Colin Ward’s school without walls

The New Statesman columnist and anarchist was a proponent of radical social change that put the most vulnerable first.

We could say of Colin Ward, anarchist and former New Statesman columnist, what he said of his mentor WR Lethaby: “His ideas were too simple for people to understand them.” As the author of over 30 books on architecture, housing policy, play theory, environmental education and prison reform, Ward was a philosopher of the vernacular. Mutual Aid, Everyday Anarchy, a collection of essays on Ward edited by Andrew Kelly, was published by Five Leaves to commemorate the centenary of his birth in 1924. For Ward’s biographer, Sophie Scott-Brown, his “priority was to revitalise anarchy in the popular imagination by showing how its principles of self-reliance, cooperation and mutual aid were already part of our daily lives.”

Growing up in Wanstead in suburban Essex, and leaving school before taking exams, Ward started work as a trainee draughtsman. From an early age he espoused the anarchist cause as a fluent writer: first for the anarchist weekly Freedom from 1947 until 1960, then as editor of Anarchy between 1961 and 1970. In 1971 he took a full-time job as Education Officer at the Town & Country Planning Association (TCPA), where he established an international reputation, becoming “one of the few anarchist writers to have a larger readership outside of anarchist circles than within them.”

At Anarchy, Ward pioneered a new kind of socially concerned journalism, commissioning articles from community activists, dissident academics and voices from the social margins. These essays amounted to a vibrant re-description of contemporary British life as a patchwork of voluntary action, informal education and social endeavour, with a strong sense of locality. When the like-minded journal New Society arrived in 1962, “Ward was an instant fan,” writes Scott-Brown, though the first two editors were already fans of his.

He moved to the New Statesman in 1988, contributing over 400 weekly columns under the rubric “Fringe Benefits”. “If Ward was anything,” records Scott-Brown, “he was a columnist and a virtuoso one at that.” The NS literary editor Boyd Tonkin recalled Ward “championed the twilight world of allotment-diggers, unofficial smallholders, prefab dwellers, caravan habitués, rural squatters, estate children, multitasking traders, DIY artisans and housebuilders, most as remote from the trim land of planning applications as they were from tax demands.” While Ward was alert to inequality and injustice, cheerfulness was always breaking in.

The historian Raphael Samuel detected deeper undercurrents in Ward’s forays into everyday life. In his 1987 essay “Utopian Sociology”, Samuel celebrated Ward’s foresight in understanding the radical changes that had emerged in Britain in the 1960s: “Anarchy represented better than any other publication the cultural revolution of the 1960s; and it did so far earlier than anyone else, and more thoughtfully.” Ward’s optimism, he suggested, “drew strength from a whole new terrain of social politics in which local initiative counted for more than national direction,” provocatively contrasting Ward’s libertarianism with “born-again Marxism, of Maoist or neo-Trotskyism hue”, which seeks to replace “real-life self-assertion with make-believe bids for power.” Samuel saluted Ward’s “constructive antinomianism”, which took its energy from having “no articles of faith to subscribe to, no canonical texts to refer to, no gods or heroes to placate”.

Housing was Ward’s early political testing ground – encouraged by postwar squatting campaigns from ex-servicemen – and direct action a key tactic. Making one’s own “home in the world” was the abiding ideal. This explains the paradox by which a self-confessed anarchist enjoyed such esteem in international planning circles, as he did at the TCPA. When asked about this, he recalled that urban planning had its origins in the anarchist ideas and writings of Élisée Reclus, Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford. At the TCPA he and Anthony Fyson launched the legendary Bulletin of Environmental Education (BEE) handbook: sent to every school in England and Wales, this initiative kick-started a new movement in environmental studies.

For Ward and fellow anarchist John Turner (the global chronicler of self-build settlements), successful housing projects required three things: reasonable security of tenure, shelter appropriate to climate conditions, and location offering access to work and social life opportunities. Urban planning was as simple – or as difficult – as that. In an ideal world, individuals and communities ought to be able to create their own settlements, hence a preoccupation with the story of Britain’s plotlands, allotment colonies, houseboat communities, housing co-ops, foyers and homeless shelters (and more recently community land trusts and progressive retirement villages).

While such initiatives are often viewed as strategically marginal, their time has come again. Ward knew that radical innovation in housing was best realised in the independent, not-for-profit sector, an insight with lessons for the current crisis in residential social care. There is a desperate need to supply a fast-growing population of older people with well-designed homes or settlements, yet the care-home sector, now largely in the hands of private equity companies, is failing miserably. Ward would have welcomed the resurgence of the almshouse movement, now providing not only for the elderly but for young people, while the development of more community-minded retirement villages is growing. There are other imaginative models of community-based residential care coming to the fore – but they will need paying for.

Ward’s most influential book, however, examined concerns at the other end of the age range. Published in 1978, The Child in the City “can probably be credited with inspiring the entire international child-friendly city movement,” says Tim Gill, former director of the British Play Council. In putting the world of the child at the centre of “everyday anarchism”, Ward broke with the left’s privileging of the male industrial worker as the principal agent and subject of social change. Children come first, and if you plan for the most vulnerable you will be planning for everybody else.

That breakthrough stemmed from his work at the TCPA, where in 1973 he and Fyson published Streetwork: The Exploding School (the title possibly a quiet joke on the anarchist stereotype), a handbook on how to explore the neighbourhood. Pupils were to be sent out with notebooks and cameras, looking at where people lived, worked, where they went and how they enjoyed themselves; in short, how one part of the jigsaw puzzle of everyday life connected to others. Ward’s long-term vision was to create “schools without walls”, wholly immersed in the life of the community – inspired by Henry Morris’s village college movement in 1930s Cambridgeshire, with the very youngest encouraged to “climb out of the sandbox and into the city”.

Understanding the street primarily as a public space, in an age when the car was fast becoming the major determinant of urban planning and postwar reconstruction, owed much to Jane Jacobs’ influential study The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). In the UK, Jacobs’ arguments were reinforced by The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) and Children’s Games in Street and Playground (1969) by the folklorists Iona and Peter Opie, who foregrounded the street and the playground as the formative terrain of sociability and a shared urban culture. By then, as Ward realised, in the battle between the child and the car for territorial control of the street, the car would win. Today this conflict is being revisited: strategies for LTNs (low-traffic neighbourhoods) and “15-minute cities” – intended to reduce car use and encourage walking – cycling and playing out are back on the urban agenda.

Finally, at the heart of Colin Ward’s anarchism was a profound disagreement with the assumption that “the social” and “the political” were one and the same thing. Reporting from the front line of community action in his New Statesman columns, Ward understood that the social was a larger, more inclusive, informally constructed and sustained world than the political – and less easily captured by vested interests: people make and unmake the social world each day, which is why it retained its flexibility and resilience.

I was lucky to know Colin and his wife, Harriet, for nearly 40 years. When young, while working on Freedom, he had known leading British and American writers and commentators such as Herbert Read, Alex Comfort, Paul Goodman, Dwight Macdonald and Ethel Mannin. Harriet was the daughter of the redoubtable feminist Dora Russell and the Greenwich Village journalist Griffin Barry, who in his New York days was close to John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson and the poet Edna St Vincent Millay. Yet Colin and Harriet lived quietly in rural Suffolk during much of their long marriage. Formidably kind and generous with their time, modest in lifestyle, fond of music, they corresponded with friends and admirers across the world. Colin died in 2010, Harriet in June this year. They found the good life in fellowship and generosity to others, in a world in which people carried on learning and supporting each other until the music stopped.

Ken Worpole’s essays on landscape and social history, “Brightening from the East”, will be published by Little Toller Books early next year