Brightening from the East by Ken Worpole

‘My book of the year so far.’ John Merrick

‘…a fantastic volume that might hopefully bring Worpole’s work to a wider audience. Never opaquely academic but always deeply researched and sharp, alongside ‘The New English Landscape’ are essays on class and the domestic garden, cemeteries and the Italian cultural relationship to mortality, the Thaxted folk festival, Detectorists, and much more besides…His warm generosity of thought makes not only for an authoritative and kindly guide to under-celebrated places and the people who called them home, but also offers blueprints for our own troubled times. ‘ Luke Turner, Caught by the River (Book of the Month, April 2025).

In Brightening from the East Ken Worpole explores a unique ‘region of the mind’ – the Thames Estuary and the marshland landscapes of the East Anglian shoreline. In this wide-ranging collection of essays, personal and historical, Worpole brings us the stories of radical communities, of arcadian dreams among the shabby plotlands of eastern England, of new ways of living. He ranges further afield too, writing on Italian cemeteries, Dutch landscape architects and the English twentieth century folk revival. Here Worpole convincingly argues that the Essex landscape has always been a refuge for new ideas, and a place where practical idealism could flourish, a place the world might learn from. Brightening from the East also contains Worpole’s influential essay, ‘The New English Landscape’.

Paperback. Out now.