Colin Ward (14 August 1924 – 11 February 2010) was a British anarchist writer and editor. He has been called "one of the greatest anarchist thinkers of the past half century, and a pioneering social historian."

Life

Ward was born in Wanstead, Essex, to Arnold and Ruby Ward (). Arnold was a teacher and Ruby a clerical worker. His parents were active Labour Party supporters. Ward attended Ilford County High School, leaving school aged 15. After leaving school he worked as an assistant to a builder, then for West Ham Council, before working as a draughtsman at Sidney Caulfield's architectural practice. Shortly after the trial he was transferred to Orkney.

Until 1961, Ward worked as an architect's assistant. In 1964 undertook teacher training at Garnett College where he met his future wife, Harriet Unwin, and he subsequently began teaching at Wandsworth Technical College. In 2001, Ward was made an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University.

Thought

Anarchism

Ward's philosophy aimed at removing authoritarian forms of social organisation and replacing them with self-managed, non-hierarchical forms. This is based upon the principle that, as Ward put it, "in small face-to-face groups, the bureaucratising and hierarchical tendencies inherent in organisations have least opportunity to develop".

Anarchism for Ward is "a description of a mode of human organization, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society". In contrast to many anarchist philosophers and practitioners, Ward holds that "anarchism in all its guises is an assertion of human dignity and responsibility. It is not a programme for political change but an act of social self-determination".

Education

Colin Ward in his main theoretical publication Anarchy in Action (1973) in a chapter called "Schools No Longer" "discusses the genealogy of education and schooling, in particular examining the writings of Everett Reimer and Ivan Illich, and the beliefs of anarchist educator Paul Goodman. Many of Colin’s writings in the 1970s, in particular Streetwork: The Exploding School (1973, with Anthony Fyson), focused on learning practices and spaces outside of the school building. In introducing Streetwork, Ward writes, "[this] is a book about ideas: ideas of the environment as the educational resource, ideas of the enquiring school, the school without walls...”. In the same year, Ward contributed to Education Without Schools (edited by Peter Buckman) discussing 'the role of the state'. He argued that "one significant role of the state in the national education systems of the world is to perpetuate social and economic injustice".

In The Child in the City (1978), and later The Child in the Country (1988), Ward "examined the everyday spaces of young people’s lives and how they can negotiate and re-articulate the various environments they inhabit. In his earlier text, the more famous of the two, Colin Ward explores the creativity and uniqueness of children and how they cultivate 'the art of making the city work'. He argued that through play, appropriation and imagination, children can counter adult-based intentions and interpretations of the built environment. His later text, The Child in the Country, inspired a number of social scientists, notably geographer Chris Philo (1992), to call for more attention to be paid to young people as a 'hidden' and marginalised group in society." He advocated for an anarchist model of housing, citing squatting and housing cooperatives from Third World countries as a model for the anarchist movement.

Bibliography

1970s

  • 1970
  • 1972
  • 1973 (With Anthony Fyson)
  • 1973 (As editor)
  • 1974 (With Colin Smithson)
  • 1974
  • 1976 (As editor)
  • 1976
  • 1978

1980s

  • 1982 Art and the Built Environment (with Eileen Adams)
  • 1984 Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape (with Dennis Hardy)
  • 1984 Housing is Theft, Housing is Freedom
  • 1985 The Plotlanders (with Dennis Hardy)
  • 1985 When We Build Again: Let's Have Housing that Works!
  • 1986 Goodnight Campers! The History of the British Holiday Camp (with Dennis Hardy)
  • 1986 Chartres: the Making of a Miracle
  • 1987 A Decade of Anarchy (1961–1970) (ed.)
  • 1988 The Child in the Country
  • 1988 The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture (with David Crouch)
  • 1989 Welcome, Thinner City: Urban Survival in the 1990s
  • 1989 Undermining the Central Line (with Ruth Rendell)

1990s

  • 1990 Talking Houses: 10 Lectures
  • 1991 Images of Childhood In Old Postcards (with Tim Ward)
  • 1991 Influences: Voices of Creative Dissent
  • 1991 Freedom to Go: After the Motor Age
  • 1993 New Town, Home Town
  • 1995 Talking Schools
  • 1996 Social Policy: An Anarchist Response
  • 1996 Talking to Architects
  • 1997 Stamps: Designs For Anarchist Postage Stamps (illustrated by Clifford Harper)
  • 1997 Havens and Springboards: The Foyer Movement in Context
  • 1997 Reflected in Water: A Crisis of Social Responsibility
  • 1998 Sociable Cities: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard (with Peter Hall)

2000s

  • 2002 Cotters and Squatters: Housing's Hidden History
  • 2003 Talking Anarchy (with David Goodway)
  • 2004 Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction
  • 2008

2010s

  • 2011 Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader (edited by Damian F. White and Chris Wilbert)
  • 2012 Talking Green

See also

  • Anarchism in England

References

Further reading

  • Colin Ward archive at RevoltLib
  • Colin Ward, Anarchism as a Theory of Organization (1966)
  • Colin Ward, Harmony through Complexity (1973)
  • Daily Telegraph obituary, 29 March 2010
  • Guardian obituary, 22 February 2010
  • The Good Life of a Gentle Anarchist, Boyd Tonkin, The Independent, 19 February 2010
  • Obituary at Outrospection.org
  • Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader
  • Center for a Stateless Society on Ward
  • Ward and Five Leaves publishers
  • Ward and the Essex plotlanders, The Guardian, 7 March 2010
  • Inveterate anarchist with a plan to put roofs over the rural poor, The Guardian, 10 July 2002
  • Colin Ward interview by David Goodway
  • A friendly market-anarchist view of Colin Ward, by an editor of Reason, 'the magazine of free minds and free markets'
  • Anarchy in the UK? It could be the best government we’ve had, Boyd Tonkin, The Independent, 03 April 2015
  • Personally Speaking: Colin Ward in Conversation with Roger Deakin (video interview)