A-Infos (en) Britain, Media, Colin Ward obituary

Writer, social theorist and anarchist who believed in self-sufficiency, allotments and 
better town planning ---- Colin Ward ---- Colin Ward was a mentor to younger activists. 
Colin Ward, who has died aged 85, lived with the title of Britain's most famous anarchist 
for nearly half a ­century, bemused by this ambivalent soubriquet. In Anarchy in Action 
(1973), he set out his belief that an anarchist society was not an end goal. Following 
Alexander Herzen, the writer and thinker known as the "father of ­Russian socialism", 
Colin saw all distant goals as a form of tyranny and believed that anarchist principles 
could be ­discerned in everyday human relations and impulses. Within this perspective, 
politics was about strengthening ­co-operative ­relations and supporting human ingenuity 
in its myriad vernacular and everyday forms.

One of Colin's favourite metaphors – adopted from a novel by Ignazio Silone – was the 
image of the seed beneath the snow, which suggested to him that anarchist principles were 
ever alive and prescient. He thought it was the work of politics to nurture such beliefs 
and to support them through small-scale initiatives, avoiding the temptation to replicate 
or scale them up to a level beyond which professional bureaucracies take over. He was fond 
of contrasting the vocabulary of self-organisation, with its friendly societies, mutuals, 
­co-operatives and voluntary associations, with the nomenclature of the state and private 
sectors with their directorates, corporations, boards   and executives.

Colin was the author of almost 30 books on subjects that ranged from allotments, 
architecture, self-build housing, ­children's play, education, postcards and town planning 
to water distribution and anarchist theory, many of which gained him an international 
­following. His book The Child in the City (1978), frequently reprinted, influenced 
planners and teachers from ­Liverpool to Latin America. Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a 
Makeshift Landscape (1984), written with planner Dennis Hardy, opened up a whole new field 
in 20th-century social history around self-organised communities and the ­Millian belief 
in the democratic importance of experiments in living. Another book, The Allotment: Its 
Landscape and Culture (1988), with David Crouch, held the line for this uniquely friendly 
form of local self-sufficiency during the barren years of centralised land use planning, 
making Colin a hero of today's environmental activists, including the young George Monbiot.

Colin was born in Wanstead, Essex, the son of a teacher and a shorthand typist. Both were 
Labour supporters and Colin remembered hearing the anarchist Emma Goldman speak at a 1938 
London May Day rally, and attending the 1939 Festival of Music for the People, in aid of 
the International Brigades, featuring Benjamin Britten's Ballad of Heroes. On leaving 
school aged 15, Colin went to work for the architect Sidney Caulfield. Conscripted in 
1942, Colin was posted to Glasgow, where he fell in with the city's lively anarchist 
movement. He was then transferred to Orkney and Shetland for the remainder of the war. In 
1945, as a subscriber to the radical newspaper War Commentary, Colin was summoned as a 
witness at the Old Bailey trial of the paper's editors, John Hewetson, Vernon Richards and 
Philip Sansom, who were accused of promoting disaffection and received prison sentences.

Throughout the 1940s and 50s, while working for the architect Peter ­Shepheard, he wrote 
and edited articles for Freedom, the anarchist newspaper, where he developed the abiding 
themes of his life. He subsequently edited the journal Anarchy from 1961 to 1970.

In his editorial and political work, he befriended and cultivated younger activists and 
writers such as Hugh Brody, Stan Cohen, Ray Gosling, Tony Gould, Richard Mabey, Carole 
Pateman, Kate Soper, Laurie Taylor and Jock Young. Many of these went on to write for the 
newly established weekly, New Society, an intellectual home that came ready-furnished as a 
result of Colin's widening influence at this time.

In 1966, he had married Harriet Unwin, a young widow with two children, Tom and Barney, 
and in 1968 they had a son together, Ben. Colin also acted as a guardian to two other 
boys, Alan and Doug Balfour, after the Balfours' mother died. This companionable, happy 
marriage of kindred spirits was longlasting. Colin and Harriet ­subsequently established a 
network of international friendships, first from their home in London and, latterly, in 
Suffolk – Colin spent a small fortune on photocopying in the local public library – as 
well as by telephone.

While working as an education officer for the Town and Country Planning Association 
between 1971 and 1979 he wrote Streetwork: The Exploding School (1973), with Tony Fyson, 
and ­established the Bulletin for Environmental Education. The point of both initiatives 
was to help get children out of school and into their communities, to talk to local 
people, and explore their neighbourhood, its amenities and utilities, and understand how 
buildings, streets, ­landscapes and social life interact. This led to Colin's focus on the 
unique world of childhood which, in the end, may prove to have been his – and anarchism's 
– most enduring contribution to social policy.

There were many other collaborations. With the novelist Ruth Rendell, Colin wrote a 
Counterblast pamphlet in 1989, Undermining the Central Line, in favour of a revitalised 
local democracy; in 1998 he produced Sociable Cities: Legacy of Ebenezer Howard, with the 
urbanist Peter Hall, to commemorate the centenary of Howard's seminal work on garden 
cities. In 2003, the film-maker Mike Dibb recorded Colin in conversation with the writer 
Roger Deakin, at the Wards' home in Debenham. This is available on DVD. To see Deakin (who 
died in 2006) and Colin together, talking freely of the delights of the natural world and 
the varied people in it, is to be reminded of a politics of life and possibility that 
stubbornly refuses to go away.

Colin is survived by Harriet, his son, stepchildren and wards.

• Colin Ward, author and social theorist, born 14 August 1924; died 11 February 2010
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