The Un(known) City

“Exploring the unknown city is a political act: a way of bringing to urban dwellers new resources for remapping the city. Nevertheless, the unknown might resist such attempts at disclosure. It could be that what is known about the city has been known all along.”
– Steve Pile, The Un(known) City … or, an Urban Geography of What Lies Buried below the Surface

london

Sunset on the Lea

I took this photo on my phone towards the end of a 7.5 mile walk home from Kentish Town after work. As I crossed the Eastway facing the carnage of the Olympic Park construction site the sun was setting directly down the course of the River Lea.

london

A Cartographic Guide to the World of Half Man Half Biscuit

Found this on the HMHB website – sublime:

“Locations namechecked in the collected works of Half Man Half Biscuit, the greatest group of recent times who are quite rightly (in the words of the late great John Peel) “A British institution”.

Created by Stuart Vallantine and a band of other HMHB fans who are just as anal in picking out place names in the collected works of Messrs Blackwell and Crossley.”

All lyrics Copyright 1985 – 2008 Half Man Half Biscuit.

View Half Map Half Biscuit in a larger map

london

King Mob


Stumbled across this interesting article about King Mob by Hari Kunzru in Tate magazine. Kunzru writes about how King Mob developed “an interest in the disruptive anti-art potential of Dada and Surrealism and a hard-edged politics partly derived from nineteenth-century Russian Nihilism. In texts such as Pisarev’s The Destruction of Aesthetics, they found fundamental questions being asked about value, politics and the (lack of ) social function of art.”
Well worth reading the rest of the article here

Although it’s unclear what became of King Mob there is an audiobook version of Iain Sinclair’s Downriver released by a label using the King Mob moniker.

london