Reframing Maidstone

I’ve just started working on a new project with Cathy, my sister, down in Maidstone. Reframing Maidstone (Video Mapping) is a event that is part of Architecture Week 2007. We’ve been commissioned to produce a project that highlights hidden aspects of the town. The project will use film and video images to instigate an exploration of the town centre – a kind of cinematic psychogeography, a kino-derive.
It’s very interesting what is happening in Maidstone. Louise Francis and Laura Knight (Art at the Centre Project Officers) are researching the feasibility of establishing an ‘Artists Quarter’ within the Maidstone town centre by: identifying potential artist studio space; raising the profile of the area through temporary art installations, street entertainment and a creative marketing campaign. It’s a really bold and ambitious plan in town that isn’t really looking for arts-led regeneration (in the way that Folkstone is) but seems to be doing it for arts’ sake and the potential benefits for the feel of the place, the genus loci.
We’ll be instigating a number of derives with local people and will mixing up the methods: algorithmic, constrained walks, “sauntering as Charles II, Richard Jefferies, W.H. Hudson, and Edward Thomas sauntered” etc. Then the central event will take place on 16th and 23rd June.
email reframingmaidstone@googlemail.com for updates and information.
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Beyond Stonebridge Park pts. 2 & 3

The final two installments of ‘Beyond Stonebridge Park’ have been uploaded to Google Video and YouTube

This is the film that Iain Sinclair described as “grunge Keiller” and has been screened here and there apparently. Catch Deep Topographer extraordinaire Nick Papadimitriou riifing brilliantly on the Phenomenology of the Stockbroker Belt, the pig-iron universe of WWI, the progression from Dan Dare to Pornography via a skip in Cricklewood Lane and loads more.

‘Journeys Beyond the Western Sector’ is now available from Crockatt & Powell’s Booksellers on Lower Marsh SE1, behind Waterloo Station. They have an interest in matters psychogeographical and sell an array of books and pamphlets such as the intriguing ‘One Eye Grey’. Nice fellas too. My old mate Ivor Dembina even did a stand-up set there the other night (Ivor was the saint who made sure that my first ever stand-up comedy gig was Saturday night at The Hampstead Comedy Club on the same bill as Time Vine – it was downhill from there featuring painful stop-offs at places such as the Feral Comedy Night at the Bridge Hotel, Sydney).

Solitary, slow and wayward – SPB Mais on how to see England (proto-Situationist manifesto pt.2)

You can no more see England from a main arterial road than you can see her from the air. What you can see from the newly constructed roads is a garish rash of scarlet, the unhealed wound of a land laid waste.

Hikers travel on foot, but they see nothing of England, for two reasons. They travel too fast, and they walk, as starlings fly, in multitudes.

It is not enough to travel on foot. You must learn to saunter as Charles II, Richard Jefferies, W.H. Hudson, and Edward Thomas sauntered, and you must learn to saunter alone.

You travel alone, not because you are unsociable, but because you are sociable. In a crowd you just nod in passing to the shepherd or road-mender. When you are alone you make friends with every passer-by. All England talks to you.

You travel alone, secondly, to meet yourself. All the rest of the year you are part of the machine. You work with the herd, take your pleasures with the herd. But alone in the quietude of the country you find yourself. You are at last finding out your own tastes, testing your own unforced reactions.

So make up your mind to be bound by no programme, to travel with complete irresponsibility, to start nowhere in particular, and the odds are that you will catch a glimpse of England that is vouchsafed only to the privileged few.

What you are looking for is as elusive as the faery music of the piper at the gates of dawn. What you see may be incommunicable to others, but it will provide you with a vision that may well alter the whole of your outlook on life.

Solitary, slow, and wayward are the keywords.

In England you cannot go wrong so long as you keep to the unknown.

You and I are likely to go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green, but our ancestors lie buried in the long barrows that strew the banks of Minchinhampton. Where they are traces of earliest man there is beauty.

So if you would find loveliness, tread the ancient tracks that top the Wiltshire downlands. The smooth green undulations will soothe your harassed mind as nothing else can.

It is impossible in the hurly-burly of the market-place to acquire or to keep any values at all. Only when we are striding the high hills alone can we take stock of ourselves, our desires, and our relation to this world and the next.

Abridged from ‘England’s Character’, SPB Mais 1936, pgs. 14-22.
You can read Pt. 1 of SPB Mais’ Proto Situationist Manifesto, Advice for Derivers (circa 1930), here

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The mystery of the missing chapters of The London Compendium

Bumped into author Ed Glinert at work the other day. I immediately congratulated him on his excellent book, The London Compendium, and told how it was invaluable to have in the bag on a London perambulation. But, I said, why the omission of the outer suburbs? Where’s the Lea Valley, Stonebridge Park, Crystal Palace, Haringey, Wanstead, Twickenham? They wouldn’t let me put them in he said, the publishers didn’t want them, I’ve got a whole book of stuff on those areas waiting to be published, he told me wearing a forlorn expression, his body language re-living the tussles with his editor at Penguin.

Even taking into account the large swathes of London left out of The London Compendium, it’s still far and away the best of the current crop of more literary London guidebooks.
But this blindness to the glories of the London suburbs wasn’t always the trend. Harold P. Clunn’s classic, The Face of London (1970), not only covers the more obvious central districts in fine detail and almost obsessive historical background, but also fits in the likes of Shadwell, Poplar, Canning Town, West Ham, Woolwich, Muswell Hill, Hornsey, Kilburn, Willesden, Cricklewood, and Hendon. The Ward Lock Red Guide (49th edition circa 1950’s) implores you to explore Barnet, Epping Forest, Kew, and Eltham.

Hopefully Glinert’s publishers, Penguin, will feel the spirit of the great London adventurers and have the good sense to publish those rejected chapters.

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Waves of Disappearance: cinematic topographies of the North Eastern frontier

I’ve written an article on the topographical films of Leytonstone (and the Lower Lea Valley) for UEL’s ‘Rising East’ journal of East London Studies, which you can read here.

In the course of the research I came across a couple of other filmic E11 references: a Bollywood film called ‘I….Proud to be an Indian’ (2004) set in a late-seventies Leytonstone terrorised by Nazi skinheads. And a 1963 film directed by Joan Littlewood, ‘Sparrows Can’t Sing’. There was also a sitcom in 1999 ‘Small Potatoes’ starring Tommy Tiernan, “Ed Hewitt runs the shambolic Screen Dreams video shop in Leytonstone, east London. He has a media-studies degree but is underachieving, consoling himself with the thought that video rental is part of the media business. His working day is enlivened (and/or complicated) by visits from three friends – sex-obsessed Rick, who works in his family’s chemists shop; aspiring photographer Juliet; and the vague Benett, currently working as shoe-hire boy at a bowling-alley.” Apparently it was another failed stab at producing a British ‘Seinfeld’ (a colleague, who also lives in Leytonstone, tells me that it was actually quite good).

I’ll be developing another project with Cathy, in Maidstone, for Architecture week in July. We’ll be posting stuff here as we go along. There’s already a link to the Wycombe work in the figure of Benjamin Disraeli, who failed to get elected as MP for Wycombe 3 times before taking the Maidstone seat.

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SPB Mais haunted by the Harrow Gasometers (in 1937)

This blog’s been quiet for a while, sorry, but I have been awoken from my slumber by the excellent Mr Tregaskis. So for you my friend, this, from SPB Mais (one of the arch proto-psychogeographers / crypto-topographers) on his topographical adventure through Harrow (1937):
“I descended from this dignified, unspoilt village past Matthew Arnold’s lovely home, Byron House, into the Weald with reluctance, for I kept on running up against that nightmare of a gasometer. In the end I took a bus and drove through all the other Harrows. To my great surprise as I wandered down Oxhey Lane…I found a gloriou common of bracken and silver-birches on both sides of the road. I was on the ridge of the hill with glorious views southward over all the Harrows. At least, the view would have been glorious had it not been for my discovery that the monstrous Harrow gasometer had suddenly spawned. I had been sufficiently harassed by the sight of one. But now there were two.”
The inability to appreciate the beauty of a gasometer nestling in the landscape does make me wonder whether, rather than being a prophet, Mais was actually a bit of a phillistine. When they recently pulled down the Edwardian gasometers in High Wycombe the old people lamented their passing. The rusting gasometers on Leyton Marshes are a key feature of the areas topography(like the pylons). They are merely the modern (or not so modern) descendants of the windmills that I read in Understone today sat down on the corner of Francis Road and Newport Road. I wonder whether Daniel Defoe complained bitterly about the cursed windmills that blighted his view.

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Maptalks and Iain Sinclair Talks in the City of Disappearances


I’ve just come across this new monthly night of discussions called Maptalks taking place on my old patch at the Betsy Trotwood. They’ve managed to rope in Geoff Dyer for a discussion about Festival Culture on 11th october. Most relevant to this blog though is the Disappearing London theme sometime in November (“London: a constantly changing city where the past sits side by side with the contemporary. Londoners have a need to document the derelict, the curious and the pie and mash shops that make up our cityscape.”)

Which leads nicely on to the Iain Sinclair edited ‘London, City of Disappearances’ published on October 25, featuring a wonderful piece by the quasi-mythical Nick Papadimitriou (last seen disappearing into a water conduit somewhere beyond Stonebridge Park). I think Sinclair’s also found room for Will Self, JG Ballard, Michael Moorcock, probably Stewart Home, and all the usual suspects. There are going to be loads of events around the launch:

THURSDAY OCTOBER 19 SUTTON HOUSE. HackneyIain Sinclair: Talk on ‘London: City of Disappearances’ 7.30pm

WEDNESDAY 25 OCTOBER’ TIME OUT’ issue focussing on ‘London: City of Disappearances’

THURSDAY 26 OCTOBER LONDON REVIEW BOOKSHOP 14 Bury Place, LondonWC1A 2JLIain Sinclair: Reading

TUESDAY 31 OCTOBER BISHOPSGATE FOUNDATION& INSTITUTE 230 Bishopsgate, London6.30 – 8.30 pm.Launch.Chair: Gareth Evans Open evening: with brief presentations from: Rachel Lichtenstein. Patrick Wright. Sukdev Sandhu. Iain Sinclair

THURSDAY 2 NOVEMBER Iain Sinclair: reading at THE SPITZ. Spitalfields market

FRIDAY 3 NOVEMBER TATE BRITAIN Late at Tate 6.30 – 8.00 pmProposed discussion. Iain Sinclair. Alan Moore. Miranda Sawyer. Will Self.Rachel Lichtenstein. Sukdev Sandhu. chaired by Tim Marlow projection work by Susanna Edwards

WEDNESDAY 8 NOVEMBER GREAT NORTHERN HOTEL, PETERBOROUGH. at 7.30 pm. £7.Iain Sinclair: reading ‘ Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare’s “Journey out of Essex.”(info .01778 342766)

TUESDAY 14 NOVEMBER MUSEUM of LONDON 6.30pm Susanna Edwards. Iain Sinclair. Art Happens: ‘London vs the Suburbs’

And if you want to buy any books by Iain Sinclair or about a disappeared London, Chris at Dollyhead Books has some real gems.

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