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About Ken Worpole

Ken Worpole is an author and policy adviser.

Articles by Ken Worpole

Saturday 11th December

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain

Ken Worpole, 11 December 2010
The ‘new ruins’ – poorly designed and shoddy shopping malls and mass-produced housing – are ubiquitous throughout our cities. Ken Worpole finds that Owen Hatherley is a witty and erudite gazetteer of terrible mistakes, but wonders if the acerbic author is as fair as he could be
Saturday 13th November

The Re-Enchantment of Place: a book about Britain is launched

Ken Worpole, 13 November 2010
For the past 20 years or more people have increasingly been exploring the British landscape on foot and by bike. Ken Worpole is one of them and here he reflects on the rewards for modern society in a renewed acquaintance with the natural world
Tuesday 6th July

Colin Ward, 1924 – 2010

Ken Worpole, 6 July 2010
A Colin Ward Memorial Gathering is being held this Saturday to honour the life and work of the great anarchist thinker.
Sunday 11th October

Stockholm Woodland Cemetery

Ken Worpole, 11 October 2009
Stockholm's woodland cemetery is a landscape whose democratic ideals serve a universal sense
Wednesday 23rd August

Roger Deakin, a journey through landscape

Ken Worpole, 23 August 2006
The author of "Waterlog" and the forthcoming "Wildwood" explored the natural landscape in fresh, surprising and influential ways. Ken Worpole pays tribute to Roger Deakin, and introduces his openDemocracy "swimmer's journey" article from July 2001.
Tuesday 4th July

The British Landscape

Ken Worpole, 4 July 2006
John Davies' beautiful panoramic photographs of the British landscape capture an industrial world now lost and a modernity running away from its past, says Ken Worpole.
Tuesday 4th April

Ian Hamilton Finlay's world

Ken Worpole, 4 April 2006
The landscape artist Ian Hamilton Finlay created an extraordinary fusion of sculpture, inscription and philosophy in his Little Sparta garden. Ken Worpole considers a complex figure.
Thursday 9th March

Lido life

Ken Worpole, 9 March 2006
"When we get down to swimming, we get down to democracy." Ken Worpole finds a political challenge in the revival of a public arena where sensuous and spiritual pleasures combine: the lido and open-air swimming pool.
Monday 13th February

'The Playgrounds and the City,' Aldo van Eyck

Ken Worpole, 13 February 2006
"Most books about architecture or town planning are earnest treatises: this book sings"
Wednesday 14th December

Living on water: welcome to a shedboatshed world

Ken Worpole, 14 December 2005
A journey through the coastal landscape of Essex, eastern England, convinces Ken Worpole that human beings in the 21st century must relearn how to live with water.
Tuesday 15th November

Saraband: from Dalarna to Dallas, and back

Ken Worpole, 15 November 2005
Ingmar Bergman’s late film returns to the characters of his “Scenes from a Marriage” thirty years on. For Ken Worpole, it confirms the Swedish director as the “Shakespeare of the 20th century”.
Monday 29th August

The world's first environmental blogger

Ken Worpole, 29 August 2005
Ken Worpole visits an English country garden where the seeds of the modern world were planted.
Thursday 5th May

There is nothing, then there is something, then there is nothing again

Ken Worpole, 5 May 2005
John Berger & Jean Mohr’s 1967 book “A Fortunate Man: the story of a country doctor” shaped the lives and political beliefs of many involved with Britain’s health service. At a packed London gathering, Ken Worpole hears it freshly echo their hopes and disappointments.
Monday 29th December

A problem with drink?

Ken Worpole, 29 December 2003
Britain’s city and town centres float on a sea of alcoholic excess. After years of promoting the benefits of the “leisure economy”, can its public policy help restore alcohol to its truer place as a lubricant of life and laughter?
Thursday 11th December

The afterlife of bodies: a reply to Tiffany Jenkins

Ken Worpole, 11 December 2003
Respect for the interred human body is shared across human cultures from prehistoric time. It involves not just attachment to the consolations of memory, but responsibility across generations. This, says Ken Worpole is “the ethical politics of ‘the long now’”.
Wednesday 8th October

Death in the Luxembourg Gardens

Ken Worpole, 8 October 2003
A memorial to atrocity in a beautiful Paris park causes Ken Worpole to reflect on the dark shadows of the public realm.
Wednesday 24th September

Essex shores, Essex lives

Ken Worpole, 24 September 2003
Behind the clichés of tacky commercialism and suburban sprawl that mark the eastern English county of Essex in the national imagination, lies another world: home-grown food, swimming by mudflats and the eternal cry of the oyster-catchers, finds openDemocracy’s associate editor.
Thursday 9th January

Landscapes and farewells

Ken Worpole, 9 January 2003
Landscape is both imagination and livelihood, the setting for human stories that are made as well as inherited. From farming to floods, from photography to hunting, the debate on Landscape & Identity has revealed the vital importance of human attachment in giving meaning to place.
Tuesday 4th June

Landscape and identity in a globalised world

Roger Scruton and Ken Worpole, 4 June 2002
How is the sense of place, essential to people’s ability to find meaning in the world, being affected by transformations of landscape in the age of globalisation? openDemocracy’s City&Country editors introduce a new debate.
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