Event at Bookseller Crow with Travis Elborough 28th March 2024

Bookseller Crow event John Rogers and Travis Elborough

Chuffed to bits to be doing an event at Bookseller Crow bookshop in Crystal Palace on 28th March with the brilliant Travis Elborough.
Get your tickets here: https://booksellercrow.co.uk/event/26190/?instance_id=338

Welcome to New London is not just a book about a city; it’s a vivid, personal account of a city in flux, where the author’s passion for exploration and his commitment to bearing witness to change converge.

Our host for the evening, Travis Elborough, is described by The Guardian as ‘one of the country’s finest pop culture historians’. Travis has been a freelance writer, author, broadcaster and cultural commentator for over two decades now and his well-loved books include Wish You Were Here: England on Sea, The Long-Player Goodbye, a hymn to vinyl records that inspired the BBC4 documentary When Albums Ruled the World, Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles and Atlas of Vanishing Places, winner of Edward Stanford Travel Book Award in 2020. He is a regular host and cherished author at our Crow events. Tickets £5 (include a drink) https://booksellercrow.co.uk/shop/john-rogers-with-travis-elborough-event/

Exploring Jane Austen’s Worthing with Travis Elborough

Blustery old Worthing. A town overly associated with pensioners escaping risqué Brighton with its lurid temptations. Worthing is decent. But I doubt it had that reputation when Jane Austen stayed there for a few months at the back end of 1805 and used it as the setting for her unfinished novel, Sanditon. Author Travis Elborough covers Austen’s sojourn on the West Sussex coast in one of the chapters of his latest book, The Writer’s Journey. I accompanied Travis on a fantastic stroll around his hometown a couple of weeks ago to shoot a video for my YouTube channel. We looked at The Connaught Theatre, Stanford Cottage (where Jane Austen stayed in 1805), The Dome Cinema as featured in the 1987 film Wish You Were Here starring Emily Lloyd and Tom Bell, Harold Pinter’s place by the sea, The Royal Arcade, Shelley House, Worthing Pier and many more locations. It was a great day. The fish and chips were huge and the batter crispy. The wind nearly blew my beard off.

Travis Elborough at the Dome Cinema, Worthing November 2022 - photo by John Rogers
Travis Elborough at the Dome Cinema, Worthing

Find more books by Travis Elborough here

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A Walk in Victoria Park with Travis Elborough

It was the hottest day of the year (so far) when I joined author Travis Elborough for a stroll around the eastern half of Victoria Park in Hackney to talk about his book A Walk in the Park. The heat caused dogs to wallow in the Burdett-Coutts drinking fountain like furry urban hippos.

Travis is a wealth of information and the walk drew not just on the fascinating history of Victoria Park – London’s first purpose-built public park – but on the broader history of what Travis refers to as a “people’s institution”.

a walk in the park elborough

We visited the monkey puzzle tree which links back to Victorian plant hunting expeditions to South America, and the corner of the park once known as Botany Bay – apparently as it was the hideout of criminals. We dropped for a chat at the Bowling Club and baked in the English Garden and had to resist the temptation to jump into the Model Boating Lake.

Listening to Travis explain how modern parks had evolved from the fenced hunting enclosures of Norman barons to the public spaces of today – now under threat from government cuts – it seemed apt that our chat took place in the shadow of the large green fenced area of the park reserved for a series of musical festivals.

I can’t recommend this book strongly enough – a fascinating stroll through the cultural history of these beloved open spaces that we all too often take for granted.