BUILDING A WINDMILL | KEN WORPOLE & MELISSA BENN IN CONVERSATION

Doors: 6.30pm

Event: 7pm-9pm

In New Jerusalem: The Good City and The Good Society, his study of utopian planning published by The Swedenborg Society in 2015 (now in its third edition), writer Ken Worpole argued for a ‘do-it-yourself’ approach to new forms of settlement, combining the best of environmental ethics with resourceful sociability. His new collection of essays, Brightening from the East: Essays on landscape and memory (Little Toller Books, 2025), begins with his experience of visiting the now-legendary ‘windmill’ community at Tvind in Denmark in 1976.

Wide-ranging in subject matter and form – already described by literary critic John Merrick as one of his ‘books of the year’ – Ken’s new book recalls historic patterns of communitarian sentiment among the marshland Quaker and Anglican strongholds of East Anglia, but also investigates more recent utopian landscapes in Dutch child-friendly urban architecture, post-war Italian memorial cemeteries, housing co-ops and urban summer colonies in Danish cities, open-air schools and other twentieth-century radical social initiatives.

Ken will be discussing these themes in conversation with writer and journalist Melissa Benn, in whose widely acclaimed novels and studies of modern education, ideas of self-exploration and collective endeavour are major preoccupations. She is currently writing a book on the relationship between post-war literary fiction and politics.

KEN WORPOLE is a writer and social historian, whose work includes many books on architecture, landscape and public policy. He is married to photographer Larraine Worpole with whom he has collaborated on book projects internationally, as well as in Hackney, London, where they have lived and worked since 1969. His principal interests concern the planning and design of new settlements, landscapes and public institutions–streets, parks, playgrounds, libraries, informal education–based on the pioneering achievements of twentieth-century social democracy and the environmental movement. In recent years he has focused on recovering the social history of communitarian experiments in both town and country, drawing lessons for the creation of new residential and environmentally sustainable forms of settlement for an ageing population. In the New Statesman, editor Jason Cowley recently wrote that, ‘Worpole is a literary original, a social and architectural historian whose books combine the Orwellian ideal of common decency with an understated erudition’. He was a founder member of the Demos think-tank and of Opendemocracy. For the Swedenborg Archive series, Ken is the author of The New Jerusalem: the Good City and the Good Society.

MELISSA BENN is a writer and activist, the author of seven works of non-fiction and two novels including the widely acclaimed School Wars: The Battle for Britain’s Education (Verso, 2011) and the novel One of Us (Chatto and Windus, 2008) – a modern retelling of Sophocles’ Antigone. As a freelance journalist, Melissa has written for The Guardian, New Statesman and Financial Times among numerous others. Her published essays have covered such diverse subjects as the New Education Establishment, media representations of children in poverty and the life and times of the Kilburn High Road. She is currently writing a book looking at the relationship between post-war literary fiction and politics.