Ken Worpole

Ken Worpole

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.

Email Ken Worpole


Ken's latest blog: The Garden of Forking Paths


Film:

Unfamiliar Territories
Ken Worpole & Patrick Wright

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 October 2023

Modern Hospice Design: the architecture of palliative and social care (Second Edition)

Modern Hospice Design 2ndEd cover

Ken Worpole

The much-expanded new edition of Modern Hospice Design: the architecture of palliative and social care, was published on 6 October 2023.

At the heart of this edition - now supported by 50 colour photographs plus architectural and landscape plans and drawings - are case studies detailing four very different but bold and imaginative approaches to social care: Lark Hill, an impressive retirement village for more than 400 residents in Nottingham with an ambitious programme of communal activities; St Wildfrid's 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 Southampton in the grounds of the city's large general hospital; and the stunning new Appleby Blue Almshouse in Southwark with a focus on a welcoming public lounge and extensive courtyard and rooftop gardens, already receiving amazing reviews.

Published by Routledge, October 2023: special reduction available

Worpole is a literary original, a social and architectural historian whose books combine the Orwellian ideal of common decency with understated erudition. .
Jason Cowley, New Statesman, 30 July 2021

For many years, Ken Worpole has been one of the shrewdest and sharpest observers of the English social landscape.
The Independent