Islingtongue > Leytonstongue

Taken For Granted (1947) - Mogden

2012-02-13T14:16:00.000Z

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If I ever had a budget to produce a DVD of The London Perambulator this classic 1947 film about the sewage system of West Middlesex, Taken For Granted would be on the extras. It is the backdrop to Nick Papadimitriou's poetic vision of his region.
Here is he at Mogden Purification Works waxing lyrical about its significance "come and pray at this pile of turds because this is you"

The clip is from the London Screen Archive

Whats Cookin down at the Birkbeck

2012-01-30T22:37:00.000Z

Last night ventured down to Whats Cookin's new home at The Birkbeck Tavern in Langthorne Road, between the cemetery and the old hospital - perfect place for a knees up. Ramblin Steve and Ally now run the pub as well as the music night - an Americana boozer in the Lea Delta, serving up Maldon Gold ale from Essex's Mighty Oak Brewery.

A trip to the Birkbeck is like time-travel for me - back to the London I first experienced as an 18-year old fresh up from the provinces and decamped to a terrace in Forest Gate. The Birkbeck is still there in 1989. The spirit of Whats Cookin reminiscent of the music nights that inspired me (drunk) to write reviews for the City Poly student rag.

Marsh Lane Fields at dusk

2012-01-22T16:49:00.001Z

Colour film of Leytonstone 1938

2012-01-20T10:13:00.002Z

This fantastic 8mm Kodachrome amateur film of Leytonstone was shot in the same year as the photographs of the cyclists in Leyton (below) were taken - 1938. It's tantalizing to imagine one of them is cycling past the camera at some point - or even that they knew the man who made this brilliant celluloid topographical record.

It's interesting to see Harrow Green, little changed, the War Memorial to the dead of the First World War and soon to gain more names carved into the granite.

The Academy Cinema (0.36s), like all of Leytonstone's cinemas, is sadly no more. They're showing William Powell in Double Wedding and Conrad Nagal in Bank Alarm. Waltham Forest now stands as the only London borough without a permanent cinema (the Leytonstone Pop-Up Cinema organises monthly screenings in the library).

The Police Station at 1.50 is boarded up now. Alfred Hitchcock was locked in the cells here as a young child at the behest of his father to teach him a lesson for some misdemeanor. It apparently left him psychologically scarred for the rest of his life - but I suppose, on the upside, he did turn that trauma into a lucrative career.

I'm going to watch it again to see if I can spot any of my Leyton cyclists. And a huge thank you to Mr S. Redburn for sharing his father's film on Youtube.

Found Memories

2012-01-14T18:41:00.001Z

Before Christmas I found a collection of old photos in a junk shop on Hainault Road, E10 which had come from a house clearance not far away in Leyton. The first handful I dragged out of the 1980s Marks and Spencers carrier bag contained these pictures of a bike shop on Church Road Leyton, Graystone's, and what looks like the gathering of a cycling club.

The date "1938" is written on the back of this photo. When I zoomed in, one of the posters on the wall behind reads, "HANGED BY HIS OWN FATHER". The name of the road is also clearly visible - Capworth Street.

They look such cheerful bunch - I wonder if they were worried about the events in Europe. At the beginning of 1938 the government announced that all British schoolchildren would be issued with gas masks. I bet the kids loved it, but as a parent, I can imagine that would have created a real sense of anxiety, a fear of what was possibly to come. Maybe it never crossed their minds - they were too busy flirting and showing off - discussing the best route to take through Epping Forest.

This is the site of Graystone's on Church Road now. Although there is no sign of the shop you can see the detail around the front door next to it has survived and the exterior of that house looks pretty much the same.

And Capworth Street seems little changed - although a large group of cyclists posing for a photo in the middle of the road would soon be shunted out of the way by an aggressively driven customised car.

You can't help wondering what happened to them during the war. I know that the owner of the photos was in the navy and obviously survived - but the rest?

This photo looks like Marsh Lane Fields from the view of the gasometer behind the line of trees, augmented by the proximity of the house to Marsh Lane (and also to Graystone's). There's no date, but another one from the same set is dated 1953, the Goon Show was on the radio, Christie committed his murders at 10 Rillington Place and both Stalin and Dylan Thomas went to their graves (not together of course).

It feels odd to be in possession of somebody else's memories. Aside from the few photos of local interest the majority of them are classic family snaps - weddings, birthdays, holidays, spanning at least 50 years.

I'm curious to know why some member of the family didn't want them when the owner died and there was the inevitable sifting through of possessions. Some of them seem to date back to the early part of the century - you'd imagine they'd be treasured heirlooms.

My wife finds them "creepy", and although I disagree I can see what she means - we weren't supposed to see these photos (this is well before the Facebook age of obsessively sharing every moment of our lives with a legion of tangetial virtual 'friends'). The people in these photos are ghosts - not half-remembered school mates.

My Mum's family were naval folk so I was familiar with the names neatly written on the backs of these photos - Alexandria, Malta Harbour, Gateway of India.

But this one has a different story begging to be conjured out of its fading ink. The writing on the back (in ink this time rather than pencil) says:

"WE THREE", Nathanya Camp, Palestine Nov' 1945

From what I can glean online Nathanya Camp was a 'leave camp' for British forces serving in the middle east during the war. In November 1945, when this picture was taken, President Truman announced an inquiry "to look into the settlement of Jews in Palestine". In November 1945 Zionist guerilla fighters were carrying out violent attacks on the Palestinian Railway system leading to the death of a British soldier.

But this is probably the most curious of all the photos. The huge (plastic?) swan, dancer emerging from a grotto on an isolated jetty - it is Lynchian, a still from a discarded work by the Blue Velvet director found in a faded, crumpled Marks and Spencer carrier bag in a junk shop in Leyton, east London.

Brodie's Beer van in Kentish Town

2012-01-13T18:17:00.001Z

Leyton's brilliant brewery delivers to the northern suburbs

Arcades of Paris (with Walter Benjamin)

2012-01-07T14:18:00.001Z

On New Year's Eve we stumbled across these two arcades in Paris (I'd love to say that this came as a shock as we'd been taking a stroll along Leytonstone High Road, but sadly nothing mystical was involved, we traveled on Eurostar).

I thought of Walter Benjamin and his Arcades Project, a book I confess I've only read snippets of, but is difficult to avoid if you have an interest in the life of cities - it is a grand work dreamt up in these very arcades.

Passage des Panoramas

From what I gather, he saw the arcades as the natural habitat of the urban wanderer, the drifter, the flaneur:
"The Parisians … have made Paris the holy city of the flaneur - 'the landscape built of sheer life,' as Hofmannsthal once put it"

Benjamin describes the experience of the urban drift, or what another dweller of Paris, Guy Debord, would recast as the psychogeographic derive (Debord would see the flaneur as a decadent figure rather than a revolutionary or a subversive - I'm not so sure myself)

"That anamnestic intoxication in which the flaneur goes about the city not only feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but can very well possess itself of abstract knowledge - indeed, of dead facts - as something experienced or lived through."

"The innermost glowing cells of the city of light, the old dioramas, nested in the arcades, one of which today still bears the name Passage des Panoramas. It was, in the first moment, as though you had entered an aquarium. Along the wall of the great darkened hall, broken at intervals by narrow joints, it stretched like a ribbon of illuminated water behind glass."
Difficult to imagine Westfield Stratford moving someone to produce such prose.

"Architecture as the most important testimony to latent 'mythology.' And the most important architecture of the nineteenth century is the arcade."

Quotes from The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin
Reading on the video by Heidi Lapaine

London in winter

2012-01-04T15:55:00.001Z

"London has always been a city that comes most to itself on grey days or after dark. All its moods and phases then resolve themselves into one spirit of benign gravity."

- Thomas Burke, Living in Bloomsbury (1939)

Situationist Library

2012-01-04T08:31:00.000Z

On a recent trip to Paris, Mathieu O'Neil talked me through his impressive collection of Situationist texts.

Some of the works in this video can be found on the Notbored Situationist International archive

Westminster Lunar Cult

2011-12-29T01:57:00.001Z

Poets and topographers

2011-12-28T14:59:00.000Z

Last night I was reading, well browsing, W.G. Hoskins' 'The Making of the English Landscape' (1955), in the pub and came across his definition of the Walla Brook on Dartmoor as "the stream of the Welsh or Britons" deriving from the original Weala Broc.

A month ago on this blog I quoted a very similar definition from Peter Ackroyd's 'London' (p.33) but in the context of relating to the Walbrook stream in London, "brook of the Welsh" deriving from the same Weala Broc.

Not sure what I'm saying about this to be perfectly honest - the similarity just struck me.

'The Making of the English Landscape' is a book I've been meaning to read for a while now - before I really immersed myself in psychogeographical material I saw Hoskins book as a potentially key text that would compliment the topographical books such as Gordon S. Maxwell's Fringe of London, and films such as Patrick Keiller's London and Andrew Kotting's Gallivant.

The book opens, "Despite the multitude of books about English landscape and scenery, and the flood of topographical books in general, there is not one that deals with the historical evolution of the landscape as we know it."

And so far Hoskins doesn't disappoint, even declaring that "poets make the best topographers".
Peter Ackroyd began his literary career as a poet, so again I suppose the two books reinforce each other.

Wander through Bushwood

2011-12-26T20:40:00.001Z

Dusk over Wanstead Flats

A wander across Wanstead Flats is my Boxing Day tradition. All four of us blew out the mid-winter feast on a walk up to Wanstead.

Bush Wood

Crossing the North Circular is like reaching the sea - the gust of traffic noise blowing in like an ocean breeze, Wanstead perched on its shore like comfortable coastal retirement town.

The beauty of the County of London Plan (1943)

2011-12-21T11:52:00.000Z

The County of London Plan 1943, for me, deserves to be regarded as holy and as beautiful as the Lindisfarne Gospels. Look at the splendour of this Communities and Open Space Survey.

Cities Under Siege

2011-12-19T00:26:00.000Z

In the pub last night I was reading Nicholas Lezard's illuminating review of Cities Under Siege by Stephen Graham. I've chalked this up on my 'books to read (but probably will just read about)' list.

from http://blog.ltmuseum.co.uk

The book is provocatively subtitled 'The New Miltary Urbanism' and aims to be an "exposé of how political violence operates through the spaces of urban life". On the most basic level this is expressed by the intense surveillance that urban populations are placed under - and Londoner's are some of the most watched over of any city dwellers in the world.
Lezard mentions the London Transport poster 'Secure beneath watchful eyes' that he ponders may have employed a 1940's design style to invoke memories of Orwell and Big Brother.

That poster first appeared in 2003 when people were still in the grip of post-9/11 paranoia. But the increased level of CCTV did little to prevent the 7/7 bombers bringing carnage to London's bus and tube network 2 years later. And it was noticeable that after the attack next to no CCTV images of any of the suspected bombers appeared even though they had passed along thoroughfares covered every inch by surveillance cameras. So who are the cameras really there to reassure?

Lezard's review highlights Graham's point that, "the powerful, particularly those in the Republican party in America, do not like cities. For a start, they're ethnically diverse places full of liberals who don't vote for them."
As the recent UK riots demonstrated, cities are places of insurrection and dissent that can spread quickly and uncontrollably. It put me in mind (again) of a line from Patrick Keiller's London where Robinson argues that:

"That the failure of London was rooted in the English fear of cities, a protestant fear of Popery and socialism, the fear of Europe, that had disenfranchised Londoners and undermined their society.
Like the idea in Graham's book that the provincial Repulicans fear the inner city, Robinson/Keiller sees London as, "a city under siege from a suburban government which uses homelessness, pollution, crime and the most expensive and run down public transport system of any metropolitan city in Europe as weapons against Londoners’ lingering desire for the freedoms of city life.”

The other recent manifestation of urban disquiet that has given the ruling elite a rude awakening has been the Occupy movement, seeming to randomly spring out of the asphalt to reclaim prime strategic locations to assert the case of the "99%". Over the weekend I 'stumbledupon' two articles exploring the links between Situationism and the Occupy movement.

I suppose people were always going to see the parallels with Situationist-inspired events of 1968 and here on The Bureau of Public Secrets those theories are further drawn out.
On Cryptoforestry, Wilfried Hou Je Bek writes about 'Occupy as psychogeographic urbanism', "Psychogeographically speaking the idea of a tent Potemkin village has great appeal."

I have to confess that when I headed down to Occupy LSX at St. Paul's I was partly inspired by the significance of a tented village emerging on the ancient and significant site of Ludgate Hill. Of all the places in London to occupy, the protestors had claimed a geographic node point in the city's history. A feature of the landscape that had been noted from the first Roman incursions right up to the building of the church on a site of great pagan ceremonial importance.

By the time I had left the encampment I could see the psychogeographical resonance would have to emerge at a later date. For now it is still about economic injustice and corporate greed.

L.A diary vid (with Toronto detour)

2011-12-14T16:16:00.000Z

The music on this video is by Glass Boy

Into the Los Angeles Urban Wilderness

2011-12-11T16:55:00.001Z

you don't see this in the Lea Valley

Yesterday morning I headed up into Runyon Canyon along with a friend and one of his year-old twins strapped onto my back.

The canyon rises just two blocks away from the glitz of Hollywood Boulevard and is managed as 'Urban Wilderness' by the City of Los Angeles. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy describes it as, "a rare example of wild chaparral with its drought-resistant evergreen trees and shrubs only a stone's throw from the hustle and bustle of the Hollywood community."


an irresistible cliche

As the movie industry goes into decline being eclipsed daily by the Games world the Hollywood sign starts to look like even more of a relic of a by-gone era. In the week I've been here I've had more conversations about games than I have heard mentions of films.

The hazards of urban walking are somewhat different in LA to London. It's amusing that this warning is near the top of the ridge of the canyon at the end of the most treacherous stretch of the trail.

There was a brown crust of smog sitting atop the city laid out flat like a printed sheet.

The urban fringe of L.A more the domain of dog walkers and personal trainers than psychogeographers.

Psychogeography zine

2011-12-10T16:57:00.001Z

Last week it was psychogeography on the radio and now psychogeography comes to you in print. Wilfried Hou Je Bek has just published a compendium of Psychogeographic Field Reports.
Wilfried is one of the key practitioners in the field, the remapping high wycombe project drew on his work with algorithmic psychogeography - which was great for engaging skeptical members of the public in the idea of derive.
This publication has some great stuff in it, including something from this blog, here's how Wilfried describes it:

"The Psychogeographic Field Reports is a collection of psychogeographic field reports. There is one from 2005, three from 2010 and nineteen from 2011. A proper editor would probably have added a two-thousand word preface explaining contemporary psychogeography as a battleground between radical nostalgia and defeatist politics of landscape, while defending it against the eros/anal/tantric obsessions of deep topographers, edge land romanticists and other brokers of psychogeographic derivatives. But fuck that! Psychogeography can't be sub-primed!!

Psychogeographic Field Reports has 40 pages of text, almost 20.000 words, entries are sorted by original publication date and Times-New Roman is used throughout."

Includes contributions from:
Patrick Clifton - Wilfried Hou Je Bek - Martin Howse - Michelle Kasprzak - Petr Kazil - Phil Kirby - Laura Oldfield Ford - Ariel Martin Perez - Matt - Mark Patrick Oughton - OtherAberdeen - Gareth Rees -Tina Richardson - Adam Roberts - John Rogers

Order your copy here

Walking With Attitude

2011-12-04T13:29:00.001Z

It is seven years ago today that I headed out with my father across the Templar Lands on the eastern edge of High Wycombe, picking up a ley line that I had optimistically identified running from the holy well through the Iron Age encampment of Desborough Castle to the Hell Fire Caves in West Wycombe.

Above is the super 8 document I made of this vaguely psychogeographical walk which had been inspired by Iain Sinclair's idea of 'nodules of energy'. It was part of the Arts Council funded Remapping High Wycombe project that I did with Cathy Rogers and was my first real foray into the practice of psychogeography

Today at 7.45pm is the broadcast of Walking With Attitude on Radio 3 - a documentary about psychogeography presented by travel writer Ian Marchant. I was interviewed for this (mainly about the Remapping High Wycombe project) alongside such psychogeographic magi as Iain Sinclair, Will Self and Stewart Home (the people who introduced me and many others to the subject). Nick Papadimitriou also appears, no doubt refuting the usefulness of psychogeography and further extolling the merits of his very own 'deep topography'.

Maybe December 4th should be declared National Psychogeographic Day.

You can download the Remapping High Wycombe book from Issuu or Lulu

1920's aerial photo of central London

2011-11-30T12:15:00.001Z

From Wonderful London Vol. I

Walk along the Walbrook

2011-11-28T00:41:00.001Z

I was flicking through the pages of Wonderful London (circa 1921) Sunday afternoon and stopped at a photo of some young men on a set of steps by the river.

The caption reads:
"The Walbrook once ran down the gentle slope of Dowgate Hill and barges used to moor there ... the Britons may have traded somewhere near this site with the ships from Gaul."
This was enough to make me head out into the night to follow its course.

Wonderful London has a chapter on Some Lost Rivers of London describing the route the river took through the City before it was buried in the mid-15th Century.
"It rose in Moorfields and went through the City wall, and so got its name, near Moorgate. It flowed under the site of the Bank past the Mansion House, along the street called Walbrook and so by Dowgate into the Thames."

Ackroyd proposes another explaination of the name - that it is "derived from Weala broc, 'brook of the Welsh', which suggests there was still a defined quarter for the 'old Britons' in their ancient city".

It seems that the Walbrook was one of the most signficant rivers in Roman and early medieval London. It ran through the heart of the ancient City dividing it in two. When the Romans arrived they built a temple to Mithras and a port on its east bank. The invading Saxons later used it as the boundary between the east and west of the City - with the invaders on the West bank and the Britons to the East.

I headed to the street named Moorfields to look for where the stream rises, although I have a feeling the whole area once went by that name. When the Walbrook ran freely this was an area of boggy marsh-lands. This may explain the relatively large amount of open space hereabouts, of Finsbury Square (where the Ocuppy protestors camp) and the artillery grounds, in a zone that has some of the most expensive land in the world.

I can't read a landscape like Nick Papadimitriou, that man can sniff out a buried stream like some kind of urban Navajo, but I've done enough river walks with him to pick up a few basics. Moorfields didn't seem to have a river/stream valley in the area but there was the low lying area just off Finsbury Circus where the Cross Rail works are drilling deep.

When I get home I checked the Cross Rail archaeological reports and indeed they have struck the Walbrook running along the course of Blomfield Street and they are searching for the remains of the Roman bridges that crossed the stream.

I breach London Wall and am drawn into Great Swan Street which curves down to low-lying land - the course of the river? Passing the Chartered Accountants Hall and following the contours of the street I traverse Copthall Avenue and find myself at Angel Court.

The City is eerily deserted on a Sunday night - the only other people I see are the lonely figures sat on sentry duty at the front desks of the office blocks. Although I have the streets to myself, there is the ever-present feeling of my every step being picked up on hundreds if not thousands of CCTV cameras.

I have a note from the London Topographical Record of an excavation of Angel Court in 1974 that undercovered a portion of the river, noting that it "dominated the original topography and habitation of the district north of Lothbury and Throgmorton Street". Remains of a Roman embankment were also discovered along with Roman relics, coins, shoes and painted wall plaster. Hundreds of styli for writing were also discovered where scribes had tossed them from their windows into the water, perhaps in frustration or disgust. In my imagination it is just one particularly bad-tempered Roman clerk who continuosly made mistakes.

Behind the Bank in Lothbury I note a dip in the road that could well indicate the course of the Walbrook. Lothbury is an ancient enclosure, or haga, of the city, a fortified burgh of Lotha's folk, an early Kentish king.

An excavation of the stream in the 19th century found a large quantity of human skulls in the river bed. One theory is that they were the remains of a Roman legion that surrendered to British tribes following a siege of a city, they were massacred "in ritual Celtic style" and their heads thrown into the Brook.

Walbrook beside Mansion House

With the City now dominated by huge blocks of concrete, glass and steel and its workaday streets the parade ground of a besuited army of clerks and accountants it's easy to forget the more earthy history of this place; when blood was spilt on these very streets in battles to control the City, when the trade was hauled up from wharfs rather than sent down a high-speed connection, when the City was the heart of London life rather than a capitalist encampment staffed by suburban commuters.

Past the Tallow Chandler's Hall and into the darkness of Cousin Lane I find the set of steps that look like the ones from that beguiling collodion photo in Wonderful London at the top of this post. There isn't a soul around, it's low tide so I walk a little along the shore looking for where the Walbrook makes its confluence with the Thames but I find nothing.

But there's no doubt that the Walbrook still lives - coursing beneath the City streets - waiting to spring back to the surface at the first opportunity - which I imagine will be anytime soon thanks to Cross Rail.

Does London Exist?

2011-11-26T16:38:00.001Z

the precincts of central London

Among the mountain of topographical books that I found in Hay last weekend the one that I bought was A Guide to the Structure of London (1972) by Maurice Ash. I was hooked by a glance at these amazing maps and the chapter titles:
1. In search of London's identity 2. The skin of an onion? 3. The geography of conflict 4. Journeys and sojourns 5. A strategy for identifying London 6. Town trails

types of housing tenure, 1966

Ash opens by asking the question of whether London exists, "There is just one question to be asked before one begins a book on the structure of London: Does London exist?"
Due to the diversity between Deptford High Street and Hampstead Heath and lack of common interest he wonders if "the entity of London is a fiction".

the central spaces of importance for conservation

I would love to imagine Ash in conversation with Patrick Keiller's character Robinson in a grubby formica-tabled worker's cafe, or perhaps at Brent Cross Regional Shopping Centre. In Keiller's film, London, Robinson posits that "the true identity of London is its absence, as a city it no longer exists ... London was the first metropolis to disappear" (you can watch this part of the film here at 3.44)

plan for the South East, 1967

Ash suggests that we should think of London as a region rather than a city, a region that has consumed the Green Belt and moved beyond. He identifies this new area of London the "Outer Metropolitan Area (the OMA), which for statistical purposes at least is bow taken to extend from beyond the Green Belt to about 40 miles from the centre of London".

strategic plan for the South East, 1970

The book ends with six journeys through London that illsutrate the thesis within the book: walking circuits in South London around Elephant and Castle, inner East London from Stepney Green, and inner West London from Earl's Court; and then wider sweeps by car north and south and the outer metropolitan areas.
I wonder what following the same journeys today would tell us about whether London actually exists or is merely a fiction?

maps reprinted by Ash from Research Paper SRI, September 1966

Hay-On-Wye

2011-11-21T21:42:00.001Z

The Castle 'honesty' Bookshop

I could feel the call of the Breacon Beacons all weekend

River Wye - Offa's Dyke Path runs along the left bank

Globe at Hay - site of the Crunch Festival

Bob & Roberta Smith and Jake Chapman amongst the yurts at Crunch

Welsh language train announcements at Newport Station by Fugueur

Make Your Own Damn Film #4

2011-11-15T14:07:00.001Z

Leytonstone Centre for Contemporary Art

Back in April this year I was asked to show a work-in-progress cut of my documentary about artist Bob and Roberta Smith at the ICA. I wrote about it here at the time.
Now that 25 minute cut has taken on a life all of its own. It's currently looping in Pierogi Gallery's Boiler space in New York where Bob has a show (there is also some more recent footage projected onto his Gotham Golem sculpture).
The film is also being shown this Sunday, 20th November at the Crunch Festival of art and philosophy in Hay-on-Wye with Bob doing a talk afterwards about his recently launched, Art Party - a bohemian reposte to the Tea Party.
The photo at the top of this page is the reason this film came into being - my desire to find out what happened inside that shed, the mysteries of the Leytonstone Centre of Contemporary Art. Now I know - I think.

Posted via email from fugueur's posterous

Walk from Leytonstone to the Thames

2011-11-13T19:46:00.001Z

Been meaning to do this walk for a while - heading south in a straight line from Leytonstone across Stratford and Abbey Marshes bound for the Plaistow Levels beside the river Thames.

Leyton High Road -

"Local history is the cradle of true patriotism, and local patriotism is the best stimulant to efficiency and progress"

Fifty Years A Borough 1886-1936 - The Story of West Ham by Donald McDougall, 1936

"There seems to be no doubt that the name comes from the Saxon, indicating the Street by the ford, or Stratford".

Old Stratford looks down upon the arrivistes

"It is quite likely that the area was a centre of communal life of the (pre-Roman) period and that it saw Druid ceremonial at its best"

The Greenway

East Ham and West Ham were simply known as Hamme at the time of Edward the Confessor.

Alfred the Great is said to be responsible for the creation of some of the watercourses around Stratford such as the Channelsea River which he created to drain water from the Danish ships moored in the River Lea.

Channelsea River 2

a home at Bromley-by-Bow - note the jacket hung up left of the bed

Limehouse Cut
"These streams had for many years been deteriorating, silting up, and at times giving off very offensive smells."

another unofficial home

the marsh monster

"But before there were small clustered villages, and before the unassailable fortress stood sentinel on the bank of the river, what people lived in the forests and marshy lands? What did they do in the struggle to live?
The first great work of these unrecorded hands was to build a wall of earth all along the north bank of the river so tha a great belt of swampy land was made fertile and flourished into meadows and pastures."
The Story of Tower Hamlets, 1967

West Ham Abbey "stood on the banks of the Channelsea River, one of the waterways created by Alfred the Great, in a very low-lying area now almost entirely covered by factories, warehouse and gasometers."
Fifty Years a Borough

Ken Livingstone in Leyton

2011-11-08T01:48:00.000Z

Ken Livingstone in Leyton by Fugueur

Monday evening I went along to Leyton Town Hall (now Orwellianly renamed Leyton Management Offices - what are they managing I worry?) to attend Ken Livingstone's 'Tell Ken' event.
I took the liberty of recording a few bits which you can listen to above.

Overall I found Ken's tone very positive - I had become disillussioned with his last term as mayor towards the end, with his seemingly too cosy relationship with the corporate interests of the City of London and his love of skyscrapers and big developments. He seemed to have long forgotten the Red Ken that I met when chairing a Labour Students public meeting during the City Poly occupation of 1991.

Maybe I had primed myself for disappointment by using the Labour Party's refusal to select Ken as its mayoral candidate in 2000 and his subsequent expulsion as the long overdue catalyst for leaving the party I'd viewed as a birthright.
The fact that he later rejoined the party and stood for Mayor as a Labour candidate in 2004, even after the invasion of Iraq at a time when Labour was very much the belicose Party of war, was a bit too much for me at the time.
(Some unfortunate young Labour candidates knocked on my door around this period and received a rant about how they were no better than members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party with hands drenched in the blood of Iraqi children - they didn't seem to see this coming for some reason).

However, he atoned slightly this evening by repeating his commitment to wealth redistribution - and using whatever means at his disposal to help bring that about - such as giving free travel to kids as 40% of children in London are from families living below the poverty line.

He would also look to expand the capital's social housing sector - although I wasn't clear whether he can build housing as mayor - and return housing estates as the kind of mixed communities they once were (such as I grew up in), rather than now where you need to be homeless and jobless to be eligible for housing.

Ken explained that the only reason he signed up to the Olympic bid was to get £8bn worth of investment into the East End. He talked about how the land south of the Olympic Park to the Thames would be the next big development area with capacity for 40,000 new homes and 50,000 jobs and that the mayor should be selling this opportunity to the growing markets in China, India and Brazil.

I asked him about Trams - and whether he would revive his proposals to extend London's Tram network beyond Croydon. To this he conjured up a beguiling image - a tram route that would follow the North Circular from Wembley arcing across the north of London to Waltham Forest.
That romance of that vision alone is almost worth my vote.

There's more info about Ken's campaign to be re-elected mayor here.
Do you think there's any chance that we'll be able to write-off the Boris years as some kind of bizarre collective halucination?

L.A. Walk

2011-10-30T03:59:00.000Z

Fairfax Ave - a strip of vintage clothes shops

Fairfax Ave

Silent Movie Theatre - getting ready for Halloween

Corner of Fairfax and Melrose looking towards Hollywood Hills


"In the early 1970s, the Improv was the hippest room in town, possibly in the world"

View across the basin from Sunset Boulevard

First Baptist Church of Beverly Hills

beneath my window I hear the the parking valets chattering in Spanish

Landor's Tower on Sunset Boulevard

2011-10-29T02:38:00.000+01:00

Went wandering this morning and ended up in Book Soup Bookstore on Sunset Boulevard.

The first book that caught my eye just inside the door was Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. I took this as a sign to have a further rummage.

I held Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon in my hand for a while - it has a nice feel to it - but eventually put it back.

I flicked through the pages of Mike Davis City of Quartz but with only two days left in LA I can't see me cramming much of this opus of Los Angeles cultural history into my still jet-lagged head.

On my third circuit of the shop, at the back, on a bottom shelf in a dark corner where the discount books are hidden, I find Iain Sinclair's Landor's Tower, priced $4.98. It was meant to be. The book genie had led me here to one of the few Sinclair works I don't already own.

I purchase the book (along with a copy of Knoedelseder's history of the golden era of 70s stand-up in LA - partly as a momento of the brilliant team of comedy writers I've been working with here).

Back in my room, now, I open Landor's Tower at the page where the shop assistant has placed a bookmark - a message from the book genie will possibly emerge from the page:

"The world had been stood on its head: landscape was a scum of dancing particles, rocked in a soup bowl."

A description of Los Angeles and a reference to the shop where the book was found.

Never lose faith in the book genie.

Mink City Journals

2011-10-21T15:26:00.001+01:00

There is a small red suitcase in the cupboard under the stairs that has been following me around for just over 10 years now. About half-way down the pile of papers inside are the journals that I scribbled down long-hand in the kitchen of a large house in Via Morane, Modena.

They call Modena The Mink City, due to its wealth derived from a proud Ducale heritage and its association with companies such as Ferrari (my landlord baked the celebration cakes for the F1 team), Lambourghini, Ducati and oddly, Tetra Pak. Most people know it as the place where balsamic comes from, but the thick sweet gloopy liquid that is drizzled over lumps of parmesan in the bars of Modena is a far cry from the thin acidic industrial balsamico de modena you buy supermarkets here.

I find one of the most powerful experiences of place is the way that it unlocks and colonises the imagination. You may be walking along a workaday street but sometimes you are in a different era or location altogether. Almost every Sunday a part of me returns to Modena at some point; why Sunday? I don’t know.

I don't think I'll ever publish the manuscript that I cobbled together from the journal entries now - it's messy and inconsistent - too full of spleen, a necessary ally as I struggled to adapt to life in a prosperous, conservative northern Italian town and about to turn 30 wondering where I was heading in my life. But there are bits that I love, so I've decided to share them here - maybe a blog would have been the best place for these ramblings if that had been around at the time.

The journals start eleven years ago in October 2000. Here's a fragment that I pulled semi-randomly.

7

I watch the late night football show on TV - my unofficial Italian teachers. Reggina go 2-0 down at home to Brescia and it all kicks off - seats get ripped up and thrown on the pitch, bottles lobbed, the lot. When they go 3-0 down it goes ballistic and the game has to be abandoned 6 minutes before the whistle.
There's violence as Napoli lose 5-1 at home to Bologna. The police wade in wielding batons, crowd scattering across the half-full stadium.
A player in Serie C is punched in the tunnel after a game by a member of the opposition who he got sent off. His head hits the marble floor and he falls into a Coma. If he dies, the player could be charged with murder.
Football hooliganism seems so un-Italian. It's ugly, organised, in-yer-face.

Sunday morning riding around on my bike all seems well with the world. Light mist over the streets, groups of families wander around in their Sunday best carrying bunches of flowers. Incredible roasting and baking smells gathering in clouds around the backs of restaurants.
I try in vain to find somewhere to watch the Liverpool - Everton match. After a circuit of the town I stumble upon the public gardens with the Civic Gallery in the middle, occupying what my guidebook tells me was the Summer Palace of the Este.

Lock up the bike and wander into a small exhibition of contemporary photography. Thoughts of football recede, the white walls erase the outside world. I'm all alone in the space, left to summon up images of summer balls and aristocratic garden parties. The gallery is a haven within a haven, the gates to the gardens close out the town, the paths lead you through the shrubs neatly laid-out in geometric patterns to the glass doors of the gallery which bathes you in warmth, light and visual curiosity.

I leave in the dusk heading to the other branch of the Civic Gallery for the continuation of the exhibition this time attended by a small smattering of well-healed middle-aged types and the young alternative-arty set. I move amongst them, like a spy, hoping not to get found out as an interloper, not here so much for the photos as just to be there, in company, observing them, classifying them into groups so that I can understand this society. I imagine them variously as teachers and students, parents and children, members of the gallery, frequenters of the same bar, inhabitants of the artist quarter, the intelligentsia.

I move through them and away as discreetly as I entered. Down the steps into the courtyard of brisk late-autumn air. Out into the streets, clanking away on my machine so antiquated it could be a velocipede, Cinema Cavour catches my eye with its poster for Ken Loach's 'Bread and Roses'. Modena is a City of Cinemas; the streets are littered with them. The Raffaello, Michelangelo, Astra, Nuovo Scala, Metropol, Principe, Olimpia, Splendor, Capitol, Arena, Embassy, Film Studio 7b, Cavour'50. Shining brass door fittings, lush red carpets, purple velvet curtains draped across the entrance. They taunt me with their programmes of dubbed films.

I'm tempted to go into the Cavour to catch Loach's latest but I know the novelty will wear off soon enough and I'll regret spending the 12,000 lire on a sentimental whim. Instead I move on to the Embassy, the least attractive cinema in Modena, where I was told they had films in English on Wednesdays. I pop one their tiny fliers in the back of my notebook anticipating the screening of The Wonder Boys in three days time.

To Piazza Grande and the cavernous Duomo di Modena. The amplified sound of a service going on in a brightly lit lower chapel like a ghostly echo bouncing round the walls jumping out of the bricks every now and then when the priest raises his voice; "Recreatione!" These spaces were built to house god himself and the ceiling here seems to stretch up to heaven forever trapping the breath and whispers of medieval minds full of superstition. I came in mainly looking for a carving on the Porta della Pescheria, showing King Arthur fighting Modroc.

Emerging out into the thick mist hanging over Piazza Grande, floodlights marking the farside, military cadets in uniform manifest from the mist draped in cloaks with swords swinging at their sides.

Around the back of the Duomo I find the door I'd been looking for, hidden away in a narrow passageway. A tingle of excitement. A piece of English mythology carved into the walls of this majestic Cathedral by 12th Century stonemasons. It feels like a secret. An indulgence by craftsmen who'd laboured away their lives making into stone the word of the church. In this dark recess they'd strayed from the gospels, King Arthur and the adulterous Guenevere showing the clergy the way to Avalon.

I buy a Guardian from the Giornale on via Emilia just before they shut; it's the Saturday edition and should get me through the cold evening in my room. The woman behind the counter asks me if anyone had won out of Bush and Gore. I said in bad Italian that I hadn’t read the paper yet, then glancing at the headline of "Allies tell Gore to back down" and wondering how on earth to express that in Italian I say "Nessuno vinto". The husband looks up, "Sempre loro vinto!". "Exactamente," I reply and I almost have a real conversation in Italian for the first time.

Suburb-hunting in Modernist Metroland

2011-10-20T00:27:00.000+01:00

SPB Mais

"To the believer in the influence of the environment - and I am certainly one - it comes as something of a shock to discover that what we are pleased to call the suburban outlook - that is, the narrow outlook of the stereotyped - is shared by the owners of castles in the Cheviots and studios in Chelsea, and is actually rather rare in the suburbs which are supposed to engender it.The truth, I thought, must be that the suburbs are not quite so uniform in character as they are made out to be."

This is the opening to a chapter on the London suburbs in England's Character by SPB Mais (1937). I keep coming back to Mais - I think he is one of the most resonant forebares of this art of wandering around and recording your thoughts about what you have seen. That must have been why I took this book down off the shelf this evening.

Mais' 'suburb-hunting' started out in Harrow with its gasometers and he praises North Harrow for a "surprising moment of courage in building a series of dazzling white flats with green tiles, recessed balconies, multitudinous glass, and terraces fronting a communal public unfenced garden." Sounds like he's describing the now Grade-II listed Pinner Court designed by local architect HJ Mark and completed in 1936 at the time Mais would have been writing the book.

Pinner: Pinner Court, Pinner Road (Nigel Cox) / CC BY-SA 2.0

Large chunks of Pinner and Rayners Lane have now been placed in a conservation area to protect its modernist and art deco inspired buildings and streetscapes - and it seems that HJ Mark was at the centre of this suburban Bauhausian outpost, particularly in Eastcote Town Centre.

This makes me wonder whether Mais, a self-professed 'man of the hills', was in fact a closet modernist, further evidenced by his belief in the influence of the environment it re-enforces my vision of this tweedy BBC radio presenter of Microphone At Large as a proto-psychogeographer. Was he drawn out to Harrow to discuss the modernist project with Mark and take a topographical ramble through the dreamscape that Marks had created in the Harrows and the Weald.

More modernist wonders of the suburbs can be seen on the brilliant Modernism in Metroland website.

Occupy London LSX Sunday 16th October

2011-10-16T20:35:00.001+01:00

Headed down to Occupy London Stock Exchange earlier today to see what was going on. I was partly drawn in by the public reclamation of the sacred pagan spot of Ludgate Hill. The Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral had given the protestors the right to congregate on the Church land around the Cathedral. The adjacent private property of Paternoster Square was heavily defended by riot police.After some poetry and megaphone rants people broke off into small discussion groups to work out what was trying to be achieved. I filmed one group and their deliberations - all very clear headed and well-informed, no old-school Marxist-Leninist theory or anarchist vitriol.You can read the final statement that was produced on the Occupy LSX website

Swandown

2011-10-06T14:29:00.004+01:00

My sister Cathy Rogers took this photo of Andrew Kotting and Iain Sinclair enjoying a well-earned pint beside the river Medway as they make their way along a series of inland waterways from Hastings to Angel Islington in a Swan shaped Pedalo. The project is called Swandown and had already began to garner a mythic status before they plonked their vessell in the water in late September - two of our great topographers on an epic crazed quest - I'm just waiting for Joblard to emerge from the Medway mist.

There's more info, pictures and video on the Swandown website http://swandown.info/

Andy Ross - Almost People

2011-09-25T20:27:00.005+01:00

Last Sunday evening my old friend Andy Ross came over to Leytonstone to make a video previewing his debut album Almost People, which was produced by ex-Stereolab drummer Andy Ramsay at Press Play Studios in South London.
Andy was my room-mate in a terraced house in Forest Gate when I arrived in London from the Chilterns back in 1989. We had both rocked up carrying guitars that we could barely play but that didn't stop us spending the next 3 years writing songs and forming a band with the rest of our dubious bunch of housemates who had little more musical apptitude than us. We were a parody of a late Thatcher student band with songs like 'Block of Concrete Flats', 'Brian Walden' and others too cringe-worthy to set down here.

We carried on writing music for a bit after leaving Poly, recording songs on borrowed four-track machines, but I wandered off on my travels (buying a guitar on the way) and that ended our musical collaboration.
But Andy has perservered and honed his craft over the ensuing 20 years and he's now made a really beautiful album. It was a genuine treat for me to be able to rekindle the collaboration in some form but this time with some proper songs that don't have titles that sound like they had come from the pen of Rick from The Young Ones
We went up to The Hollow Ponds to catch the last hour of light which I seem to have slightly miscalculated meaning that we were chasing the sunset around the edge of the water. Being a Sunday we ambled round the grounds of the parish church and I grabbed a few images of Andy on the church steps before, out of the gloom, the vicar started shouting angrily at us about the Churchyard being private property and that we should ask permission to enter - no wonder church numbers are dwindling.
Oddly one of Andy's songs I remember most from Poly days was called Vicar in his Chapel - perhaps it was a prophecy.

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Westfield Stratford City drift (with rotting meat and Olympic village vertical slum)

2011-09-14T10:11:00.001+01:00

Yesterday evening I got a call from artist Bob and Roberta Smith asking if I fancied exploring the new Westfield Stratford City that had just opened that day down the road from Leytonstone. I quickly grabbed my minidisc recorder and a mic and off we went.
Bob then played out the entire disc live and unedited on his Resonance fm show, Make Your Own Damn Music. This is a sample of the broadcast.

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St. Mary's disused Underground Station

2011-09-13T11:43:00.001+01:00

Inside the former Distict/ Hammersmith and City Line Station in East London.
There's more info on Abandoned Stations

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The London Perambulator in full

2011-09-01T10:45:00.002+01:00

Here's the full-cut of The London Perambulator that I've decided to release online after two years on the festival circuit. The film is not just a profile of enigmatic cult writer Nick Papadimitriou but about the lure of the edgelands of the city, the idea of psychogeography and Nick's very own Deep Topography.

When I made my first video with Nick in 2005 I remember Googling 'deep topography' and there was nothing. Now it has been discussed at academic conferences, cited in national newspapers, mentioned on Radio 4 and even been the subject of an item on Newsnight. To cap it all Nick landed a publishing deal with a top London publisher to write the definitive deep topographic text which is due out next year.

I'm not sure we knew what to expect when we premiered the film at The Whitechapel Gallery in the East End Film Festival, April 2009. When you perambulate the margins as we do, schlepping round the fringes of industrial estates and tromping through the 'acoustic footprint' of the North Circular, you develop a natural scepticism about how your endeavours will be received. But the screening sold out that night. The film was discussed by a panel that included Iain Sinclair, Will Self, myself and was chaired by Dr Andrea Philips from Goldsmiths - and seemed to go down well.

More screenings followed, including The London International Documentary Festival, Cine City Brighton Film Festival and Doc Days at Curzon Soho. A few years ago I'd been inspired by seeing Jem Cohen's Chain at the Curzon and here now was our film playing on the same screen. That was a good moment, but there have been loads.

Putting it up Youtube now feels like a homecoming of sorts - that was where we uploaded our first videos and you could, if you wished, chart the progress of the project through to its conclusion with The London Perambulator.

Although is that the conclusion? We continue our work together with our radio show on Resonance fm (that was a product of the film) and I've inevitably filmed Nick on walks. Who knows, maybe there'll be 'Scarp - the movie'.

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Ventures & Adventures field recordings

2011-08-28T18:42:00.002+01:00

We're starting to think about another series of Ventures and Adventures in Topography on Resonance fm so I've been sorting through some of the field recordings from walks from the first two series.
The first recording here is a reading from the introduction to The Fringe of London - this is the credo that inspired our walks.
The complete podcasts can be downloaded here

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golden hour

2011-08-20T00:43:00.000+01:00

This was the view west from Blackfriars Bridge at around 7.30pm this evening

We walked via St Andew's Hill and looked in at Wardrobe Place where the plane trees reach over the Georgian buildings in defiance of their life-spans, soon to expire.

Paternoster Square felt like the living civic centre that the architects probably hoped for - the Italinate piazza where families take an evening passeggiata

paternoster.mov Watch on Posterous

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Scenes from an East London garden

2011-08-14T19:10:00.002+01:00

Last year I thought I'd do my bit for the dwindling bee population and plant some borage after nurturing 4 or 5 plants from seed. This summer they came back with a vengeance entirely covering a previously barren plot of dusty lifeless soil. The borage patch is now alive with bees.

Look at them here getting absolutely sozzled on nectar, sucking it in till their little furry cheeks puff out. That's probably not what they do at all but they seem to be in some sort of elevated state as they dance between the translucent blue petals bumping into each other like inebriates staggering home from the pub.

After attending Pestival in 2009 I vowed to let my garden become a bit more untidy to allow the insect universe to flourish. I let the herbs go to seed and now this small kitchen patch is bustling with hexapoda activity.

I saw this butterfly jockeying with a bee for the best position on the flowering mint. I've had a go at identifying the butterfly without luck - I'll take a punt that it's a variety of Skipper.

There's an element of jeopardy feeding here as it is the domain of a greedy-gutted spider that has spun his super-sticky web across the entire bed. The other day I saw him capture a wasp, wrap it in web then carry it off to hang from the underside of a mint leaf. Such efficient slaughter. My young son informed me that the spider would inject a poison into the wasp's gut that would liquify it and allow him to suck it up much as the boy slurps down a smoothie.

A ladybird and a flying ant both took a promenade along the wicker arch that supports the sweat peas, largely indifferent to each other each, peacefully co-existing - maybe we can learn something from them (but not the spider perhaps).

These yellow flowers have emerged quietly in the shade of the overhanging ivy. Consulting R.S. Fitter's Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers (1956) tells me that they're a Ragwort of some kind I like the idea that they're Hoary Ragwort simply because of the name, although they're most likely Marsh Ragwort, meaning that the seeds could well have come home with us from a walk on Leyton Marshes or Wanstead Flats.

Knowing the name of the plants that spring up in your garden changes your relationship with them - they're no longer just a weed but have a heritage and a mythology - there's a popular belief that Ragwort can kill horses (not by sneaking up and strangling them but if the horse eats its own body weight of the intensely bitter leaves).

Apparently Ragwort is a favourite of the stripy caterpillar of the cinnabar moth which I spotted over on Wanstead Flats recently, then when down in Devon last week saw a few of the post-pupa moths themselves marvellous black and red wings lighting up a deep Devon hedgerow.

One of the most surprising things to emerge from the ground this year is a triffid-like pumpkin plant, legacy of leaving last year's Halloween lantern to rot on the edge of the vegetable patch that has no vegetables (until now). Two grasshoppers have taken up residence on its great bristly leaves - or are they crickets. I haven't heard them sing yet.

Here are some more photos - all taken with the space of about 20 minutes

Update @ 21.30: This fella just came and joined the party and hop out across my foot as I was watering the borage

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Through the forest to Loughton

2011-08-01T02:02:00.000+01:00

Headed out this afternoon up past the Hollow Ponds through Epping Forest to Loughton.
I didn't consult my copy of Buxton as much as I should have to glean the names of the specific parts of the forest - such as Gilbert's Slade that runs beside Forest School and is a muddy bog for most of the year; and also Rushey Plain that I passed at some point.
Here are few images from the walk

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Orgone Accumulator in Crotch End

2011-07-26T20:50:00.005+01:00

Read more about Wilhelm's Reich Orgone Accumulator in this brilliant Guardian article

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2011-07-26T20:50:00.001+01:00

Bob art over in White City

Afoot Round London

2011-07-22T11:05:00.002+01:00

"Exploration, I hope no-one has said this before, begins at home. Now that the North Pole has been reached and Cook's tourists penetrate to Patagonia there is very little undiscovered country left outside England for the roving adventurous individual to explore. But in England and especially within an hours ride from London there are vast tracts of terra incognita still left. It would take a long investigation to determine why in the last 40 years these formerly traveled districts have ceased to attract the foot of the wayfarer and explorer".

Pathfinder - Afoot Round London, 1911

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Direct Cinema

2011-07-06T17:21:00.001+01:00

Richard Leacock and Robert Drew discuss the origins and philosophy of Direct Cinema

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Bee on the borage

2011-07-04T13:48:00.002+01:00

Last summer I asked the twittersphere, or whatever you call it, to recommend a plant that I could grow that would attract bees (in the 70's it was whales we were saving, now it's bees - is that progress?). Two people replied with the answer that borage was the thing.
I grew some from seed that rose triffid like on a barren patch of ground and this year it has returned in force - this plant the vanguard.
Who said the bees were all dead!

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Timelapse experiments

2011-07-02T21:40:00.001+01:00

Had a first stab at some time-lapse today - I think it may have been prompted by an anxiety about the changing seasons. Not sure.

I hooked up my Canon 550D (or Rebel t2i) to my laptop and used the EOS Utility driver as a remote control taking pictures at 5 second intervals. The camera was set to manual - afraid I can't remember what the settings were.

I then stuggled a bit with the editing before discovering that you could make the video in QuickTime Pro7 by opening the photos as an image sequence.

You can also do a crude bit of colour correction with the filters when you export.

timelapse1.mov Watch on Posterous

This is the first stab - monsterous buddliea outside my window

timelapse2.1.mov Watch on Posterous

Couldn't resist the classic cloud timelapse

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In search of the North-East Passage

2011-06-23T01:46:00.001+01:00

Headed out from home 7pm on Sunday night on foot in search of the north-east passage. I'm now well familiar with the other two routes across the marshes that separate Leytonstone from the western city, well from London really. But the most northerly was unknown to me. It lies north of Walthamstow in an unpromising corner of the city at the end of Blackstock Road.

I spent the first 100 yards preoccupied with an uncomfortable right shoe. This had the potential to be a fair old yomp so my footwear had better be right. Once fixed I then became overly aware of the sloshing of the water in my aluminium water bottle - and what were the dangers of drinking from an aluminium vessel. I was only two streets away from home.

Soon past Leyton's archaeology row with Walnut House, and the former home of Essex County Cricket Club. When this area was being developed at the end of the C19t Palaeolithic flint flakes 'as sharp as knives' were turned up, forming what was claimed to be a remarkable 'Palaeolithic floor'.

The cottages in Vicarage Road are in fine bloom - village Leyton lives with the spirit of the antiquarian Revd. Strype. I check-in with the beguiling 1940's blocks of flats on the corner of Brewster Road with their cross-work brick patterns, they're aligned to catch the sun like a standing stone monument ready for the veneration of Julian Cope.

I am trying to understand the 'northern-ness' of where I live. Leytonstone gains its identity from being on the eastern fringe - we are eastsiders. That is until you look at a map or walk back from central London via the most direct route and find yourself pushing north up through Clerkenwell and Highbury.

Crossing Lea Bridge Road near the fine stone obelisk protecting the library I wonder whether Markhouse Road runs along a watershed. The ground drops away to the west running off into the river Lea. Numerous streams run beneath the tarmac from the higher ground around Whipps Cross and the Dagenham Brook runs just below Markhouse.

The hops fields in Boundary Road have long since gone. The Lea Valley pylons appear between houses. I pass an electricity substation wearing a wig of Russian vine. St. Saviour's Church looks abandoned. I wander round to the Gothic building behind which turns out to be Barking Lodge, Diocese of Chelmsford, Barking Area Office. There is a CofE school and further church buildings. An ecclesiastical encampment among the heathens of the marshes.

Past the sad scene marking a 'Fatal Collision' among the withering yellow flowers are weathered soft toys and three apples.

I move quickly along crumbling Blackhorse Road - reduced to a post-industrial rat-run. Waltham Forest Council has identified this as a spot to 're-introduce the country into the city' - to allow glimpses of the marshes to break through the phalanxes of asbestos-lined buildings. They've got their work cut out.

I cross the Valley between Walthamstow Reservoirs and Tottenham Marshes as the sun ducks behind great puffy cloud formations and stop for a swift half in the Ferry Boat Inn.

There's a certain optimism in the aspiration that drives up the development of Hale Wharf. Great hunks of isolated apartment blocks with birds-eye views of the rusting Lea Delta but little else in the way of infrastructure unless you plan to commute by coracle. A channel of the river around the site has become clogged with weeds - a metaphor perhaps or am I trying to look too hard for signs and meaning. It's what this landscape does to you.

I land on the western shore of the Lea at Tottenham Hale. My reaction to 'North' as I forward more cautiously is to want to head home - to be back in my local by closing time, impossible on foot without tracing my steps and even then unlikely. I'm tempted by the train at South Tottenham but am not ready to leave the 'fugue' and so force myself on - but to where? I hadn't thought this far ahead - I hadn't thought much at all. I'm simply following instinct now.

The High Road climbs a steep incline of churches that will soon fade into the synagogues of Stamford Hill. I could turn north again here - for Finsbury Park and beyond. It is 9.40pm and as I stand at the crossroads of Amhurst Road I pledge to get back to my local by 11pm closing. Can't be done I think, but I won't give up until I know it's impossible.

Clapton Common has a dream-like midsummer air with Hassidic Jews strolling across the grass and beneath the hanging boughs in the last light. Large groups of men congregate on the pavements intensely conversing in what I assume to be Hebrew.
Downhill past the Krays' Evering Road and gyro the roundabout onto Lea Bridge Road.
It's after 10pm.
I up the pace.

Half-way along Lea Bridge Road my right knee goes. Tendons go taunt and menisci grind against bone - it becomes reluctant to perform its primary function as a joint and bend. This is sure to sabotage my mission - I'm swinging lead in the dark as I cross back over the river.
I hobble to a corner shop and seek medicine in the form of a can of Stella Artois hastily necked. I'm moving a bit more freely now. It took me 40 minutes to reach this same point on the way out. It's 10.30 - no chance of making last orders.

Down Church Road, into Capworth Street which is surreally blocked bumper to bumper rush hour style as two drivers lock horns in argument, "So I can be this ignorant and drive", one menacingly reasons whilst leaning through the window.

In Francis Road at 10.49. The pain returns. To seek more Stella would surely sink me - have to grit my teeth.
A final burst and I break through the swinging pub doors 1 minute before the bell rings. Marge is behind the bar. I recount my quest as I order my pint.
"You made good time then", she says.
"Not really, it's just before 11" I reply.
"I know, but we close at 11.30 on a Sunday."

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Sounds from a Leytonstone garden

2011-06-20T23:13:00.001+01:00

Blackbird in East London by Fugueur

Field recording of a bird singing at 9pm in the back garden. Aside from the passing planes turning over Wanstead Flats for their final approach into Heathrow you can hear the sound of the recent rain falling onto a carpet of ivy leaves.
The bird wasn't actually in my garden but somewhere nearby.

I've assumed this is a blackbird, I know precious little about birdsong but my father, who is an old Chilterns man, was saying that "you always get Blackbirds in these London gardens".

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2011-06-12T14:33:00.001+01:00

I dug out a miniDV tape the other day from a walk I did in May 2005 for the Remapping High Wycombe project. I'd never watched it back - the walk (and therefore the tape) had served its purpose - I'd mapped out the final points in what we were calling the 'nodules of energy' of the town. I'd borrowed this term from a talk Iain Sinclair had given with Will Self at Hawksmoor's St. Luke's Church in Old Street. He'd used it in reference to the church itself, William Blake's burial site in nearby Bunhill Fields. We transposed this idea onto High Wycombe and came up with our own 'nodules of energy' for the town.

The walk in the video documents the final stretch of these - Ivor Gurney's lodgings, Malmer's Well ancient British fortification, the old straight Bronze Age track of Coffin Walk, Harrison's Stamp Factory, Disraeli Monument, Tinker's Wood (the home of Bodgers and Bandits) and Compair Broome and Wade.
I'm using the camcorder to scribble down video notation - haphazard, rough, the sounds of scuffed feet and birdsong. Watching it back I could almost remember every step of the way.

I sought out this tape and hastily hacked this video because now my mind is turning back to the walks we planned that never embarked upon. Out beyond the Hughenden Valley, breaking free of the Chilterns escarpment and into open country.

There's more about this walk here

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The wisdom of Alan Moore

2011-06-11T13:32:00.001+01:00

"I've come to think that the universe is a four-dimensional site in which nothing is changing and nothing is moving. The only thing that is moving along the time axis is our consciousness. The past is still there, the future has always been here. Every moment that has existed or will ever exist is all part of this giant hyper-moment of space-time."

Alan Moore, New Statesman, 13.06.11

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Merlin's Cave, Penton Mound

2011-06-04T16:23:00.001+01:00

I recently remembered that we didn't play the whole of this field recording from the walk Nick and I did around the Wells, Springs and Pleasure Gardens of Islington and Pentonvile - so here it is. One of my favourite walks this one - on a cold January Sunday night starting as we pass Merlin's Cave on Penton Mound.
You can read more about the walk and the pleasure gardens here on the Ventures and Adventures blog.

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Will Self and David Eagleman - life, death, afterlife

2011-05-30T13:26:00.001+01:00

Whoever thought of putting Will Self and David Eagleman on the same stage should be entitled to the last jammy-dodger for the next 12 months. This video is only 10 minutes long but there's more than enough to get your synapses humming.

I told my 7-year old son about Eagleman's story Reversal from his book sum where the expansion of the universe stops, the arrow of time reverses you live your life again - backwards.

He said, "I hope that doesn't happen"

"Why" I asked, thinking there was perhaps there was some existential unease

"Because I don't want to have to play all those levels of Lego Pirates of the Caribbean again on the Wii .... and then Lego Batman, and then Donkey Kong Jungle Beat"

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More Lomographs of Leytonstone

2011-05-28T11:27:00.000+01:00

Here are some more photos of Leytonstone taken with my Lomo Smena 8M - the antiquated feel of the photos seems to fit the area somehow

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Make Your Own Damn Film #3: Women Should Be In Charge: Film Screenings & Panel Discussion

2011-05-19T18:03:00.001+01:00

Women Should Be In Charge: Film Screenings & Panel Discussion

20 May 2011

Free

12pm – 5.30pm I Should Be In Charge
A free screening of the latest edit of a feature documentary about Bob and Roberta Smith. London-based film-maker John Rogers has been following the artist since July 2009 to make this film, I Should Be in Charge, due for completion later in 2011. John Rogers has worked on numerous projects with comedian Russell Brand and completed his first feature documentary in 2009, The London Perambulator. He also produces and co-presents a radio show on Resonance 104.4fm with Nick Papadimitriou, Ventures and Adventures in Topography.
6pm - 7.30pm Panel discussion and film
During the evening Bob & Roberta Smith invites people to sign up to a proposed new law, Esther’s Law, based on a sculpture by Jacob Epstein of his teenage daughter, which seems to challenge the male hegemony of art. Esther's Law suggests that society should create a truly representative political system, including women making up 50% of parliament.
Taking this as a starting point, a panel of influential women chaired by curator and broadcaster Cecilia Wee including artist Sonia Boyce, Professor of Social Science Janet Newman from the Open University, artist Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre and Bob & Roberta Smith discuss whether Esther’s Law is necessary.
Artist Bob & Roberta Smith wants to see a parliament that is representative of the diversity of gender, ethnicity and range of abilities in contemporary society. But in an age where power is increasingly shifting away from organised nation-state politics and where grass-roots women-led organisations make a real difference, does it matter whether or not women are elected into Downing Street?
7.30pm – 10pm Selection of films by Katherine Aranielo
In a series of films Katherine Aranielo subverts and parodies contemporary issues around disability such as assisted suicide, media representation, prejudice, charity, ignorance and body aesthetics. She uses film, performance and other media to transform stereotypical representation into works that deliver their critique with humour and playfulness. Aranielo is a London-based artist and filmmaker who studied a MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths (2004) and has been shown at Tate Modern, Tate Britain and film festivals worldwide.
→ Katherine Aranielo

Calendar

Date Time Venue Book

Friday 20/05/2011
I Should Be In Charge screening 12:00 pm Lower Gallery
Free

Friday 20/05/2011
I Should Be In Charge panel 6:00 pm Lower Gallery
Free

Friday 20/05/2011
Katherine Araniello screenings 7:30 pm Lower Gallery
Free

Please note
Films start at the advertised time. Doors open 15 mins prior to this. Latecomers are only admitted at the Duty Managers discretion.

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Date	Time	Venue	Book
Friday 20/05/2011 I Should Be In Charge screening	12:00 pm	Lower Gallery	Free
Friday 20/05/2011 I Should Be In Charge panel	6:00 pm	Lower Gallery	Free
Friday 20/05/2011 Katherine Araniello screenings	7:30 pm	Lower Gallery	Free

via ica.org.uk

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Make Your Own Damn Film #2

2011-04-27T01:24:00.002+01:00

I've reached that point where I'm looking around for inspiration.
Just been attempting what is turning out to be the most difficult sequence so far in this cut for the show at the ICA on 20th May.

It's based around a short video I edited for Wire magazine back in 2009 when I had just started the project. I liked the basic feel but it doesn't serve the purpose or rhythm of a longer form film.So I've been attempting to weave in and out of Bob performing Make Art Not War with the Ken Ardley Playboys with footage from interviews at Tate Britain, the Hayward Gallery and images from Bob's Factory Outlet show at Beaconsfield.

The cut for the Wire took me about two hours start to finish. This time round, several hours in, couple of cans of beer, a bit of swearing and I'm still not convinced this sequence is working although it has some great moments.

Luckily something popped up when reviewing some interview footage of Bob that has serendipitous associations.

He mentioned being inspired by seeing the artist Christo wrapping Paris' Pont Neuf in fabric. This was captured brilliantly by the Maysles brothers in a documentary, part of a series of films about the work of Christo. I've always loved these films and have watched them again and again.

The Maysles idea of 'direct cinema' greatly appeals to me, trying to capture the spontaneity of the moment, of letting action unfold in front of the lens. I love the honesty and simplicity of their films, the documentarian as benign witness.

A couple of years ago I was very fortunate to meet Albert Maysles in New York. It was when I had recently finished The London Perambulator and was considering what to do next. The octogenarian Albert proceeded to enthuse about his current and future projects, at least four of them at various stages of production, his eyes lit up wide and shining as he described scenes he'd shot and things he hoped to capture as the films progressed. It was a truly humbling and inspiring encounter.

When I got back to London I soon threw myself in the Bob documentary and here I am now trying to finish it - wonder what Albert would make of my film - probably find what I've just done a tad busy perhaps - on the other hand that is in the service of being true to the subject. Who knows - at this stage you have to please yourself really.

Time to take a break from the edit and watch those Maysles films about Christo and Jean Claude.

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Make Your Own Damn Film #1

2011-04-10T21:19:00.002+01:00

The procrastination can continue no longer and I must sit down and start editing my documentary about the artist Bob and Roberta Smith. The final push has come via the invitation to screen some of the footage as part of an event at the ICA centred around Bob. I received an email yesterday saying that they need my 'film' delivered by 6th May.

This is only a work-in-progress cut running at about 20 minutes but it's often daunting enough showing your closest, most trusted allies your unfinished work let alone presenting it in public at one of London's most esteemed art institutions. It's a great privilege though, the ICA is exactly where I'd love the film to end up so this is a kind of reversal.

Luckily I've shot some great footage over the last 20 months or so and my initial plan for the film to be a kind of bricolage looks like it works, which is a relief (for now). But this stage of an edit is a mixture of anxiety and excitement. Excitement that you are finally piecing together your film and seeing some great things in the footage. Anxiety over the inevitable technical hiccups to be resolved and the fear that you don't actually know what you're doing.

The diagram above is what you do inbetween the two states - I'm not sure it helps a great deal but you can look up and see it all there in little green bubbles, nod and then get back to the laborious task of transcoding hours of rushes.

Ai_Wei_web_2.mov Watch on Posterous

Being as this is a fairly free-flowing profile of Bob, his work and his world filming never really stops - particularly as Bob is so active.

When I conceived of the idea of the film it was because I'd heard about this artist who lived in Leytonstone (where I also live) who had a gallery in his garden called The Leytonstone Centre for Contemporary Art. I had a vision of a short documentary about a man painting in his shed around the corner from my front door. We met for a pint in the pub that sits equidistant between our homes (and where I'm going in a moment). I got a call the next morning to film the opening of an exhibition that evening followed by a dawn assignment shooting Bob building a mobile brownfield site for the South Bank and it has carried on like that sporadically ever since taking me as far away from Leytonstone as New York, Walsall and Ramsgate.

Yesterday I was filming a protest in support of the imprisoned Chinese artist Ai WeiWei at Tate Modern. Bob was taking part in an 'official' protest outside the gallery when the spontaneous action in the footage above took place. It's never dull with Bob.

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Edgelands: Between the urban and the rural - video | Books | guardian.co.uk

2011-03-22T22:13:00.001Z

via guardian.co.uk

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Gas explosion

2011-03-14T09:10:00.002Z

Big gas explosion this morning at the new supermarket in Church Street, the same place that burnt down and has just re-opened. Street closed for at least two hours

Alfred Hitchcock in Leytonstone

2011-03-01T21:20:00.001Z

Just found this interesting clip on ITN Source about Hitchcock's early years in Leytonstone. I usually introduce the films at Leytonstone Film Club by saying that it is our attempt to bring cinema home to the birthplace of one of the greatest directors, because once you leave the tube station you wouldn't know it. How long will we have to wait for the Hitchcock Cinema to open in Leytonstone

Download now or watch on posterous

Alfred_Hitchcock's_history_growing_up_in_East_London.mp4 (7901 KB)

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This is the walk I did today

2011-02-20T23:50:00.005Z

This is the walk I did this afternoon depicted in a beautiful map in Edward North Buxton's 'Epping Forest' (1923). Wish I had refered to Buxton's book before heading out as he would have pre-warned me 88 years in advance of the swamp that consumes Gilbert's Slade in winter. Not only did this fill my left shoe with freezing mud but also cause me to twist my right knee in the midst of the hornbell and holy. I swear the blackbirds and sparrows celebrated this throughout the treetops. Nonetheless I pushed on through dusk. By the time I reached Salway Hill I was a limping muddy wreck, albeit in a nice new cap sent by some kind folk who live on a cotton farm in Mississippi.

Had I been visiting in the later half of the 18th Century I could have dragged my right leg along the old Lea Bridge Road to Woodford Wells where SP Sunderland (1912) informs us that the chalybeate spring was used by invalids to ease their pains. But alas this is 2011 so I was left to slope down Snakes Lane to board a rail replacement bus service.

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The temple in the forest

2011-02-20T16:57:00.002Z

Tilbury - An Estuarine Odyssey on Vimeo

2011-02-12T00:27:00.002Z

via vimeo.com

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The Lost Pleasure Gardens of Finsbury and Pentonville « Ventures & Adventures in Topography

2011-02-04T02:23:00.002Z

There are various ways you gain an impression of a place and develop a curiosity about it, which eventually inspires research and expeditions. It might be a view from a train as it passes above rooftops and gives a rare glimpse of an intriguing, unknown landscape stranded between stations. Apparently this is what led Patrick Keiller to shoot his film Stonebridge Park at that location in north-west London. It may be a chapter found in an old book that captures the imagination, as happened when I read HV Morton’s 1925 account of Leather Lane street market.
But for me the deepest and most lasting impact is made from repeatedly tramping over the same ground again and again, coming at it from unfamiliar angles, at different times of the day and night, in varying moods and stages of your own life, chipping away finding unconnected fragments that slowly form some kind of collective picture. This is my relationship with the area covered in the episode on Finsbury and Pentonville.
looking down across Pentonville
For a few years I lived just off Penton Street and walked every day to and from the South Bank. In fact for about four years I walked everywhere from that high ground that rises up from the valley of the Fleet. One of the threads that emerged from these daily perambulations was the relationship between this area and its natural springs, the pleasure gardens that grew around them and traces left behind. I recorded some of these observations as they came to me on my blog, Islingtongue, but this walk with Nick was really the first attempt to record a collective impression in some form.
Nick knows about water, he jokes that he is ‘the river man’, but he could seriously claim to be the ‘urban stream man’. I was intrigued by what he would make of this incoherent slalom between pubs and council estates over a course of only a couple of miles that mark the sites of the springs and pleasure gardens of Finsbury and Pentonville.
We met at Chancery Lane Station. There is no water reference here as such but from Holborn Viaduct there is a fine reveal of the form of the land as it drops into the course of the River Fleet running beneath Farringdon Road. I also want to shoehorn in a log of Saffron Hill where in the evenings you often find the street totally deserted. Saffron Hill was where Dickens set Fagin’s den in Oliver Twist, The One Tun pub features in the book. It was a notoriously lawless slum. Further up the street it was the heart of London’s C19th Italian community where it was noted that not a word of English was spoken. Today it has an austere, indifferent look about it.
There is a realisation that this could be a heritage trail and The Clerk’s Well in Farringdon Lane, Clerkenwell is indeed on a sanctioned route – but what intrigues me is that the other wells and spas are oddly neglected. Everybody knows Islington – Tony Blair made sure of that. But far fewer know of the 18th and 19th century spa resorts that stretched out along the slopes of Penton Mound. And then there is the whole mythos of Merlin’s cave and observatory here. Islington should be as well known for its pagan rites as its frothy coffee drinking meeja-types (the other untold story of this area is its unusually high percentage of council tenants).
We clock-in at Cold Bath Square where from 1697 patients were lowered into its chalybeate waters seeking the cure for “scorbutic complaints, rheumatism, chronic disorders etc”. We are guided in part this evening by S.P. Sunderland’s excellent Old London’s Spas, Baths and Wells (1915) and Nick has a copy of an 1880s Century book on the River Fleet.
The Clerk’s Well is visited as is the now lesser known Skinner’s Well but Sunderland records that in the middle ages it too played host to the performance of mystery plays.
from Old London's Baths, Spas and Wells
Along Bowling Green Lane we bowl to look through the locked park gates at the site of the Spa Fields where once large congregations of radicals would gather. Some of these firebrands found themselves incarcerated back at Cold Bath Square when a prison replaced the Bath House there.
Through the gates we spy Spa Green Estate designed by visionary socialist architect Berthold Lubetkin. This was the Islington Spa and the estate carries the name in Tunbridge Wells House (the pleasure ground had also been called New Tunbridge Wells).
Across Rosebery Avenue we skirt around Wilmington Square where the New London Spaw occupied Ducking Pond Fields and soon we are dropping down into Black Mary’s Hole behind Mount Pleasant Sorting Office. This evocative name has various explanations but I always believe than when such ambiguities exist go with the most colourful story, which is the one put forward by Chesca Potter that this was a sacrificial pit to a goddess.
We slosh through the shallows of the Fleet and emerge out on Grays Inn Road. Up ahead is St Chad’s Well. St Chad is the patron saint of wells and here again we find mythology at work with the legend of the spring rising from a wound in the foot of Edmund Ironside inflicted by King Cnut. The illustrious Bagnigge Wells, home of Nell Gwynn is skulking behind a bus stop on Kings Cross Road, abandoned and unloved like a discarded royal mistress with just a fading engraved tablet as recognition. Is this a punishment for the way that Bagnigge degenerated into a place of debauchery before closing its doors in the time of Victorian prudery?
Up the Riceyman Steps we don’t so much jaunt as hobble and we stand and argue about Merlin on Claremont Square which EO Gordon would have us believe is the summit of Penton Mound, location of the Arthurian wizard’s observatory and cave. I have wholeheartedly signed up to Gordon’s thesis despite the knowledge that this area happened to be developed by a fella by the name of Henry Penton. He egotistically named the area Pentonville in the late 18th Century, rather than it gaining its moniker back in the misty, murky Arthurian past after the Romans left and created some blank pages in the history books which we could fill with whatever took our fancy.
I don’t think London celebrates its mythology as much as it should so maybe we should hush up the Henry Penton link and claim that he changed his surname in line with something he read in the same Welsh bardic odes that Gordon used as the basis for Prehistoric London, its Mounds and Circles.
Islington Spa
Not long ago this was literally my home stretch as we pass the site of the Belvedere Tavern (Bel vedere = good view in Italian) and a good view it would indeed have had over the fields of saxifrage that swept below into the City. The Lexington Bar occupies its building now and keeps the spirit of dancing and entertainment alive although they may have ditched the games of rackets that were played here.
Just off Penton Street, Dobney’s Tea Garden is curiously marked by Risinghill Street. Peter Ackroyd notes that one could read the etymology of Penton as ‘rising hill or spring’. Nick tries to indulge me but I can tell he’s had enough hocus pocus for one night. So it was with some scepticism that he greets my declaration that our final spring, The White Conduit on Barnsbury Road is the home of cricket. The pub still bears the name under its eves, although it is now Sardinian restaurant. But it was here that the first cricket club was formed which later had to move on to grounds in St John’s Wood where it took the name of the Marylebone Cricket Club or MCC as it is more famously known. When this was a pub I saw the mouldering half-hearted cricket shrine placed above the front door for the benefit of the odd Australian tourist. Peter Ackroyd says there was a maze in the garden and possibly marks the spot of Druidic rituals.
We could have carried on – Islington was dotted with springs and gardens. We could have followed Copenhagen Street to the pleasure garden in Caledonian Park where the cattle market clock tower still stands. We might have sat in the tea garden that still exists behind the Canonbury Tavern and then pushed along to take a imaginary balloon ride from the car park of the Highbury Barn Tavern where the songs of Arsenal supporters have replaced the operettas for which it was noted. But instead we sat on a bench, near midnight in the playground – probably actually in the middle of the batting track of the world’s first cricket club, and wondered how we’d turn all this into a 30 minute radio show.
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via venturesintopography.wordpress.com

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An winter stroll along the arbours of the Pleasure Gardens of Finsbury and Pentonville

2011-01-28T13:00:00.001Z

Since I started this blog over 6 years ago there has been a preoccupation with the sites of the pleasure gardens, wells and springs of Islington - spread out along the slopes of what E.O. Gordon calls, The Penton Mound.
So it gave me great pleasure to return to this, admittedly half-researched, area for an episode of Ventures and Adventures in Topography.
Here is the resulting radio show and also link to previous posts on the blog about the pleasure gardens of Islington.

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The Eastern Queen - Ilford

2011-01-26T22:03:00.000Z

Download the podcast here

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Ilford - The Eastern Queen

2011-01-24T10:56:00.002Z

Episode 5: The Eastern Queen (Ilford)
Inspired by Thomas Burke’s The Outer Circle: Rambles in Remote London, Nick Papadimitriou and John Rogers explore the far-lying eastern suburb of Ilford.
Burke , like other writers of the early 20th Century, was disdainful of Ilford. Writing in 1921 he said of ‘the Eastern Queen’ that, “After Walthamstow it comes as tepid soda-water upon an August noon. Ilford wears an expression of unfulfilled desire. It hungers for colour. Even the rush and turmoil about the Broadway have a frigid tone.”
Nick and John ignored his advice and headed out along the Romford Road to find a visionary landscape, optimistic and vibrant, ‘rising from alluvial Essex’.
With reading by Heidi Lapaine and music by Europa51
Read more about this episode here
Ventures - The Eastern Queen (Ilford): Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download (136)

via podcasts.resonancefm.com

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Across the marshes: Plumstead to Cross Ness on Vimeo

2011-01-16T18:33:00.002Z

via vimeo.com

Download the podcast of this walk here http://podcasts.resonancefm.com/archives/5553#more-5553

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Day of the Triffids influence on Shaun of the Dead

2010-12-30T22:26:00.004Z

I was watching the 1981 BBC adaptation of Day of the Triffids today. There was a scene when the 'hero' Bill Masen and a girl he has resecued, Jo, seek refuge in a pub from a zombie-like mob of blind people who roam the streets.

It's not long before they are discovered by a another group of the menacing blind people who omimously feel their way around the outside of the pub whilst Bill and Jo sit tight inside

This is much like in Shaun of the Dead when Shaun goes to rescue his girlfriend Liz and they too barricade themselves in their local, The Winchester. Soon the zombies return and circle the pub.

The images here really struck me with their similarity
There were also some fantastic images in Day of the Triffids of London 6 years after mass blindness and a mystery virus had caused depopulation. I have an unwatched copy of 28 Days Later that I shall view with a new interest.

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Wanstead Flats Boxing Day Walk

2010-12-27T13:32:00.002Z

Wanstead Flats Boxing Day Walk (550d test/ T2i) from fugueur on Vimeo.

Twilight walk across a frozen Wanstead Flats in east London on Boxing Day.

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Wanstead Flats Boxing Day

2010-12-26T19:30:00.002Z

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Free book for Christmas

2010-12-24T12:03:00.002Z

Here's something I wrote a couple of years ago as part of a public art project funded by the arts council. We started with the question of 'what makes a place' in response to a massive shopping centre being built in our home town, then headed off on a series of psychogeographically inspired derives over the course of 18 months.

Open publication - Free publishing - More architecture

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Environmental Agents: The Art Of Field Recording: The Wire:

2010-12-23T12:41:00.002Z

via thewire.co.uk

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Winter solstice: See the light on the darkest day | Art and design | guardian.co.uk

2010-12-21T13:20:00.001Z

The meaning of light ... the passage into Maeshowe chambered tomb, on Mainland, Orkney Islands. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
It is time to pray for the return of the sun. In this deep midwinter, we can start to imagine what the winter solstice meant to the ancient inhabitants of Britain who built Stonehenge and Maeshowe, and who aligned these mysterious buildings to receive the remote rays of the sun on the darkest day of the year.
This is the holiest time of the year – if you happen to share the beliefs of these ancient pagans, which, in fact, are obscure because they left no writings or even much in the way of figurative art. But the winter solstice must have been deeply important to them because on this day, and this day only, sunlight creates startling effects at Britain's late neolithic and early bronze age monuments. Most astonishingly of all, it enters the long narrow entrance passage of the burial mound of Maeshowe on Orkney's Mainland island and glows on the back wall of the inner chamber. The building becomes a giant camera, catching sunlight in a moment of mystery and wonder.
The architecture of Maeshowe is one of the marvels of these islands. Inside the earthen mound is a profoundly impressive chamber made of massive blocks of stone arranged in powerful lintels neatly layered, perforated by accurately rectangular openings. There is a precision to the stone construction and its plan, with symmetrical side chambers. When later Viking warriors broke into the chamber they wrote runic inscriptions on its stones, adding to the strange atmosphere. But it is at the winter solstice that Maeshowe consummates its mystery with the astronomical spectacle of the sun piercing its dark sanctum of death.
Light in darkness, life in death, the moment when the sun begins its return journey towards midsummer. Truly the pagan midwinter is a moving celebration. But, as we rush around buying presents, do we remember the true meaning of the winter sun festival?

via guardian.co.uk

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Ventures and Adventures in Topography

2010-12-19T18:36:00.001Z

Episode 3 – Scarp

This week John Rogers and Nick Papadimitriou head out onto the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire Escarpment, subject of a forthcoming book by Nick.
Scarp is a conspicuous but broken ridge running from Batchworth Heath, near Harefield, on the Middlesex-Buckinghamshire border, via Oxhey to Elstree and thence eastward to High Barnet. Further east, the ridge runs through Hadley and Enfield Chase, widening considerably north of the former place towards Shenley and North Mimms. The eastern edge of Scarp curves north and then north-east, following the River Lee upstream into Hertfordshire, until it diminishes in height in the region of Hertford and Great Amwell. Much of the land is green belt broken by small clusters of dwellings, old farms and ribbons of Victorian suburban houses. Scarp attains its greatest height at Stanmore Common (480 ft).
With a reading from the book by Nick Papadimitriou and music by Europa51

Read more about this episode on the Ventures blog and watch a video of the walk on Vimeo

Standard Podcast: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download (131)

via podcasts.resonancefm.com

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Notebooks

2010-12-14T13:57:00.002Z

Went walking with Nick Papadimitriou on Saturday along the Southern Outfall Sewer for our radio show on Resonance fm. Shot this near Thamesmead Estate when Nick was dreaming that somewhere up in one of the tower blocks dwelt a fellow deep topographer chronicling the local landscape and lore.

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Through the 'Urethra of London'

2010-12-12T22:44:00.000Z

Weston's map showing the Philly Brook

"Geographically Leytonstone is just a case of in one end and out the other. It's not the end of the road like Whitechapel, nor is it the beginning of the end like Southgate. Leytonstone, if it's like anything it is the urethra of London."
Lenny's Documentary, Ian Bourn (1978)

I came across the above quote from a film by Leytonstone film-maker Ian Bourn not long after I moved to the area. I quickly became aware that previous repeated viewing of the films of fellow Leytonstonian, John Smith, had left such a powerful imprint upon my psyche that they may well have influenced my decision to move out here to E11. I decided to further research what I then termed the 'cinematic topography of the north eastern frontier'.

Leytonstone at one point had the largest population of artists of any place in England. The building of the M11 Link Road was both the cause of this Left Bank blossoming out east, through the empty properties it produced after compulsory orders were served, and then the construction of the road some years later brought about its end. The artists only moved on after a protracted stand-off with the road builders and a prolonged eviction. The M11 Link Road Protests loom large in the psyche of the area and have luckily been well-documented.

underground stream near Wood Street

But this was not the subject for our Ventures and Adventures expedition through Leytonstone and Leyton. We chose to chart a less contentious and mythologised feature of the landscape - a small, underground stream running a course of just under two miles beneath the streets. The Philly Brook seems to have been virtually forgotten and is recorded merely in the name of a street, Fillebrook Road, and that of a house near the Leyton Orient football stadium, Brook House. The stream can be heard gurgling through the street irons on Southwest and Queens Roads. Otherwise the only clue lies in the valley it has carved out of the local terrain.

The solitary reference in literature I could find was in The Story of Leyton and Leytonstone by W.H. Weston published in 1921 which has two hand-drawn maps showing the course of the stream. So I decided to have a rummage in the archives at the Vestry House Museum in Walthamstow.
The Vestry House staff greeted my research enquiry enthusiastically and when I arrived, there was a small pile containing all their references to the Philly Brook, or Fille Brook. One was cream envelope marked 'Uncatalogued Ephemera L13.7 The Fillebrook', and inside was a photocopy of an article from the local newspaper printed in 1994.
The other direct references in text came in the form of series of handwritten notes and cuttings made sometime in the interwar period by local antiquarian Frederick Temple.

Nick looking for the source

It was with these clues that Nick and I set out to follow the course of the Philly Brook. To add an element of genuine erudition to the walk we arranged to meet local historian David Boote half-way along the route. David has also researched the stream and had a fairly solid idea where it runs.
I met Nick at Leyton Midland Road overground station and it was clear that the journey from Gospel Oak had seduced him to the charms of this beguiling train-line. I recently found a great article by Bruce Jerram and Richard Wells published in 1996 passionately defending the significance of the then "much derided" North London Line. Fourteen years on and it is now a vital part of the transport infrastructure feeding into the new city arising around the Olympic Park at Stratford.

I'd got the idea from one of the newspaper articles at the Vestry House that the Philly Brook rose, not near James Lane as it commonly assumed, but further north near Wood Street in Walthamstow. So there we headed.
Two hours later and after the exciting discovery of an underground stream running between some garages and a 19th Century cricket ground, and Nick broke the news that what we had found was a quite different, but unmapped, water course that most likely ran through Walthamstow to link up with the Dagenham Brook or Coppermill Stream further towards the Lea Valley.

Source of the Philly Brook near St Andrews Church

And so we effectively restarted our walk and ambled across the edge of Epping Forest to where the Philly Brook rises at the end of James Lane near Whipps Cross Hospital.
I ducked into the cafe at St Andrews Church to grab a cup of tea. When I told the ladies working there what we were doing they said that the building of some flats behind the church had caused a spring to come up in the basement or crypt. The Philly Brook lives! I thought. Apparently, flooding of basements was common in the area until the building of the Link Road, which seems to have displaced not only the E11 avant garde but also tamed the rising waters of the stream.

We made our rendezvous with David Boote a mere two hours late and then took a walk through the valley of the Philly Brook that meandered as the stream once did - taking a whole three hours to complete the final mile-and-a-half. Much verbiage was spilled along the banks of the brook, plenty of it highly entertaining but unbroadcastable on the radio show (due to time and not inappropriateness).

looking down the course of the stream

Finally at the end of the walk, and after forgetting to pay homage to composer Cornelius Cardew who had lived and died not far from the river's run, we reached what we thought was the end. But as the stream no longer appears above ground we would have to be content to leave this to conjecture. And then Nick squinted through the gloom at his Village London atlas and proclaimed that the Brook met the Mill Stream right near where we were stood on a traffic island near Dunedin Road. He disappeared into some undergrowth and then yelled out - here was the stream. And there we believe it was, running meekly through a concrete culvert beside the allotments, still unseen and unheralded.

Download the podcast of this episode here

Some links and further reading

Platform's work on London as a city of watersheds

Cornelius Cardew's Great Learning Performed in Leytonstone

Leyton and Leytonstone Historical Society

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Podcasts: Ventures and Adventures in Topography

2010-12-10T17:43:00.001Z

Entries Tagged as 'Ventures and Adventures in Topography'

Ventures and Adventures in Topography

December 7th, 2010 · No Comments

Episode 2: Leytonstone & Leyton -
The North-Eastern frontier

This week’s show comes to you entirely from
Leytonstone & Leyton as Nick Papadimitriou and
John Rogers explore the valley of the Philly Brook –
the buried and forgotten stream that runs beneath
the streets of the London zone that begat Alfred
Hitchcock, London’s short-lived ‘Left Bank’
and the great Panjandum. This is [...]

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Tags: Ventures and Adventures in Topography

Ventures and Adventures in Topography

November 26th, 2010 · 2 Comments

Episode 1 – Brent Cross

Ventures & Adventures in Topography presented
by John Rogers and Nick Papadimitriou,
is a show taking you on a series of
lop-sided rambles around the margins
of London,exploring zones and areas
of the city drawing on an eclectic
range of references,influenced by old
\topographical books, psychogeography,
deep topography,
and the hopeless mis-reading of maps.

This week we’ll be taking you on [...]

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Tags: Ventures and Adventures in Topography

via podcasts.resonancefm.com

If it's too cold to go out for a walk why not take an audio stroll with me and Nick as we explore the 'skirt of London'

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Snow in Leytonstone

2010-12-01T19:51:00.001Z

Snow in Leytonstone (Canon 550D / T2i test) from fugueur on Vimeo.

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Philly Brook trailer - a phantasmagoria

2010-11-30T17:17:00.002Z

Listen!

via AudioBoo

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Ventures and Adventures in Topography - new series

2010-11-23T02:21:00.001Z

Download now or listen on posterous

Ventures Ep1 extract.mp3 (977 KB)

The new series of Ventures and Adventures in Topography starts this coming Wednesday, 24th November at 5pm on Resonance 104.4fm (and online). I'm here busily editing the field recordings from our walk around Brent Cross for the first episode. Here's a very short fragment that tickled me.

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Iain Sinclair - Objects of Obscure Desire

2010-11-18T01:43:00.002Z

via youtube.com

Always wonderful to listen to Iain Sinclair.
Sat in the very seat where I interviewed him for The London Perambulator.

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Incredible Biographies #1

2010-11-12T00:43:00.001Z

What a life W. G. Moore led. What a hero. This biography comes from A Dictionary of Geography, published by Penguin in 1949. From teaching to writing a Geography of Capitalism in 1938, when such a concept would have been radical but without the kudos it would attract today. Founder of the meteorological service for Persia - maybe I'm drawn to this as it sounds exotic, but here is a man who started life at the Grammar School in Burton-on-Trent. He was not a man to rest on his laurels as he then went on to write such essential tomes as The World's Wealth, The Soil We Live On, and Adventures in Geography.
We don't know whether he preferred gin or scotch, but we can guess that he would have donned a tweed in the English winter and tropical khaki in Persia. We salute you and your uncelebrated endeavours.

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Fines in Shillings remain in Leyton

2010-10-27T12:42:00.003+01:00

Noticed this old sign on a street-lamp in Guernsey Road E11 this morning - vestige of an age when "Good Rule and Government" could be undermined by dogs defecating on the pavement.

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Resovision

2010-10-14T22:57:00.003+01:00

The brilliant and essential Resonance fm have ventured into the realm of the moving image with Resovision - broadcasting live from the Frieze Art Fair in London. Watch the wonder unfold here

resovision on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

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Brief Bristol Perambulation

2010-10-08T16:02:00.004+01:00

Later, after the gig at the Hippodrome and a pint I descended Christmas Steps at midnight with my edirol in hand
Listen!

Will Self reads from 'Walking to Hollywood' 2

2010-09-20T23:11:00.002+01:00

via youtube.com

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Will Self reads from 'Walking to Hollywood' 1

2010-09-20T23:10:00.002+01:00

via youtube.com

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2010-09-16T11:49:00.002+01:00

I like to imagine there is a spirit that guides my fugues at times - that rewards me for surrendering to its lure. The rewards come in the shape of stumbling into unexpected corners of the city at the end of unpromising schleps. But sometimes they come in the form of books. Today I succumbed to the fugue and found these four books virtually side by side on the same charity shop shelf.
Rising in the East (1996) unlocked the door. A book of essays on East End regeneration written in a pre-Cool Britannia London - when to talk of a renaissance of the East may still have sounded optimistic or opportunistic. The first eager read turned up an essay on the importance of the North London Line Overground train at a time when it was fighting for its life. I skimmed the first few pages of this thesis as I glided eastwards from Haringey to Leyton on one of the brand new trains running on the 160- year old line. 'Traversing the Great Divide: The North London Line and East London' the essay is grandly titled, by Bruce Jerram and Richard Wells, and such is their passion apparent for the NLL that they produced this brilliant diagram demonstrating how it arcs West - East across the capital, or as it was viewed at the time from "a rich desirable west to a poor, dull, possibly dangerous east". With the stations being upgraded, gleaming pre-graffiti trains and the East London Olympics at the end of the North London Line, it looks like they won their argument.
The Romance of London from 1910. The first pages pouring cold water of talk of the myth of King Lud but all the same acknowledging Tacitus's observations that in AD61 he finds London "celebrated for the gathering of dealers and commodities". A Roman refuting the idea that the Romans founded our city.
A guide to Camden written at the height of Britpop and an archeological examination of the relationship between town and country in Roman Britain (wonder whether urban sprawl was an issue back then?)

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Lea Walk

2010-09-13T01:25:00.003+01:00

Headed out for a wander beside the Lea in the late afternoon sun. They're building a whole new world over the road - the pace of building of the Olympic Park is startling. We duck down away from the madness and into the quiet shade of the willow trees.
On a section of the bank that looks prone to flooding the boys spot a dead hairy crab washed up with piles of rubbish. The eldest suggests that the pollution must have killed it and he then returns the decaying crustacean to the water.
We pass through dense thickets of pink flowers catching the sun. Using my 1950's wildflower book I posit that these may be Himalayan Balsam, that this tattered tome tells me are commonly found by rivers and streams.
The boys can't resist the pull of the open sea of pitches on Hackney Marshes and they sprint across. We follow the water again along the Hackney Cut past the barges, joggers and fishermen and reach Lea Bridge Road at the magic hour of last light.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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2010-09-05T20:20:00.002+01:00

Brodie's beer festival at the King William in Leyton. Over 20 ales brewed on site. And now the folk music starts. One of the best pubs in London.

Esoteric reading list circa C18th

2010-08-22T22:50:00.001+01:00

Britannia Antiqua Illustrata, by Aylet Sammes
Concerning the Certainty of the World of Spirits, by Richard Baxter
Relations of the Wonders of the Invisible World, by Cotton Mather
- taken from 'Hawksmoor', by Peter Ackroyd

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2010-08-13T19:03:00.002+01:00

2010-08-13T19:01:00.002+01:00

Ivul

2010-07-26T01:05:00.002+01:00

Went to see this beguiling and inspiring film for the second time on Friday followed by a Q&A with director, Andrew Kotting. Gives me hope for narrative fiction cinema

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Northumberland Long Sword and Rapper Dancing in Leytonstone

2010-07-20T14:41:00.004+01:00

Northumberland Long Sword and Rapper Dancing in Leytonstone from fugueur on Vimeo.

Went along to this performance by Hawksword dance side at Holy Trinity Church Leytonstone last night. It was part of the Leytonstone Festival. The doors of the newly-built church were open to the summer evening coming in off the estate (where the Hollydown Estate tower blocks once stood). My 7-year-old son was reticent about going in at first - you can imagine he wouldn't have ever seen anything like this before, but he soon bought into the spectacle.

2010-07-18T17:18:00.001+01:00

Bush fire on Wanstead Flats

Perambulating to Curzon Soho

2010-07-12T13:39:00.003+01:00

The London Perambulator rambles on with a screening at Curzon Soho on Wednesday 14th July at 7.45pm. What a life the film is having after we let it loose last April.
I'm writing this now sat on a sofa in the lobby of a hotel in New York - I'll arrive back in London the morning of the screening so be interesting to see how I handle the Q&A with jet-lag.
Bizarrely I've had to go away for work before almost every screening of the film. I don't even go away that much but whenever a screening looms I get the call to fly off somewhere to work for a week, or this case 4 days.
I can't help thinking there's a message in this - lord knows what it is and considering that travel stopped me from attending the Brighton Film Festival and Bethnal Green Working Mens Club screenings maybe the message is to leave Nick Papadimitriou alone to do the Q&A (I know that's what Nick thinks).
Hopefully some of you reading this will be able to make it along Wednesday - and if you do you'll know why I'm yawning.

Info and tickets here

1989

2010-07-09T17:56:00.001+01:00

I saw some of the brilliant photos from this book when Peter Marshall did a presentation at Invisible Cities. They really resonated with me as that was the year I first moved to London as a scruff-bag student.
Here's the blurb for the book:
'1989' claims to be Chapter 1 of a book based on the notes made by the photographer on a walk through the streets of northeast London with a well-known author of 'psycho-geographical' works.
But the author is entirely fictional, and the notes, written in 2005, after his death and sixteen years after the pictures were taken are in part a gentle spoof on psycho-geography but more importantly a reflection on photography and the documentary process.
Peter Marshall has been photographing London since the 1970s and had his first one-person museum show more than 25 years ago. His work is in various collections including the Museum of London.
From 1999-2007 he became known around the world for his critical writing about photography as the 'About.com' Photography guide.
He set up his first web site in 1995 and has continued to have a high profile with web sites of his work on the 'Lea Valley', 'London's Industrial Heritage', 'The Buildings of London' and 'My London Diary' as well as the '>Re:PHOTO' blog.

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Barrage Balloons on Wanstead Flats

2010-07-04T19:29:00.005+01:00

I almost literally stumbled upon these curious posts when walking back across Wanstead Flats the other week. I'm fairly certain that they were used to tether the barrage balloons that were part of the air defences based on the Flats during the Second World War. The foundations of the communications hut can still be seen in Long Wood.

Marginal Land (Richard Mabey)

2010-06-15T00:38:00.001+01:00

"... it is often in those awkward-shaped parcels of ground - left over like a hem when the surrounding areas have been sewn up - called 'marginal land'. These seem to be multiplying with the piecemeal extension of built-up areas: a sliver left over between two strictly rectangular factories, a disused car dump, the surrounds of an electricity sub-station"
- p.38 The Unofficial Countryside (1978), by Richard Mabey

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The People's Supermarket

2010-06-13T16:28:00.003+01:00

Lamb's Conduit Street

On the way to Coram's Field yesterday we decided to stop by the cheapo chain supermarket in Lamb's Conduit Street to pick up some carrots to feed the animals. Instead of the usual consumerist nightmare we found this brilliant community owned and run co-operative in its place. We chatted to the lovely smiley lady behind the counter about the store - staffed and run by members who volunteer a small number of hours per year.
I remember reading about a similar scheme in Brooklyn, NY - great to see it taking off here.

More info here
And some photos here