Colin Ward

• Name — Colin Ward • Born — 14 August 1924 • Birthplace — Wanstead, Essex, England • Died — 11 February 2010 • Education — * Ilford County High School • Garnett College • Occupation — * Writer • Editor • Notable Works — Anarchy in Action (1973) • Movement — Anarchism • Partner — Vera Balfour (died 1963)

Ward was born in Wanstead, Essex, England, to Arnold and Ruby Ward (West). Arnold was a teacher and Ruby a former clerical worker. Both parents were active Labour Party supporters. Ward attended Ilford County High School, Essex leaving school aged 15 with no qualifications. His first job was as a clerk for a builder who was fraudulently erecting air-raid shelters. He then worked in the office of the Borough Engineer of Ilford Borough, where he encountered 'the inequitable treatment of council-house tenants'. From there he began working for the architect Sidney Caulfield, whose work Ward described as having 'dwindled to temporary repairs to factories in the East End of London'. In 1942, aged 18, Ward was conscripted into the army as a sapper, going on to work as a draughtsman in the Royal Engineers. In 1943 he was based in Glasgow in the Army School of Hygiene. Goodway (1963) observed that Ward: Ward began attending Glasgow Anarchist Group events. Shantz and Williams (2013) documented that Ward met Eddie Shaw, Jimmie Dick and Frank Leech. They also documented that Leech encouraged Ward: 'to put together some articles for the London publication War Commentary - For Anarchism — published by Marie Louise Bernari of the Freedom Press Group... and the material appeared in December of 1943.' Ward subscribed to the anti-militarist anarchist newspaper War Commentary. Consequently, in 1945 he was called as a witness for the prosecution in the trial of the paper's editors, John Hewetson, Vernon Richards and Philip Sansom. Shortly after the trial he was transferred to Orkney.

After being demobbed in 1946, Ward returned to working for Sidney Caulfield and began contributing to Freedom Press. In 1947 he began editing the anarchist newspaper Freedom, the successor of War Commentary, and remained an editor of Freedom until 1960. From 1952 to 1961, Ward worked as an architect's assistant for Shepheard and Epstein. In 1961 he founded the monthly anarchist journal Anarchy, which he edited from 1961 to 1970. From 1961 Ward worked for two years as director of research for the architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon. Then in 1964 he undertook teacher training at the former Garnett College in Roehampton southwest London, where he met his future wife, Harriet Unwin. He subsequently began teaching at Wandsworth Technical College, in South London. In 1971, Ward became the Education Officer for the Town and Country Planning Association. He published widely on education, architecture and town planning. His most influential book was The Child in the City (1978), about children's street culture. From 1995 to 1996, he was Centennial Professor of Housing and Social Policy at the London School of Economics. In 2001, he was made an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University.

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 was "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 activists, Ward held 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."

In the chapter Schools No Longer in his 2018 (originally 1973) book Anarchy in Action, Ward discussed the genealogy of education and schooling, in particular the writings of Everett Reimer and Ivan Illich, and the beliefs of anarchist educator Paul Goodman. Many of Ward'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 wrote, "[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 the chapter The Role of the State to Education Without Schools (edited by Peter Buckman). 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".

In his 1976 book Housing: An Anarchist Approach, Ward criticized slum clearances, the municipalization programmes created by the Labour Party and the private landlord housing model. He advocated for an anarchist model of housing, citing squatting and housing cooperatives from Third World countries as a model for the anarchist movement.

• 1961 • 1961 (As C.W.) • 1962 • 1963 • 1963 • 1964 (As C.W.) • 1964 • 1965 • 1965 (As C.W.) • 1966 (As C.W.) • 1967 (As C.W.) • 1968 • 1968

• 1970 (As C.W.) • 1970 • 1970 (As C.W.) • 1972 • 1976

• 1987a • 1987b

• 1992

• 1970 • 1972 • 1973 (With Anthony Fyson) • 1973 (As editor) • 1974 (With Colin Smithson) • 1974 • 1975 (As editor) • 1976 (As editor) • 1978

• 1982 (With Eileen Adams) • 1984 • 1985 (With Dennis Hardy) • 1985 • 1986 (With Dennis Hardy) • 1986 • 1987 (As editor) • 1989 • 1989 (With Ruth Rendell)

• 1990 • 1990 (Originally 1988) • 1991 (With Tim Ward) • 1991 • 1991 • 1993 • 1995 • 1997 Stamps: Designs For Anarchist Postage Stamps (illustrated by Clifford Harper) • 1997 • 1997 • 1998 (With Peter Hall)

• 2000 (Originally 1996) • 2002 • 2003 (With David Goodway) • 2004 • 2004 (With Dennis Hardy)

• 2011 (With Damian F. White and Chris Wilbert) • 2012

• 2022 (Originally 1996) • 2023 (originally 1988) (With David Crouch)