Colin Ward

It was after leaving art college, in 1982, through my work within the Urban Studies movement I first became aware of the work of Colin Ward. 

Colin Ward (1924-2010) was an English post-WW2 writer and anarchist. Between 1947-57 Ward wrote for, and then edited, Freedom, the UK-based anarchist newspaper before creating and editing 118 issues of Anarchy magazine. It’s claimed that Ward’s editorship of Anarchy, including its radical typography and design, represented the true epicentre of 1960s counterculture in Britain. Ward’s approach to anarchy was to foster incremental improvements in society through the empowerment of the individual and local communities. The magazine was concerned primarily with realisable projects, living examples of is rather than the apocalyptic imaginings of ought. It was about doing things; an applied anarchism that became known as Utopian Sociology. Ward wrote that “Anarchism is not a speculative vision of a future society… But a description of a mode of human organisation, rooted in the experience of everyday life, operating side-by-side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society.’

For ten years I worked within that movement in London, first for the magazine Bulletin of Environmental Education (BEE) (briefly meeting Colin during this time) and then with Urban Studies Centres across the city for an organisation named after Ward’s seminal book, STREETWORK. BEE linked up social activism, urban and rural studies, and projects of curriculum change and in STREETWORK- The Exploding School, Ward espoused an alternative to classroom-based learning that fostered a sense of empowerment and capacity to make change by engaging in local issue-based projects. I brought an arts-based approach to this work and ran multiple projects giving voice to communities through their own creativity. This has stayed at the heart of my practice with children, families and young people for over 35 years.

 The September 1963 cover of Anarchy magazine features a picture of an adventure playground and is subtitled ‘Adventure Playground  -a parable of anarchy.’ For Ward, children occupied a symbolic place somewhat equivalent to the worker for contemporary socialists and communists and these new playgrounds represented the building of a new world by empowered children. For me, fostering children’s creativity supports empathy, empowerment and a connection to self and community that has become sadly squeezed out of many contemporary societies.

Simon Spain 

March 2020

STREETWORK – The exploding School, Routledge, 1973

The Child in the City, Pantheon Books, New York, 1978