Tag: psychogeography
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We Were Strangers
A friend of mine passed away a few months ago and, although we were never especially close, his death affected me deeply. For a time afterwards I found myself impelled, on my lunch breaks, to leave the office block in central Manchester where I work and spend an hour walking – briskly yet purposelessly –…
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Rethinking Mythogeography
I first came across Phil Smith in Walking, Writing and Performance, in which he appears as ‘The Crab Man’, an alter ego also credited as one of the contributors to 2010’s Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways: a collection of fragmentary narratives that construct and deconstruct an approach to walking as an artistic practice, a…
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Ghosts on the Shore
Identities – of people and of places – form slowly over time, through the sedimentary accretion of multiple overlapping layers. Even the oldest or most deeply buried stories never entirely disappear. Sometimes it takes the archaeologist, or the psychoanalyst, to do a little digging. Paul Scraton’s Ghosts on the Shore enacts a sustained process of…
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The Old Weird Albion
Histories and hauntings of the English South When I think of the South Downs, I see a watercolour of Beachy Head by Eric Ravilious. A chalky white cliff illuminated by a lighthouse with an ominous raincloud hovering above it. I remember climbing to the top of the Devil’s Dyke to look at the pastoral Constable…
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Shopping centres, caves and the fate of us all
If you leave Nottingham train station and head towards the centre of the city, you will eventually come up against a large brown wall barricading the city. Actually it is the backside, or front (it’s hard to tell), of a shopping centre called Broadmarsh. Like a museum gift shop, the only way is through. I…
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A New Map of Berlin
I am an inexperienced cyclist. As far as possible, I avoid Berlin’s main arteries and stick to the backstreets. Bike lanes constricted by car traffic, tram tracks and intrusion from roadworks and heavy construction make me nervous, so my routes are often haphazard interconnections of empty footpaths, public and corporate plätze, service alleys, old river…
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A New Map of Berlin
Fehrbelliner Strasse intersects the indefinite, porous border between the old East Berlin neighbourhoods of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg. Forming a T with the sloping green space of Volkspark am Weinbergweg, the street is lined with pretty late 19th-century altbauten that had survived artillery and aerial bombardment at the end of World War II, and featureless…
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Shorelines Festival 2013
The perennial danger of the small town literary festival is that it takes place solely within the confines of a conference centre / tent / town hall or other academic / municipal space. However well-advertised, accessible (geographically, financially) and welcoming, there is always then a potential for division between inside and outside. This becomes pronounced…