Colin Ward is everyone's favourite anarchist. He is not the kind who comes with a bomb in his briefcase. In 1914, Shaw wrote, rightly and sourly: "Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you." But this is not the anarchism of Colin Ward. He is the anarchist as optimist. The anarchist who seeks out corners of self-help and mutual aid in the here and now, and tries to help it evolve into something more valuable.
He has unlikely admirers. In the Times Literary Supplement, Ferdinand Mount called him "the indispensable anarchist." The Spectator once profiled him as an unacknowledged hero of our time. He has written, most often about architecture and planning, and the destructive impact that grandiose, centralised schemes have on individual happiness. Essex-born (in 1924), he admires the untidy entrepreneurship of the people who built themselves pre-war shanty towns such as Jaywick Sands, near Clacton. His affectionate history of such places is called Arcadia for All. Long out of print, it should be re-published and made required reading for our new generation of planners who, once again, seem to specialise in knowing what is best for other people.
But his writings about the native vigour of shanty towns (in Britain or the third world), or about the self-help merits of squatter movements, have always been a parable of how the whole of life could be made better. They are underpinned by an unhysterical opposition to the workings of the state, whether in national or local form. In 1987, he wrote of the "sinister alliance of Fabians and Marxists, both of whom believed implicitly in the state, and assumed they would be the particular elite in control of it." He was just as hostile to bureaucrats who had an "undisguised contempt for the way ordinary people organised anything."
One of Ward's own heroes, Alexander Herzen, wrote: "A goal which is infinitely remote is not a goal at all, it is a deception." An anarchism which takes this as its slogan is more British than Russian. Like the heretical Welsh monk, Pelagius, Ward adheres to the appealing creed that good works-and not only membership of some tight-knit group of the saved-are the path to paradise.
He seems to have been converted to anarchism in Glasgow, where he was posted during the second world war. Leaving aside the continental anarchists who once flourished in the east end of London, Glasgow is the only British city which has had a serious anarchist movement. Ward began to write for the anarchist journal, Freedom. As the fighting drew to a close, the magazine's editors hoped for revolution. They published articles entitled "Hang on to your Arms!" Ward was one of the servicemen subscribers who testified in court that they had not been disaffected by such journalism. The editors went to jail, all the same.
Ward has never, he says, called for "revolution next week." In 1961, the weekly Freedom spawned a monthly, Anarchy, which Ward edited. It pursued, and sometimes helped set, the libertarian agenda of the 1960s. In an early job in a borough office, Ward had learned all about the way housing for the working classes operated, with estates ranked into a rigid pecking order.
He is the anarchism of Kropotkin, author of Mutual Aid, the gospel of self-help and cooperation, not that of Bakunin, whose best-known slogan, "The urge for destruction is also a creative urge," was until recently spray-painted on a comprehensive school wall near me in north London. Himself the gentlest of men, Ward has always looked for what he has called (in Anarchy in Action) the "seed beneath the snow." Anarchism, to him, is "far from being a speculative vision of a future society." He argues that, "once you begin to look at human society from an anarchist point of view, you discover that the alternatives are already there... the parts are all at hand."
He pursues this argument in numerous books and a continuing flow of articles. His most influential book, perhaps, is The Child in the City. The idea was simple. The right way to judge a city, or any scheme of urban planning, is what it delivers for children. The writing and the evocative photographs were imbued with an Opie-like respect for children's inventiveness and autonomy, and a wish to protect their anarchic freedom.
It is odd, in a way, that he has recently written so much about New Towns. You might think these were the epitome of prescriptive planning But he detects Kroptkinist merits in Ebeneezer Howard's original Garden City vision, which even the bureaucratic postwar version didn't wholly erase. He also saw New Towns as a way to give working people an entry ticket to the countryside, from which gentrification and agricultural change increasingly excluded them.
Beliefs such as Ward's require tenacity. I am writing this as two of the longest-lived examples of mutuality continue to fray: the cooperative movement and the building societies. Tenant control and worker control have never delivered the hoped-for results. Mutual aid has so far flourished best in consumption, rather than production: Which?, the Good Food Guide, the Campaign for Real Ale. Under this heading I would include much environmentalism-from the Council for the Protection of Rural England, through the Ramblers' Association, and on to George Monbiot's newer The Land is Ours pressure group. They speak for consumers of the countryside.
Today's eco-warriors include Colin Ward in their pantheon. He was an environmentalist before most people knew what the word meant. But, like all saints, religious or ultra-secular, he is a thorny ally. Suburbia is not a dirty word to him. He wrote an entire book, Welcome, Thinner City, in praise of lower urban densities. In Richer Futures, a collection of essays by his admirers, he writes of the virtues of "a peopled landscape," not a green museum: "All too often a concern for the protection of the countryside is a concern for the exclusive enjoyment of it by the mobile affluent classes." Fortunately for everyone, Colin Ward will never be demobbed from the Awkward Squad.
Richer futures
Ken Worpole ed.
Earthscan 1999, ?12.95
