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 aesthetics and public policy. Married to photographer Larraine Worpole, until her death in October 2025, they collaborated on book projects internationally and across the UK, as well as in Hackney, London, where both lived and worked since 1969.
Ken’s 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, and a former Visiting Professor at London Metropolitan University.
You can now follow Ken on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/kenworpole/
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)
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
‘Brightening from the East’ chosen as one of the New Statesman’s Book of the Year 2025 by writer Geoff Dyer.
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.
What Worpole’s account attests to is the paradise of making paradise, of meaningful labour, and especially of a deep relationship with the land.