About Colin Ward
Colin Ward, who has died aged 85,
was the most read as well as the most original British anarchist writer
of the second half of the twentieth century.
Brought up in suburban East London, he was a �failure’ at school,
leaving at fifteen to take jobs in building, municipal housing and then a
series of architects’ offices, thereby generating the expertise for the
bulk of his output as a writer. In the mid-sixties he retrained as a
teacher but for most of the seventies was education officer for the Town
and Country Planning Association, resigning in 1979 to become a
full-time author.
It was conscription into the British Army during the Second World War
that radicalized him since, posted to Glasgow, he admired its anarchist
orators, attended their weekly meetings and began to write for Freedom
Press’s periodicals. On demobilization in 1947 and back in London he
was invited to join Freedom’s editorial collective, thus beginning
intimate association with the people who were to become, in his
description, his �closest and dearest friends’.
His spare-time journalistic apprenticeship was daunting, writing
articles for Freedom, a weekly throughout the fifties. He was enabled
to break from this treadmill when his fellow editors gave him his head
from 1961 to 1970 with the monthly Anarchy (while they continued to
bring out Freedom for the other three weeks of the month). Anarchy
exuded vitality, was in touch with the trends of the decade, and
appealed to the young – and it continues to excite. Its preoccupations
centred on housing and squatting, progressive education, workers’
control, and crime and punishment. It showcased Ward’s distinctive
anarchism, already apparent in his articles for Freedom, but now
standing alone or supported by likeminded contributors.
It was the editorship of Anarchy that released him from the obscurity
of Freedom and Freedom Press and made his name. During the sixties he
began to be asked to write for other journals, not only in the realm of
dissident politics but also such titles as the recently established New
Society. From 1978 he became a regular contributor to New Society’s
full-page �Stand’ column; and when ten years later New Society was
merged with the New Statesman he was retained as a columnist for the
resultant New Statesman and Society with the shorter, but weekly,
�Fringe Benefits’. He also wrote a long-running column for Town and
Country Planning and an �Anarchist Notebook’ for Freedom, and in
addition contributed columns to the Architects’ Journal.   Through his
columns many unsuspecting readers were exposed to anarchist ideas for,
whatever he might be doing, he always saw himself first and foremost as
an anarchist propagandist.
His first books came as late as 1970-72, but these were intended for
teenagers and published by Penguin Education. Â It was the third, Anarchy
in Action (1973), which was his only work on the theory of anarchism,
indeed the only one �directly and specifically about anarchism’ until
his final publication, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction (2004). In
Anarchy in Action he makes entirely explicit his highly original
anarchism (even if, as he always acknowledged, much indebted to
Kropotkin and Landauer). The opening words have been much quoted: �The
argument of this book is that an anarchist society, a society which
organizes itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed
beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its
bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices,
nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their
superstitious separatism’. His kind of anarchism, �far from being a
speculative vision of a future society…is a description of a mode of
human organization, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which
operates side by side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian
trends of our society’.
It is Ward’s vision of anarchism, along with his many years of
working in architecture and planning, that account for his concentration
on �anarchist applications’ or �anarchist solutions’ to �immediate
issues in which people are actually likely to get involved…’   Â
Although he claimed in 1997 that �all my books hang together as an
exploration of the relations between people and their environment’ (by
which he means the built, rather than the �natural’, environment), and
while this clearly covers nine-tenths of his oeuvre, it seems rather (as
he had put it earlier) all his publications are �looking at life from
an anarchist point of view’. So the �anarchist applications’ concern
housing:Â Tenants Take Over (1974), Housing:Â An Anarchist Approach
(1976), When We Build Again Let’s Have Housing That Works! (1985) and
Talking Houses (1990);Â architecture and planning:Â Welcome, Thinner
City:Â Urban Survival in the 1990s (1989), New Town, Home Town:Â The
Lessons of Experience (1993), Talking to Architects (1996) and (with
Peter Hall) Sociable Cities:Â The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard (1998);Â
education:Â Talking Schools (1995);Â education and the environment:Â
(with Anthony Fyson) Streetwork:Â The Exploding School (1973), The Child
in the City (1978) and The Child in the Country (1988);Â education,
work and housing:Â Havens and Springboards:Â The Foyer Movement in
Context (1997);Â transport: (with Ruth Rendell) Undermining the Central
Line (1989) and Freedom to Go:Â After the Motor Age (1991);Â and water:Â
Reflected in Water: A Crisis of Social Responsibility (1997). A
surprisingly large number of his books were written in collaboration,
something he particularly enjoyed, for he was an exceptionally friendly
as well as generous man.
Ward was scornful of most other anarchists’ obsession with the
history of their tradition: �I think the besetting sin of anarchism has
been its preoccupation with its own past…’  Still, despite his own
emphasis on the here-and-now and the future, he wrote four important
historical works, the first two with Dennis Hardy and the third with
David Crouch:Â Arcadia for All:Â The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape
(1984); Goodnight Campers! The History of the British Holiday Camp
(1986);Â The Allotment:Â Its Landscape and Culture (1988);Â and Cotters
and Squatters: Housing’s Hidden History (2002). The masterly Arcadia
for All, a history of the �plotlands’ of south-east England, is simply a
natural extension back into the recent past of his major interest in
self-build and squatting in the present, while Cotters and Squatters
draws from their entire historical record in England and Wales. In
Goodnight Campers! the entrepreneurial holiday camps are traced to their
origins in the early twentieth century and the �pioneer camps’, in
which a key role was played by major organizations of working-class
self-help and mutual aid: Â the co-operative movement and trade unions.Â
The historic importance of such institutions in the provision of welfare
and the maintenance of social solidarity was to become a theme of
increasing significance in Ward’s work; and he is currently being
identified as a �pioneer of mutualism’.
In 1966 he married Harriet, the daughter of Dora Russell, the
feminist advocate of birth control and libertarian schooling, and she
survives him.
David Goodway
Books by Colin Ward
