Cryptic Symbols of London

I’d love to know what this is. 

Taken from The Pictorial Handbook of London Comprising its Antiquities, Architecture, Arts, Manufacture, Trade, Social, Literary, and Scientific Institutions, Exhibitions, and Galleries of Art (published in 1854)  – with a map engraved by Lowry

london

Counter-Tourism and The Art of Wandering

The works of two fellow travelers deserve a shout-out here.

Firstly ‘Counter-Tourismby Crab Man aka Phil Smith. I haven’t read the book yet,  because it’s probably brilliant and I’m writing my own book at the moment and I don’t want to be unduly influenced by Smith’s usually creative slant on the re-imagining of ‘traditional’ heritage locations and the standard notion of sight-seeing.

When I was working on the Remapping High Wycombe project I read his brilliant essay ‘Dread, Route and Time: An Autobiographical Walking of Everything Else’, and ended up somehow mangling and misremembering his cogent notions as ‘autotopobiography’ (follow the tag at the bottom).

But an alternative to the often useless Rough Guides and Lonely Planets is long overdue – why buy a guide to each country and city when you could just buy the Counter-Tourism Handbook and use it everywhere you go.

If you want to read deeper into the broader culture that Smith and other cultural walkers inhabit then Merlin Coverley’s The Art of Wandering – the writer as walker’ is a must read. This is another long overdue book, Coverley having written two other key publications on a similar theme with his Pocket Essentials on ‘Psychogeography’ and ‘Occult London’.

The book takes us on a ramble from the Walker as Philosopher through to the Experimental Walking practised by Smith and his cohorts in Wrights and Sights, charting the excursions of the Dadaists, Surrealists and Situationists.
It not only covers the visionary walking of William Blake and Werner Herzog, the Walker as Philosopher, Pilgrim and Vagrant; but also links James Bone’s The London Perambulator (1925) to my old walking companion Nick Papadimitriou through the title of the film about him that I borrowed from the book (we’re going out for a walk on Saturday – you can read about it next year).

There’s an interesting section on a book by Jeff Nicholson, ‘Bleeding London’  from 1997 where the central character secretly carries out one of my fantasies – to walk every street in London, chalking each one off in the index of an A-Z as he goes.

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My Revolutions and The Angry Brigade

Last night finished reading Hari Kunzru’s brilliant novel, My Revolutions – an intense first person account of a man’s involvement in a British revolutionary group in the late 60’s and early1970’s.

While I recognised elements from things I’d read and seen about the Baader Meinhof Gang and the Weathermen (the scene in which the activists march down a street in crash helmets reminded me of this image from the Chicago Days of Rage) – the unmistakable parallel is with The Angry Brigade.

Britain’s own armed revolutionary cadre are often forgotten about, partly perhaps because as someone once said their name has a ‘Pythonesque’ quality to it (they also became known as the Stoke Newington 8 which still isn’t as sexy as The Red Brigade) – and that they avoided killing people, unlike the headline-grabbing murders of the European groups.
(Both Baader Meinhof and The Red Brigade have been subjects of highly stylised biographical films with good-looking actors – and the Weathermen have featured in an episode of The Simpsons – can’ think of any appearances of the Angry Brigade on screen).

I tentatively pitched the idea of a documentary about The Angry Briage to Channel4 around the time My Revolutions was published but to no avail (I think the lack of a body count was an issue and that the commissioning editor had never heard of them).

Just as well perhaps, because there is already the excellent documentary above.

Here’s a fascinating interview with the Angry Brigade member John Barker

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Debunking Debord – Chris Gray Memorial Lecture

Last week I was invited to Housmans for the inaugural Christopher Gray Memorial Lecture given by Gray’s long-term friend and collaborator Charles Radcliffe.

It was fascinating to hear Radcliffe talk about heading off to Paris with Chris Gray to meet Guy Debord and join the Situationist International. He was disparaging about Debord, saying how square he was and didn’t understand the acid culture that was a significant force in 60’s London (Gray later authored The Acid Diaries). Debord’s intellectual achievements weren’t contested but more the manner of how he dealt with his allies and fellow travelers.

He then gave a pithy account of all the expulsions and exclusions from the SI instigated by Debord and how the Situationists never really seemed to do anything else. Radcliffe was in that select group of people who resigned.
It was a great evening and felt I learnt more about Debord and the SI than in the previous years of reading hagiographies of Debord and his cohorts.

On the way home I read Chris Gray’s introduction to his key book on the SI – Leaving the 20th Century. It seemed from the talk and from Gray’s text that the principle thinker on psychogeography wasn’t Debord by Ivan Chtcheglov. I imagine Debord couldn’t be bothered to walk around Paris all day from the sounds of it.

A passage from the book about the foundation of the SI also struck me:

‘On 28th July 1957, delegates from l’Internationale Lettriste, from the largely Scandinavian and German Movement pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste and from a dubious London Psychogeographical Committee, met at a formal congress at Coscio d’Arroscia in Italy and decided to amalgamate. L’Internationale Situationiste was born.’

Does this mean that this ‘dubious’ London Psychogeographical Committee was the first explicitly psychogeographical group?

If so makes it fitting that the practice and ideas of psychogeography were revived in London in the late 1980s/early 90’s by two men who were in the audience that night at Housmans – Fabian Tompsett and Stewart Home.

There is a video of the part of the event on the Housmans Youtube Channel

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Hitler Passed This Way

Found this brilliant, poignant little book the other day

It contains before and after photos of areas bombed during the Second World War. Like these of Paternoster Row devastated by a bombing raid in December 1940.

The introduction states that the photos “present the aftermath of the new kind of war Hitler thrust upon mankind, the war in which non-combatants were to be killed off like insects, and their homes, hospitals, schools and churches were to be smashed to pieces.”

I’ll place it next to William Kent’s equally haunting Lost Treasures of London, Kent being a great guide to the city dutifully logging the artifacts, and relics, as well as buildings lost in the Blitz.

Thankfully I also have the wartime optimism of the County of London Plan (1943) to perk me up – a reminder that whilst the bombs rained down on London there were a group of people in a nissen hut somewhere planning new open spaces, hospitals, and fly-overs.

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The History Man

I read this passage from Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975) this morning as the Overground trundled through the new Stratford taking shape for the Olympics.

Howard Kirk is stood at the top of a multistorey carpark above a shopping centre:
“He stares out, over the unwindowed parapet, at the topography of the town. … To one side he can see the blocks of luxury flats, complete but half-empty, with convenience kitchens and wall-to-wall carpeting and balconies pointed at the horizon; to the other side, on the hill, stand the towers of high-rise council flats, superficially similar, stacked, like a social workers’ hand-book, with separated wives, unmarried mothers, latchkey children. It is a topography of the mind; and his mind makes an intellectual contrast out of it, an image of conflict and opposition. He stares down on the town; the keys dangle; he populates chaos, orders disorder, senses strain and change.”

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Scarp map

Met Nick Papadimitriou tonight to discuss the video we’re shooting to tie in with the publication of his epic deep topographic tome, Scarp (published by Hodder and Stoughton this June).

Scarp map

Nick drew this map in my notebook to indicate some of the places where we could film to capture the key elements of the North Middlesex Tertiary Escarpment (hope I’ve got that right).

Somehow going to make a video from these notes