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Articles by Ken Worpole
Book review: All To Play For – How to design child-friendly housing
Ken Worpole explores Dinah Bornat’s call for child-friendly neighbourhoods and asks why the UK continues to fall behind its European peers in providing them The dream persists that, one day again, we will recreate the child-friendly streets, housing estates and neighbourhoods beloved of documentary photographers of the first half of the 20th century. But the odds are, I think, stacked against this.
Caught by the River
We should all be deeply grateful for Emma Warren’s timely cultural history of the youth club, writes social historian and former youth worker Ken Worpole.
Let the children play
In a war-ravaged street in Mosul, Iraq, a dozen boys are filmed playing football. They run, scramble, shoot, dive in the dust, and occasionally hug when scoring a goal. Yet there is something heart-breaking about this football game – it is played with an imaginary ball. This is haram football, haram meaning forbidden, banned by Islamic State. In 2015, two years before the film was made, 13 boys had been publicly executed by a firing squad for watching a football game on television.
The Peculiar People of Essex
Newly published by Little Toller, Ken Worpole’s ‘Brightening From the East: Essays on Landscape and Memory’ tells stories of arcadian dreams among the shabby plotlands of eastern England. It’s also our Book of the Month for April. Read an extract below. In the early 1960s my family lived for a short time in Daws Heath, a small settlement near Southend, renting a house across the road from a chapel belonging to The Peculiar People, a Nonconformist sect unique to Essex.
Modern Hospice Design
Table of Contents Book Description Critics' Reviews 2nd Edition By Ken Worpole Copyright 2024 202 Pages 50 Color Illustrations by Routledge 202 Pages 50 Color Illustrations by Routledge The new edition of this acclaimed book comprehensively updates its timely advocacy of the need for good quality palliative care, today more necessary than ever.
A history of unpopular protest
On 16 February this year, seven Just Stop Oil protesters were found guilty of peacefully blocking the distribution of oil from the Esso Fuel Terminal in Birmingham. All were sentenced to 12 months conditional discharge with costs of up to £500. However, it was the views of District Judge Wilkinson, in sentencing them, that caught the news. “It is abundantly clear that you are all good people,” he said. “It’s unarguable that man-made global warming is real and we are facing a climate crisis.
Caught by the River
Ken Worpole writes: The short autobiographical piece below was commissioned for a book that never happened. Writing in the first person is not something I feel comfortable with, to be honest, but on this occasion there was no other choice. I have spent a lot of time on trains travelling around the country, often noting that when a small group of friends or work colleagues travel together, it is invariably one person who does the talking: if it is a mixed group it is usually a man.
Caught by the River
Read Ken Worpole’s introduction to Adrian May’s ‘Boot Sale Harvest’ — a seasonal journey through the boot sales of Essex, which explores the human stories to be told by books and pens, ukuleles and harmonicas, soup bowls, strawberries and tins of paint. If we ever thought a book was needed on car boot sales then poet, folklorist, literary academic, hobbyist, musician and collector of trifles, Adrian May, was clearly the writer to do it. And now he has, quite wonderfully.
Radical Object: Potato Planter at Frating Hall Farm
In 1943 a breakaway group from John Middleton Murry’s failing socialist education project, The Adelphi Centre–which was based in a rural Edwardian mansion near Colchester–took over nearby Frating Hall Farm on the Essex Tendring peninsula. There they ran it as a radical pacifist settlement until 1954.
Is pride in the Kindertransport misplaced?
The British effort to rescue Jewish children is fondly remembered – but the truth is more complex This article is a preview from the Spring 2020 edition of New Humanist Two small public sculptures at Liverpool Street Station commemorate the Kindertransport, the exodus of 10,000 Jewish child refugees sent to London by their parents between December 1938 and September 1939, before war was declared and the exit barriers came down.
Six days in a 70s utopia
Was the Danish radical schooling project known as Tvind a liberating new frontier in education, or a cult? This article is a preview from the Summer 2019editionof New Humanist In early 1975 a Danish academic called Lars started coming into the coffee bar at the bookshop and community centre in Hackney, east London, where I worked, to play chess. We got talking.
Publication: The Isle of Dogs: Before the big money / Mike Seaborne
Now home to financial heavyweights and epic skyscapers, the Isle of Dogs was once the beating heart of industrial East London. In the early ’80s Mike Seaborne began documenting the area’s social fabric, taking his camera around the streets and inside remaining working factories and businesses. These photographs, taken between 1982 and 1987, show the island on the cusp of huge development.
‘The power of the grave as the locus of remembrance has been increasingly relinquished’
More than 60 per cent of open space in the London Borough of Newham is cemetery land, a problem not confined to British cities. Anyone taking the ‘A’ train from Manhattan to JFK Airport through Queens will wonder why the dead take up as much room as the living, as the train rattles past mile after mile of headstones and memorials.
The New English Landscape
"We can never neatly separate what we see from what we know." — E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (1950). ‘The relationship between remembering and forgetting is, paradoxically, related to the relationship between memorials and ruins. Novelist Robert Musil published an essay on ‘Monuments’ in 1936, noting how much of his native city of Vienna was crowded with memorials to soldiers, statesmen and illustrious figures, forgotten ever after.
Tidal Pools: Photographs by Jason Orton
04.15.09 Ken Worpole | Gallery Tidal pools, also known as seawater pools or lidos, were once common along the coast of Britain, particularly at seaside holiday resorts. Their function was to enclose and retain a sufficient depth of seawater in which children and adults could swim after the tide had retreated from the seashore. Some were more elaborate than others.
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