Special price offer on Culture and Politics, edited by Phil O’Brien: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3824-culture-and-politics