About me

I write about social visionaries, utopian dreamers, and social thinkers. The thread that runs through them is ‘active hope’—something that we do and decide upon rather than being a quality of mind that we simply have or we don’t. The stories, histories and ideas I write about centre on people who acted, experimented and thought on the basis of that conviction. They range from diehard utopians and revolutionaries through to economic thinkers, who though they may appear as sober, practical types often hold radical social visions for reform.

I started off as one of those economists, in fact, working in government, international development and academia. But as a graduate student, I was sitting in university lecture halls adrift in mazes of algebra when the 2008 global financial crisis hit. In my hometown of London, bankers were turfed out of their glass skyscrapers clutching cardboard boxes. People lost homes and livelihoods. The collapse of the financial system narrowly averted, we entered the age of austerity. In classes, we went on shuffling our equations – economic theorising gliding swan-like over the surface of reality while economic chaos reigned.

I began to appreciate that those clever theories had all sorts of utopian visions embedded within them – good ones and bad ones – even if these were never openly stated. Gradually I became drawn towards trying to demystify these ideas for people who weren’t necessarily clued up on social and economic jargon and then to think about the broader visions that are connected to them. And that led me out of academia and into writing.

And social theorising doesn’t get you very far if it just stays as models and abstract principles written on paper. That’s why I’ve become fascinated by how social ideas are reflected in the physical spaces of the cities that so many of us now inhabit. I’m fascinated by the nooks and crannies of the city, London especially, how it can harbour alternative spaces, both physical and mental, how it’s both a concrete place and something that you have to imagine to understand and therefore somewhere that’s constantly being remade.

You can find out more about my writing on economics, utopia, history and London here and here.