Walking the Essex Coast from Frinton to Walton-on-the-Naze

A half-term escape to the sea. Not just any sea but the North Sea which had been calling me all summer. So we boarded the train at Stratford bound for Frinton-on-Sea and walked along the coast, past beach huts piled high along the seafront, to Walton-on-the-Naze. Reaching the Naze Tower on the crumbling coastline, Felixstowe in view to the north, we turned and headed back for the early evening train back to London.

Ghosts of Berlin

Oliver Rogers, writer
Oliver Rogers

Guest post by my son, Oliver Rogers aged 19

As an eager young traveller, my time in and understanding of Berlin was defined by my attempt to locate its zeitgeist. Haunted by the idea of going to a city or a country and not really experiencing it, not really experiencing Paris or London or Munich I was determined to find where the essence of the city lay. I wanted to be able to say, “This is Berlin”. Upon arriving in Berlin and exploring the area surrounding the Hotel I was somewhat stumped. I couldn’t find it, and although it seems arrogant to think you could encounter the essence of an entire city on a couple of streets what I immediately encountered was different to what I had expected. We arrived on a warm day, different to the bleak urbanism that characterised my idea of the city, and my initial reference point for the area we explored was Barcelona. The clear skies, flanked on either side by tall walls of buildings, and wide streets; I asked myself “Is this Berlin?”, the German metropolis with the lazy atmosphere of a coastal Mediterranean city? However, as me and my dad explored the city further and began to encounter what I expected Berlin to be I came to understand not only what its zeitgeist was but where it was stored, and how that was unique to Berlin as a city.

Reichstag, Berlin - photo by John Rogers
The Reichstag

One of the first landmarks we visited was the Reichstag. It was a hot day, hotter than I had ever imagined Berlin being and the building stood there with all of its regular significance; The seat of power in Germany, a monument to a long civil history. More than anything however it struck me as this looming epitaph, an epitaph for what Germany had been for the past century. Fittingly not too far away lay an actual epitaph, an epitaph to the soviet soldiers that fell during the battle of Berlin. At first, I thought that the way Berlin embodied and enshrined its past was similar to other cities like London. It enshrined them in monuments, preserved buildings, plaques, museums and so forth. London’s essence is distributed across its entire surface, but certain sites act as a concentration of the city’s essence in sights like these; physical manifestations of history and symbolism and importance. Great monuments like Buckingham Palace, The Tower of London, The British Museum, and St Paul’s Cathedral.  London is an old global artery and it embodies these things proudly. This is what I expected of Berlin. We pressed on and encountered a monument to the homosexuals murdered during the holocaust unassumingly placed in a park- A large grey slab of stone- across the street from rows upon rows of concrete coffins commemorating the Jews murdered in the Holocaust, both of which were sobering in their simplicity and in the weight of their presence.  As a security guard chased children who had been clambering on the coffins as if they were a piece of street infrastructure it began to strike me that Berlin was different. These sites of atonement, sober acknowledgements of the country’s dark past, I realised that these monuments weren’t simply separate from the city, distinct sites embodying a past other attached to the rest of the essence of the city like a benign tumour, these sites constituted the foundation of the essence of the city itself. The children clambered because perhaps they did not view that memorial as a separate entity detached from the city itself but also as a part of Berlin as any street or church or museum. Berlin is defined by its history like any city, but for Berlin, this unavoidably means being a city defined by its crimes. In places such as the holocaust memorial and fragments of the Berlin wall these sites not only serve as historical sites but manifestations of a city in perpetual atonement.  These sites peppered the whole city like old scars, and this feeling of a looming shadow, a shadow of atrocity extends out from these monuments and pervades over the entire city like a fine mist, something I would come to understand more and more as we progressed throughout our trip.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

After visiting an exhibition on Karl Marx we encountered preserved bullet holes in the side of the building from the battle of Berlin. Initially I viewed it like any other memorial site or historical monument, but as we progressed and the bullet holes became a common feature in many of the buildings in the centre I realised that this was a feature of the city. This shadow was something the city had kept so that they would not forget, and thus it became a core part of the essence of Berlin. In cities such as London, there is minimal social or governmental atonement for the atrocities of empire despite the fact that the legacy of empire is embedded into the bones and the role of the city, there is no atonement. Architecturally we consecrate our triumphs and bury our crimes. The atrocities of empire are a footnote, an unpleasant fact attached to the overall history of the city like a post-it note. Berlin cannot do this, as its history is completely entwined with its dark past. For Berlin however this confrontation with its own history is embedded into the essence of the city itself, and as such there are no individual sites that act as conduits for the essence of the city much better than any street or square. It is everywhere, all-pervading. Berlin in many ways is a graveyard; it saw the death of the empire, the republic, the Reich and of communism.  Every street was an artery of a past death machine, an archaic empire, a dead experiment and it knows this, it refuses to forget. It preserves its wounds.

Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin
Checkpoint Charlie

The arrival at Checkpoint Charlie was one of the most striking moments of the entire trip for me. We didn’t quite know what we were expecting, but personally, I found it disappointing. I thought that a site of such historical importance would have some element of grandiosity about it, but it had nothing of the sort. Soon however I realised that Checkpoint Charlie was more than anything a subtle monument to a defeat, a defeat of the communist east and as we browsed and picked through Soviet helmets for sale, kiosks full of hammer and sickle emblazoned hip flasks and pins adorning images of Marx and Lenin it further occurred to me that this is exactly what a capitalist victory over communism would look like. The entire cultural legacy of the Soviet Union and the shadow it cast over Germany were reduced to commodities, commodities to be bought and gawked at and exchanged in hopes that you could purchase a fragment of that long-dead communist zeitgeist. As well as being a monument to defeat Checkpoint Charlie was a victory monument to capitalism, and if a monument to capitalist victory were to be anything it would be precisely what Checkpoint Charlie was; a market. Capitalism displayed its victory through its functioning, its breakdown of the soviet legend into little trinkets you could put on your shelf. As I was buying a chunk of the Berlin wall preserved in resin is when this all became clear to me, and when I realised that far from being a disappointment Checkpoint Charlie was exactly what it should be; banal, friendly, a pastiche, a place you leave with a receipt in your pocket.

Soviet War Memorial

Ultimately, I came to understand Berlin as a city defined by its history more than most because its history is synonymous with its crimes, and unlike most cities, it actively engages with the unfiltered darkness of it. It is a city entrenched in its past. Its past constitutes its very essence and one’s very understanding of it and therefore it is a city defined by its crimes.

It doesn’t concentrate a curated and airbrushed history and essence into sites and monuments, Berlin’s sites are simply nodes in the larger network of its zeitgeist. With all this in mind Berlin is still a beautiful city, one that, due to the embedding of its essence throughout all of its bones, feels vast and varied and rich. East Berlin whilst also engendering a divided Europe engenders the seeds of what Berlin is becoming, of how the city is developing in the wake of its past.  The historical proximity to the epochs that have defined contemporary Berlin is unavoidable, and it is why the shadow of the past looms large, but the cinders of Berlin’s past provide a foundation to develop an identity separate from its past rather than being largely defined by it. However, Germany’s epoch of subjugator and subjugated only ended with the fall of the Berlin wall and therefore that shadow will project its darkness over Berlin and the country for a long, long time. 

Watch the video above

A wanderer in Paris

“I had come to France to do nothing but walk and eat”

– Jack Kerouac, Satori in Paris

The above quote from Jack Kerouac’s Satori in Paris would adequately describe the three days I recently spent in Paris with my youngest son. We walked and walked and ate and ate and it was all so glorious – just like the city itself. We had no other plan, and if there’s a city in which to allow yourself to be drawn by your desires and to simply drift, then it is the city that gave birth to the flaneur in the 19th Century covered arcades – the gaslit passages such as Passage Jouffroy, Passage Verdeau, and Passage des Panoramas.

These enclosed boulevards became the haunts of poets and curious pedestrians alike. The great German sociologist Walter Benjamin dedicated a huge study to the Paris Arcades, The Arcades Project and was inspired to wax lyrically about the wonders they held within; “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.”

Paris arcade
Paris arcade

For Benjamin the ultimate figure in the crowded arcades was the Flâneur, for him epitomized by Baudelaire, engaged in “aimless strolling, the ability to lose oneself in the crowd, populating one’s solitude.”

Joe and I aimlessly strolled from Montmartre to the Latin Quarter to browse the shelves in Shakespeare and Company and sat reading on an upstairs sofa while someone tinkered on the piano next door. We took a boat to The Eiffel Tower then walked a diagonal back across the city to Montmartre. We experienced the future of art exhibition at L’Atelier des Lumières and watched the hoards swarm around the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. A scooted through Père Lachaise Cemetery to find the grave of Jim Morrison and watched the illuminated red sails turn above the Moulin Rouge past midnight. But mostly we aimlessly wandered and savoured every meal – duck legs, mussels, lamb fillet, rump steak, croque monsieur, pancakes, panna cotta, caesar salad, country pate, and just the bread was amazing.

Paris people walking

Edmund White noted in his book, The Flâneur, “Paris is a world meant to be seen by the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.” He writes how Benjamin explained that “the flâneur is in search of experience, not knowledge,” and that summarises our approach to this trip. Although we did scoot through some of the tourist hotspots we did so with innocence, seeking not dry facts, but the experience of place. And what a wonderful, magical experience it was.

A stroll round Oxford

This daytrip to Oxford came with the first whiff of Spring. I felt the excitement trickling through my nervous system as the train departed Marylebone for the ‘City of Youth’. And unlike those excursions where expectation and reality clash, the day unfolded like a dream in the radiant sun.

With no plan and a mostly unhelpful foldout map I just drifted the streets – down past Christ Church then back along the High Street and through the covered market. I took lunch sat outside in Turl Street not far from Brasenose College. Near the Bodleian Library I remembered the day I spent here shooting a BBC Culture Show with Russell Brand in 2007 that culminated in his address to the Oxford Union. A fun day.

Although I’d carried the image of finishing the day in a pub garden beside a river, when I reached the end of my perambulations I fancied a return to the ancient Turf Tavern where I’d spent an evening here celebrating the recent arrival of my 40th birthday. Emerging into the twilight I followed the voices in the alleyways (there’d been exams that morning) til I arrived at The Bear, said to be one of the oldest pubs in Oxford.

A glorious day and I shan’t leave it so long to return next time.

A return to Wycombe Wanderers

I hadn’t been to watch Wycombe Wanderers since 1997, when Martin O’Neil was manager and Steve Guppy was flying up the wing being berated by the home fans. Before yesterday that’d been my solitary trip to my hometown club’s new ground. Growing up I’d watched Wycombe at their historic Loakes Park ground with its famous sloping pitch. My grandfather had been an avid Wycombe fan, walking over the hills from Wooburn to Wycombe to watch the blues. My Dad’s cousin, Tony ‘Bodger’ Horseman, is still the Wycombe’s all-time record goalscorer and record appearance holder (a ‘bodger’ is a turner of chair legs – chair-making being the traditional industry of Wycombe).

Tony Bodger Horseman of Wycombe Wanderers
Tony ‘Bodger’ Horseman – photo Bucks Free Press

We had some Wycombe legends playing for our village cricket club, Wooburn Narkovians, captained by my Dad and where I spent all my summers till the age of 18 – Paul Birdseye who Captained Wycombe for many years (and batted No.3 for Wooburn), Geoff Anthony a Welsh Amateur International (and our wicketkeeper), Howard Kennedy who is among the top 10 appearance makers for the club, and Jack Timberlake who went to school with my Dad and ran the village grocers. Jack also helped set up and run Wooburn Wasps, the youth team where I played from aged 9 to 16. At one time the captain of England schoolboys came to play for us and I got scouted by a number of the big London clubs (we regarded Watford as a London club). This is all background to why I took my youngest son out to Wycombe for his first Wanderers match.

The Little Market House, Wycombe – designed by Robert Adam 1761

It was not only Joe’s first time at Adams Park, but his first proper look at the town of my birth (and where one side of our family can be traced back at least to the 1520s). So on the way to the ground I gave him a quick potted history – the Dial House on Crendon Street where Martin Lluelyn poet and Doctor to Charles I on the scaffold had lived, the Red Lion where Churchill sat astride while campaigning, the Market House marking the distances to London (29 miles) and Oxford (25 miles), the curious ancient stone by the Guildhall that someone suggested could be a mark stone from a neolithic stone circle (there’s another behind the nearby Parish Church). We walked past the old Multi-Racial Centre beneath the fly-over where a number of notable gigs took place in the 70s and 80s, on our way to look at Wycombe College where I did my A-levels. It’s now Buckinghamshire New University. It was interesting to find a plaque on the wall pointing out the original course of the River Wye before it was diverted through a culvert during the 1960s town centre redevelopment.

Paul's Row High Wycombe, August 2021 - the pavement shows the original course of the River Wye before it was culverted through the town centre

A later redevelopment, in the early 2000s, had brought me back to Wycombe to work on an art project with my sister, Cathy, that had been inspired by the scheme. Homesick living in Sydney, I’d searched online for news of my hometown and been surprised to see it unrecognisable from the descriptions of the plans for Project Phoenix. You can read about Remapping High Wycombe project here and download the text I wrote. Our walk through the town confirmed some of our fears of what the resulting Eden Shopping Centre would do to the surrounding parts of Wycombe. Many of the shops were boarded up on Crendon Street and the High Street with its historic medieval market was incredibly sombre compared to what it had been before Eden brought its covered mall to the Newlands carpark. Once one of the most prosperous towns in the country, the Guardian recently reported how it has become a ‘food insecurity hotspot’.

The Wycombe Stone
White Hart Street High Wycombe, August 2021 - photo by John Rogers, the lost byway
White Hart Street

But the spirit of Wycombe is strong, this is the town that started the English Civil War after all. And you can see signs of recovery in the town centre, since my last visit at the end of 2019. We made our way out to Adams Park nestled in the foothills of the Chilterns, and even Joe was beguiled by the sight of the hills rising above the stands. The atmosphere outside the ground was good with live music in the Chairboys Village in the carpark. There was plenty of nose inside the stadium – the Wycombe chants being led by a manic drummer at the back of the terraces who was still there banging that drum long after the final whistle. Sam Vokes, with his 64 International Caps for Wales and 113 Premier League appearances, always looked likely to be the difference between the sides, and his 3rd minute back post header from Jordan Obita’s cross proved decisive. Lincoln City played well, to give them credit, and big David Stockdale pulled off a couple of fine saves to keep the scoreline at 1-0.

Chairboys Village, Wycombe Wanderers v Lincoln City 21st August 2021
Adams Park, Wycombe Wanderers v Lincoln City 21st August 2021
Sam Vokes Goal, Wycombe Wanderers v Lincoln City 21st August 2021

After the match we walked back into town. Past the Hour Glass where my sister used to drink and my Dad play darts, then down Mill End Road where my Mum went to school. Then we followed Dashwood Avenue all the way back into town as I told Joe stories of Lord Dashwood’s Hellfire Club and showed him the place on the Avenue where we’d brought him to meet my Aunty Carol when he was just a few months old and she was in the final months of her life. Naturally our trip to Wycombe ended with a pint of Rebellion Brewery IPA in The Antelope (well Joe had to have lemonade).

Under Milk Wood

I recently spent a peaceful week in Lower Fishguard, staying in a cottage used in the film version of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. This meant we had a steady stream of people peeping through the lounge windows as they followed the local heritage trail.

The Pembrokeshire Coast is absolutely littered with standing stones, burial chambers and stone circles, one local told me that most fields in the area had some kind of prehistoric stone artefact in them. An archaeologist I spoke to explained that Neolithic and Bronze Age people traveled from all over Europe following the setting sun till they reached the most westerly point to bury their dead, hence the location of the numerous stone burial chambers overlooking the sea.

Garn Wen burial chamber

 

We took a family walk up the steep hill to the Garn Wen burial chambers or ‘cromlechs’ overlooking Fishguard Harbour. They were absolutely magnificient – now looking onto the back gardens of a housing estate rather than gazing out westwards across the sea. It’s interesting to think that this ‘remote’ location was so connected to continental people who would have barely stepped foot on the land of ancient Britain but who came here to bury their dead, creating a deep bond between this coastline distant lands. It’s a magical, storied landscape.

Back to Birmingham – City of Surrealists

Screening with the brilliant Video Strolls has the added bonus of a chance for a wander round Birmingham. I’ve blown through a couple of times before on tour with Russell Brand but those occasions were restricted to backstage views of venues and a quick dash through the Bull Ring searching for gifts for the family.

The occasion this time was a screening of London Overground at the Flatpack Film Festival and despite my best intentions I arrive with only an hour or so to explore. Instead of searching out new sights/sites I want to pay homage to the Birmingham Surrealists and somehow connect them to Birmingham’s Edwardian arcades.

King Edward House Birmingham

The crowds are out enjoying the sunshine pitching into New Street. There’s something about the architecture that reminds me of Downtown LA, the fading grandeur of former times. Could Ridley Scott save himself a few quid and shoot the next Blade Runner movie in the midlands, bounty hunters pursuing Replicants along the corridors of King Edward House.

Trocadero Birmingham

I stand outside the Trocadero pub in Temple Street, one of the haunts of the Birmingham Surrealists. I know the Kardomah Cafe is nearby but can’t locate the exact location until Andy Howlett takes me back there after the screening to point out the ghost sign still visible above the entrance to Hawkes and Curtis menswear shop.

Emmy Bridgwater Night work is about to commence

Emmy Bridgwater Night Work is About to Commence (1943)

I move on to the Birmingham City Gallery and Museum to find the surrealists there. The entrance is dominated by Jacob Epstein’s bronze statue of Lucifer (1944-45). After touring the galleries I find a painting by Emmy Bridgwater  Night Work is about to commence (1940-43). Bridgwater, born in Edgebaston in 1906,  was a key member of the Birmingham Surrealists along with Conroy Maddox and John Melville. It’s Melville’s Aston Villa that I spot next, painted in the year Villa won the cup, 1956.

The Victoria Birmingham

Time is moving on as it has a habit of doing when you have somewhere to be and I advance to the venue of the screening, a beautiful art deco boozer behind the Alexandra Theatre. The screening is packed and the film seems to go down well in its first outing beyond London. But once again I depart Birmingham vowing to return for more thorough exploration.