Common Treasures with Giles Smith, Hana Loftus and Ken Worpole
About this Event
Giles Smith, Hana Loftus and Ken Worpole
Common Treasures
Wednesday 10 June 2026, 6.30pm - 8.30pm
The Commons Community Kitchen & Café at The Minories, 74 High Street, Colchester, CO1 1UE
Giles Smith, founding partner of the architecture and design collective Assemble, Winner of the 2015 Turner Prize, will be discussing the Common Treasures project and accompanying books with writer, designer, and Essex-based planner Hana Loftus, and writer and social historian, Ken Worpole.
Common Treasures is an anthology that offers a credible and compelling vision of what life in a rural future might look like.
Tickets: £10 / £8 concessions (students, under 27s and unwaged)
Common Treasures is a project which explores the challenges faced by rural communities by bringing together people with a broad range of different skills and experiences who are committed to a form of rural development that prioritises communities over profit, promotes sustainable agriculture and land stewardship, and combines lasting economic impact with ecological and social values.
Find out more about the Common Treasures project at commontreasures.org.
Giles Smith
Giles Smith is an architect, writer and educator. He is a founding partner of the award-winning architecture practice Assemble, where his work focuses on socially-oriented projects at scales that range from furniture and events to complex buildings and masterplanning.
Hana Loftus
Hana Loftus is a planner, designer and writer based in Essex. She co-directs HAT Projects, an architecture and planning practice based in Colchester, and as a writer has been published in Apollo, Icon and widely in the architecture and planning press. Hana contributed an essay to Volume 2 of Common Futures.
Ken Worpole
Writer and social historian Ken Worpole is 'a literary original, a social and architectural historian whose books combine the Orwellian ideal of common decency with understated erudition,’ according to The NewStatesman. Ken has pursued a lifelong interest in the social history of London's East End and its relationship to the Thames Estuary and coastal East Anglia. His two most recent books are No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen: Back to the land in wartime Britain (2022), and Brightening from the East: Essays on landscape & memory (2025), the latter being chosen by Geoff Dyer as one of the New Statesman's 'Books of the Year' 2025. He is a contributor to Common Treasures.
Photo of Giles Smith © Hannah Thual
Photo of Hana Loftus © Polly Alderton
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
GBP 8.00 to GBP 10.00
