Care in the Countryside' with Ken Warpole

According to a recent report from the Royal Institute of British Architects, Our small towns and villages are set to become retirement communities, while a major provider of care homes recently argued that there is a clear case both socially and economically for care homes to be a central component of community infrastructure. In short, rural life will be increasingly inhabited by an ageing population, and this represents an opportunity to reconfigure and innovate rural life as something not to be feared but as a chance for innovation and a renewal of local civic pride.

Writer Ken Worpole has long argued that Essex has always played a major role in providing forms of residential care, retreats and rehabilitation settlements for many thousands of Londoners, a trend likely to increase. How we can use this opportunity to revive rural infrastructure care homes, churches, parish councils, public libraries, voluntary organisations, walking groups, education in later life, environmental initiatives to improve the quality of life for those who still have much to give to rural life in Essex.

Ken Worpoles new book, Brightening from the East: Essays on landscape & memory, has just been published by Little Toller Books. Many of the essays make particular reference to rural life in Essex. In 2021 The New Statesman wrote that: Worpole is a literary original, a social and architectural historian whose books combine the Orwellian ideal of common decency with understated erudition.