“Life is not a walk across an open field”. This Russian proverb, cited in an essay by Stoke Newington-born writer John Berger (2026-2017), so fascinated historian Ken Worpole that his frequent repetition of it has led many to believe it to be a phrase of his own creation.
This year marks Berger’s centenary, and a series of commemorative local events was launched on 28 January with a talk at Stoke Newington Bookshop featuring Worpole and writer Gareth Evans. They were discussing the former’s latest volume Brightening from the East, a collection of essays that explores the relationship between East London and the East of England.
Longtime Hackney resident, Worpole was active during the 1970s in Centerprise, a bookshop and cultural space on Kingsland High Street. At that time Berger was an influential figure in the wave of engagé intellectuals who remained grounded in the social issues of the places where they lived, and he inspired several of those linked to Centerprise to write a collective work of oral history called Working Lives to which Worpole contributed.
The historian acknowledges the incredible admixture of creativity and cultural exuberance alive in this area in the 1960 and 1970s. “There were tremendous opportunities to make yourself in 1960's Hackney”.
And make himself he did. Having failed in his initial aim of becoming a civil engineer, he went on to train as a schoolteacher (he taught at Hackney Downs School between 1969 and 1973), before eventually becoming a professional writer.
Known for his ideas on landscape, Worpole was and is at the heart of a strand of cultural production by those who, in Berger’s footsteps, invite us to explore the territory beyond mainstream values and lifestyles.
Both authors have been attracted to marginal lands, Berger to rural France, and Worpole to the ‘scraplands’ and ‘bastard’ lands of the east of England. “That kind of landscape has haunted me”, he says. He is particularly fascinated with the shifting coastal borders of Essex, with its many estuaries, islands and alternative cultural communities: close enough to London to allow regular cultural interchange, yet removed enough to preserve the region’s wild lands.
Like Berger, Worpole invites us to reach out to spaces that are heterogeneous, where we encounter the feral and the sublime. For these writers landscapes are as much about people as they are about places; they may not always be ‘open fields’, but that is what makes us cherish them.
Brightening from the East: Essays on Landscape and Memory by Ken Worpole is published by Little Toller, ISBN: 978-1-91506-846-0; RRP: £16.
A John Berger film screening and panel discussion is planned for May at the CLR James library.
