Colin Ward

Later life

Ward was demobbed from the army in 1946, when he returned to working for Sidney Caulfield and began contributing to Freedom Press. From 1952 to 1961, he worked as an architect's assistant for Shepheard and Epstein. From 1961 Ward worked for two years as director of research for the architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon. 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 (TCPA). In 1979 he stopped working for the TCPA to become a full-time writer.{{efn|Ward in Ward & Goodway 2014, p. 76 His first two books were Violence (1970) and Work (1972). He wrote 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 engagement with anarchism

Ward initially engaged with anarchism in 1943, when he was in serving in the army in Glasgow. Goodway (1963) observed that he 'received as "a real education" there: on account of the eye-catching deprivation, his use of the Mitchell Library and, as the only British city ever to have had a significant anarchist movement (in contrast to London's Continental exiles and Jewish immigrants), the dazzling anarchist orators on Glasgow Green with their Sunday-night meetings in a room above the Hangman's Rest in Wilson Street and bookshop in George Street.' 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 ...'. Ward responded with his article Allied military government{{efn|Ward in Ward & Goodway 2014, p. 2 which was published under his own name in the mid-December 1943 issue of War Commentary, which was followed by articles which were also published under his own name in the following January, February and March. In April 1945 Ward 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.

In 1947 Ward began editing the anarchist newspaper Freedom, the successor of War Commentary, and remained an editor of Freedom until 1960. In 1961 he founded the monthly anarchist journal Anarchy, which he edited from 1961 to 1970.

Ward on 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 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."

Ward on education

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".

Ward on housing

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 co-operatives from Third World countries as a model for the anarchist movement.