Trip to Norwich for the launch of W.G Sebald’s Shadows of Reality

Royal Arcade Norwich

Writing starts with a photograph, W.G Sebald said on a German TV arts magazine programme about the publication of his book The Emigrants. This clip was played under the looming 15th Century timbered roof of the Dragon Hall in Norwich on Wednesday at the launch of Shadows of Reality – A Catalogue of W.G. Sebald’s Photographic Materials
(Eds. Clive Scott & Nick Warr). The event also marked what would have been Sebald’s 80th birthday, in the city where he worked for much of his life and made his home. I decided to make the trip to Norwich to attend the event, meeting a friend there who had been taught German literature by ‘Max’ Sebald at UEA in the 1980’s. My walk from the station to meet Duncan passed through the Art Nouveau Royal Arcade, built in 1899. Such arcades are intimately connected with strolling poets, flâneurs, through an association with Baudelaire and described at length by German philosopher and theorist Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project. Sebald was himself a notable strolling poet and would have passed through the Royal Arcade on many occasions.

Swan Yard Norwich
Swan Yard

Duncan and I looped round the narrow medieval streets of Norwich in the hours before the event at the National Centre for Writing at Dragon Hall. Along with a group of Sebald’s former students, Duncan had reprised the Austerlitz walk from Liverpool Street to Alderney Road in Stepney that I’d filmed with artist Bob and Roberta Smith in 2019 using notes provided by Iain Sinclair, who’d been taken on the walk by poet Stephen Watts. It was Watts who’d led W.G Sebald on those original Austerlitz research walks through the East End. The UEA alumni walk of Max’s former students was carried out on the 18th May 2024, the day that would’ve been Sebald’s 80th birthday. There’s an account of the walk on the University of East Anglia website, where W.G Sebald taught for thirty years.

The Music House, King Street, Norwich
The Music House, King Street, Norwich

With still some time to kill we admired the exterior of the Music House in King Street, the oldest house in Norwich, built in the 12th Century.

Shadows of Reality event
W.G Sebald Shadows of Reality event, Norwich
W.G Sebald Shadows of Reality event, Norwich

As a writer of unclassifiable prose, Sebald drew heavily on photographic images and was notable for embedding them within the text in intriguing ways. The Shadows of Reality book collects Sebald’s photographic materials together into a single catalogue with commentary and presented in chronological order. Friends and former colleagues read from Sebald’s works, often in German – the language Sebald wrote in. The conclusion to the evening was its most impactful. An audio recording of W.G Sebald reading from the Emigrants in English at an event at UEA in the 90s that reverberated around the packed medieval hall. It was a poignant and magical event.

W.G. SEBALD: Shadows of Reality – is published by Boiler House Press

The event took place on 12th June 2024

Visit to the Marx Memorial Library

I was passing the Marx Memorial Library on Clerkenwell Green at lunchtime and realised that I’d never actually been inside. Not even as an eager Politics student in my youth. The papery smell in the reading room instantly transported me back through the years. It was intoxicating for a brief moment.

Reading Room, Marx Memorial Library, Clerkenwell Green
The worker of the future upsetting the economic chaos of the present by Jack Hastings

The Library was established on the 50th anniversary of Marx’s death in 1933, ‘with the aim of advancing education, knowledge and learning in the science of Marxism, the history of socialism and the working class movement’, at a time of book burnings in Nazi Germany. It had previously been the print house for Twentieth Century Press which was linked to William Morris and Eleanor Marx (Karl’s daughter). Morris’ contribution is recounted on information plaques around the walls. The fine 18th century building was constructed in 1737 as the Welsh Charity School.

Lenin Room, Marx Memorial Library, Clerkenwell Green
Lenin Room, Marx Memorial Library, Clerkenwell Green

The Lenin Room commemorates V.I Lenin’s presence working in the building between 1902-03 where he published several issues of the newspaper Iskra, which can still be found on the desk. Although this isn’t the exact room in which he worked. During this period Lenin lived nearby in Percy Circus – a plaque marks the building.

Lenin Room, Marx Memorial Library, Clerkenwell Green

The walls are plastered with various socialist and Soviet posters. The Bakers’ Union were having a meeting, so we unfortunately couldn’t see the hall nor the memorial garden to the British International Brigades who fought in the Spanish Civil War.
The Library holds over 55,000 books, pamphlets and periodicals, including some unique collections.

Picture of Karl Marx at the Marx Memorial Library, Clerkenwell Green

Related post – Clerkenwell Tales

Sniggs Alley & the Oldest Pub in England

“Every town on the multiverse has a part that is something like Ankh-Morpork’s Shades. It’s usually the oldest part, its lanes faithfully following the original tracks of medieval cows going down to the river, and they have names like Shambles, the Rookery, Sniggs Alley …”
Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

A walk to find a location from best-selling author Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series of books nestled in the Chilterns countryside close to where Pratchett grew up – and also my childhood home. Sniggs Alley is a place in Ankh-Morpork on the Discworld. It’s also an ancient footpath that runs from Loudwater to the village of Penn in Buckinghamshire. Our quest to find Sniggs Alley starts in High Wycombe and we walk along the A40 London Road to Loudwater before walking into the Chiltern Hills. We then turn towards Forty Green, near Beaconsfield, where Terry Pratchett grew up. At Lude Farm we pass the field where a B17 bomber crashed on 12 August 1944.

Sniggs Alley, Loudwater Buckinghamshire
Royal Standard of England, Forty Green

At Forty Green we stop for a pint on the Royal Standard of England, which is the oldest free house in England and has existed for over 900 years. The final part of the walk takes to Beaconsfield Library where Terry Pratchett spent much time reading and studying.

Pub Chat from the George, Wanstead

London Pub Chat – Old Traditions, Best Walks, Tube Problems etc.

Sunday chat over a pint in the historic George pub in Wanstead, East London. There’s been a pub on this site since at least 1716 (see the shot of a historic sign on the side of the pub) and it’s reported that Wetherspoons have put the lease up for sale. Read more here
While drinking a pint of Adnams Ghost Ship I answer some of your questions and generally chat about London. Some of the topics covered include:

  • Old London Traditions such as the Knollys Rose Ceremony
  • encounter with the magical walking elf
  • the proliferation of St Mary’s Churches along the Thames from Battersea to Rotherhithe
  • Soho in the 1950s and Iain Sinclair’s Pariah Genius
  • visits to North America and the Continent
  • Favourite tube stations
  • Problems on the Central Line
  • Hugenots in London
  • Roman London around Westminster
  • Best gig memory
  • What does it take to be a good Londoner

National Park City – Walking Week Talk

John Rogers illustration by Liam O'Farrell
Painting by Liam O’Farrell https://www.liamofarrell.com/2024/05/john-rogers-talk/

Back in early May I had the pleasure of giving a talk about my new book, Welcome to New London – journeys and encounters in the post-Olympic city for London National Park City as part of Walking Week. The venue was a disused chain coffee shop on Fleet Street, just yards away from where the River Fleet flows beneath Farringdon Road. It was a great evening.

The wonderful artist Liam O’Farrell attended and created the fantastic painting you see above (ok, I’m biased) and wrote a blog post about the event and the book. I’m enormously grateful to Liam for both. You can read Liam’s post here and visit his online gallery of London artworks here.

National Park City event Fleet Street
National Park City event Fleet Street

Screening: London Recorder: William English / Emily Richardson / John Rogers / Andrew Vallance

Hackney Wick sign

Delighted to be screening an extract from my 2021 Hackney Wick video at this great programme at the brilliant Close-Up cinema, curated by Contact.

Programme details from the Close-Up website below:
Films that cover several regions of London, including the outer edges of Hackney, the centre of the city and Brixton. 

Hackney Wick: The Changing Face of London
John Rogers, 2021, 12 min (extract)
Hackney Wick: The Changing Face of London represents one of John Rogers’ ‘London walks’, which he publishes on his YouTube channel. It looks at the changes in Hackney Wick since the video he last made there in October 2016. The tour of Hackney Wick starts at the edge of the Olympic Park, on the site of the former Hackney Stadium, and explores the legacy of the area.

Memo Mori
Emily Richardson, 2009, 23 min
A journey through Hackney tracing loss and disappearance assembled from fragments of footage shot over three years (2006–2009). Each section of the film observes something that has been, or is about to be, erased from the landscape. A seismic shift in the topography of East London takes in a canoe trip along canals, allotments in Hackney Wick, a magical bus tour through the Olympic Park and a Hell’s Angel funeral. Richardson’s observational images are woven together with Iain Sinclair’s response to her images and excerpts from his book Hackney, That Red Rose Empire.

Yesterday the Revolution Began
Andrew Vallance, 2024, 1 min
Planned and casual, personal and collective, moments mark time’s flow. For most people in London, the 13th of December 1995 started out like any other day of the week. Yesterday the Revolution Began recalls several instances from the date that marked the start of one of the Brixton riots.

City
William English, 2018, 19 min
City is principally filmed from a 14th floor flat, in bursts of single film frames. Looking down on busy crane operators, roadworks, underground excavations and tree-surgeons, the footage spans markedly different seasons, and was shot across a period of nearly twenty years (between 1986 and 2015). The second half of the film shifts to abstracted footage in negative and includes darting arcs of light that make for a purely optical ‘city film’.

Night-line
Andrew Vallance, 2024, 9 min
After dark, London takes on a different form, when work, leisure and other activities diverge from daylight expectations. Here, new sensibilities emerge and time and space, sight and sound, are recalibrated. Night-line pursues the nocturnal city, from dusk to the early morning, locating a place that envelops and haunts you.

William English, Emily Richardson and Andrew Vallance will be in conversation after the screening.
Programmed by Contact: www.contactscreenings.co.uk

Walking the Mardyke Way from Purfleet to Bulphan

A couple of weeks ago I returned to the border of Greater London to walk the Mardyke Way. This ancient river has followed the same course for over 30 million years. Today it carves a path through the Essex countryside on the edge of London. The route I took from Purfleet was around 11-miles followed by around another 3 miles to West Horndon Station. This is great walk through fields, meadows and fens.

Aveley - Mardyke Way

I started at Purfleet to capture the point of the Mardyke’s confluence with the Thames. It has an impressive wide mouth, partly marked by the huge brick 18th Century gunpowder magazine. From here there’s a path beside the river for a relatively short distance before I needed to embark on a wide detour along Tank Hill Road to the village of Aveley. The Old Ship Inn marked the start of Ship Lane with its impressive St. Michael’s Church, the oldest parts of which date from the 12th century.

St. Michael's Church Aveley
St. Michael’s Church Aveley
Mardyke Way sign at Aveley

A mile or so along Ship Lane from Aveley you can find the start of the Mardyke Valley path to Stifford. From here the route closely follows the course of the river passing through fields and fringing woodland.

Mardyke Way

It appeared that the walk had two sections – from Aveley to Davy Down then Stifford Bridge to Bulphan but there’s a walkable path the entire way with only short overgrown areas. There were vast expanses of farmland to the East of the river leading up to Orsett Fen and then beyond into Bulphan and far fewer walkers and cyclists in these upper reaches. It was blazing hot, my neck and calves toasted in the sun.

Harrow Bridge Bulphan - Mardyke Way
Harrow Bridge Bulphan

Harrow Bridge at Bulphan marks one end of the Mardyke Way but it did appear possible to follow the river little further north along the roadside. The promised footpath across fields to West Horndon Station didn’t manifest in reality on the ground despite signs at either end (or at least I could’t find it), meaning I had a precarious at times 2.5-mile walk along Dunnings Lane. An incredible walk that has added to my understanding of the landscape around the fringe of London.