Books
Books and academic reports with information about Tolmers Village. In date order, most recent first. Please contact us with any omissions or amendments.
Gardens of the future: unique visions for a changing world – 2025
Ruth Chivers ed, British Library, 2025.
Download page spread on Tolmers by curator Valentina Mirabella (pp140-41).
Robin Evans’s Empty Room: Collective Living in the 1970s and the Problem of Domestic Realism – 2024
Joseph Bedford, Burning Farm, 29 March 2024 See PDF
“Art as a mass political weapon”: the Poster Collective 1972-1982 – 2020
Christine Halsall, Luca Barbieri, Jane Dixon-Halsall, Leviticus Hinds eds., 2020. Limited edition. Enquiries about availability sent to info@tolmers.net will be passed on.
Making Places Better – 2020
Nick Wates, PhD by Publication thesis, University of Brighton, 2020. Study on the impact of Nick Wates’ books starting with The Battle for Tolmers Square. Download
We all live in Tolmers Square – 2019
Bartlett 100 Stories / 02/100, George Bull ed, University College London, 2019
First published online, 5 February 2019.
Jeans and Beans and a Tub of Miso; Memories of Community Foods 1976 – 2006 – 2013
Tim Powell, 2013
Great book charting the rise of what is now ‘Britain’s experts in the procurement, sale and distribution of organic and natural dried fruits, nuts, seeds, pulses, grains and branded health foods’, from humble beginnings in a squat in Prince of Wales Crescent, then a short term lease on the south side of Tolmers Square and now an industrial estate in North London.
(from timp684[at]gmail.com)
The London Square: Gardens in the Midst of Town – 2012
Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, Yale University Press, 2012.
ISBN 978-0-300-15201-2
‘Yet there was an upside to these dire events [the rundown nature of London’s squares in the 1970s]. Demolitions and threats to Georgian Bloomsbury and to Tolmers Square in Euston (the ‘locus classicus of London’s intellectual squatting movement’), succeeded anew in drawing public attention to the plight of the squares, and precipitated the initial stirrings of the movement for their preservation.’ (page 270)
Tolmers in colour: Memories of a London squatter community – 2010
Nick Wates with Mae Dewsbery & Caroline Lwin, Bay Leaf Books, 2010 See details
Buy from the NWA shop.
Goodbye to London, Radical Art and Politics in the 70’s – 2010
Astrid Proll ed, Hatje Cantz, Berlin, 2010. Includes essay on Tolmers by Sacha Craddock.
www.hatjecantz.de/
The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness – 2010
Oren Harman, W.W.Norton & Company Inc., 2010.
The last chapter tells the story of Tolmers during the time George Price was there.
Author’s video precis at www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU-s_5zkGL0
20 years of “planning” the Tolmers Square office development – 1981
Jamie Gough, Middlesex Polytechnic, Geography and Planning Papers No 5, July 1981, Middlesex Polytechnic.
The Battle for Tolmers Square – 1976
Nick Wates, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976. Reissued 2012.
Digital and paper copies available from Routledge Revivals, the NWA shop or Amazon.
Download ‘final chapter‘: The Tolmers Tale End, unpublished article, 1984.
Tolmers village: evolution or revolution – 1974
Ken Morgan, Oxford Polytechnic, 1974