landscape public policy
Ken Worpole
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Ken Worpole is a writer and social historian, whose work includes many books on architecture, landscape and public policy. He is married to photographer Larraine Worpole with whom he has collaborated on book projects internationally, as well as in Hackney, London, where they have lived and worked since 1969.
His principal interests concern the planning and design of new settlements, landscapes and public institutions - streets, parks, playgrounds, libraries, informal education - based on the pioneering achievements of 20th century social democracy and the environmental movement. In recent years he has focused on recovering the social history of communitarian experiments in both town and country, drawing lessons for the creation of new residential and environmentally sustainable forms of settlement for an ageing population.
Ken has served on the UK government’s Urban Green Spaces Task Force, on the Expert Panel of the Heritage Lottery Fund, and as an adviser to the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. He was a founder member of the Demos think-tank and of Opendemocracy.
Ken's latest blog: The Garden of Forking Paths
Film:
Unfamiliar Territories
On Tuesday, 8 June 2021, in the Swedenborg Society library in Bloomsbury, writers Ken Worpole and Patrick Wright were invited to sit down and discuss their distinctive approaches to researching and writing literary and social history, notably the ‘unfamiliar territories’ of urban memory, marginal literary cultures and landscapes, and pastoral disenchantment and rural modernism.
A Swedenborg House Production, 2021 (38 minutes)
> Watch the film
Published March 2025
Brightening from the East: Essays on Landscape & Memory
Ken Worpole
This new collection of essays explores a unique ‘region of the mind’ – the Thames Estuary and the marshland landscapes of the East Anglian shoreline. Wide-ranging in its subject-matter and form, both personal and historical, the essays recount stories of radical communities, of arcadian dreams among the shabby plotlands of eastern England, and of new ways of living. It ranges further afield too, exploring Italian cemeteries, Dutch landscape architects and the English twentieth century folk revival, along with many other studies of 20th century outposts of radical dissent. The collection opens with the influential essay, ‘The New English Landscape’.
Buy the book here: www.littletoller.co.uk
Worpole is a literary original, a social and architectural historian whose books combine the Orwellian ideal of common decency with understated erudition. .
For many years, Ken Worpole has been one of the shrewdest and sharpest observers of the English social landscape.