[...] Throughout my years in Baltimore, I always tried to maintain some relationship to local politics: we bought up an old library, and turned it into a community action centre, took part in campaigns for rent control, and generally tried to spark radical initiatives; it always seemed to me very important to connect my theoretical work with practical activity, in the locality. So when I got to Oxford, the local campaign to defend the Rover plant in Cowley offered a natural extension of this kind of engagement. For personal reasons, I couldn’t become quite as active as in Baltimore, but it provided the same kind of connection to a tangible social conflict. It also led to some very interesting political discussions—recorded in the book, The Factory and the City, which Teresa Hayter and I produced around it—a fascinating experience. Soon afterwards I read Raymond Williams’s novel, Second Generation, which is exactly about this, and was astonished by how well he captured so much of the reality at Cowley. So one of the first essays in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference became a reflection on his fiction.