landscape public policy
Ken Worpole
Ken Worpole is a writer and social historian, whose work includes books on architecture, landscape aesthetics and public policy. Married to photographer Larraine Worpole until her death in October 2025, they often collaborated on book projects internationally and across the UK, as well as in Hackney where they lived and worked from 1969 onwards.
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, with a particular interest in the dynamic relationship between London’s East End and rural and coastal Essex in the 20th century.
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, of Opendemocracy, and a former Visiting Professor at London Metropolitan University.
Follow Ken on Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/kenworpole/
The Frating Farm Archive, Essex Record Office:
Many invaluable documents, letters & photographs were collected in researching 'No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen' (the story of Frating Hall Farm), now kept and catalogued by the wonderful people at Essex Record Office, where this reunion was held.
Published March 2025, reprinted July 2026
Brightening from the East: Essays on Landscape & Memory
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
His warm generosity…makes not only for an authoritative and kindly guide to under-celebrated places and the people who call them home, but also offers blueprints for our own troubled times.
Consistently thoughtful and moving
No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen:
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.
One work of nonfiction I have most enjoyed this year