Ken Worpole's new collection of essays, 'Brightening from the East: Essays on landscape & memory' (Little Toller Books, 2025), 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.