For more than a decade we – photographer Jason Orton and writer Ken Worpole – have documented the changing landscape and coastline of Essex and East Anglia, particularly its estuaries, islands and urban edgelands. We continue to explore many aspects of contemporary landscape topography, architecture and aesthetics, and in 2013 published our second book, The New English Landscape (Field Station | London, 2013), the second edition of which was published in 2015 and is now out of print.
Horsey Island, Essex, March 2013 by Jason Orton In 2010, ARTEVENTS published a book of essays and poems under the title, ‘Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and Its Meanings’, edited by Gareth Evans & Di Robson. It contained a short essay of mine called ‘East of Eden’ on the as yet unformulated – but to me self-evident […]
PUBLISHED WEDNESDAY, 19 MARCH 2025 This month Little Toller Books publish a collection of essays and writings of mine from the past two decades, now gathered together for the first time. The book includes not only descriptive writings and reflections on numerous excursions into the hinterland of the Thames Estuary and the marshland landscapes of […]
Balcony horticulture, 2023 The social and political after-effects of the catastrophe of the First World War included recognising that many who had sacrificed their lives had done so with little if any stake in the nation’s future. Of those who had survived – a lot of whom had come from conditions of brutal poverty […]
Who is Iain Sinclair, and where did he come from? That’s what people in London wanted to know in the early 1970s, east of Liverpool Street Station. His formative years were gradually disclosed in instalments on the covers and fly-leaves of small poetry collections and the bylines to essays in journals and magazines, as he […]
The much-expanded new edition of Modern Hospice Design: the architecture of palliative and social care, will be published on 29 September 2023. The first edition sold well and was widely cited in the professional literature, leading to conference invitations and talks, which in turn meant I realised how much there was still to be […]
St Peter-on-the-Wall, 7th century chapel at Bradwell Two buildings dominate the flat, estuarine landscape of the Dengie Peninsula in Essex where the River Blackwater meets the sea: the austere 7th century chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, and the decommissioned 20th century Bradwell power station, the latter wrapped up like a monumental installation by the artist Christo. […]
This month marks the tenth anniversary of The New English Landscape blog, now running to seventy-five short essays, reviews and commentary, or 70,000 words. It was started to promote the book of that name published by photographer Jason Orton and myself in autumn 2013, collaboratively exploring in words and photographs the unique topography of the […]
In 1973 I was involved in an oral history project in Hackney organised under the title, ‘A People’s Autobiography of Hackney’. We put notices in the local newspaper and sent leaflets to tenants’ associations in the borough, asking if older residents wanted to share their memories of growing up and living in Hackney in the […]
Toby Jones in ‘Detectorists’ Just before Christmas, Historic England posted a blog, A Brief History of Community Centres in England, illustrated by contemporary colour photographs showing modest and occasionally eccentric buildings scattered across the country. While of minor interest to some architectural historians, attention is now being paid to buildings that have nevertheless played a […]
A favourite novel of the late, and much-loved writer and anarchist, Colin Ward, was Huckleberry Finn. Huck’s common-sense decency and independent spirit led him to become one of the great moral heroes of world literature. Another of Mark Twain’s books nevertheless provides the best title to describe the public persona of Ward himself: An Innocent […]