Stroll from Broadcasting House & Cavendish Square to Hyde Park Corner

After appearing on BBC 5Live I took a Sunday stroll through Central London to a WW1 memorial with special family significance. My walk starts at BBC Broadcasting House then passes through Cavendish Square where I explore the history and the architecture of the area. I continue down Wigmore Street past Wigmore Hall and the wonderful art deco splendour of the first Debenham department store at 33 Wigmore Street.

John Rogers at BBC 5Live Broadcasting House

Passing Marylebone Lane we see where the buried River Tyburn passes underground. I then went down St Christopher’s Place and Gee’s Passage and briefly along Oxford Street before turning up James St with a nod to Selfridge’s. Crossing Oxford Street I walk down Duke Street and take a look at the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company buildings around Lumley Street and Balderton Street. These are fine examples of Victorian ‘model dwellings’ built in the 1880s to provide good quality housing for working people. My next stop was the former U.S Embassy building on Grosvenor Square and then turned into Brook Street which took me to Hyde Park.

Machine Gun Corps Memorial Hyde Park Corner

I strolled along the wide paths revelling in the majestic autumn colours of the leaves. The focal point of my walk was the Memorial to the Machine Gun Corps who my grandfather, William Rogers, served with during the first world war. The memorial can be found on Hyde Park Corner near the Wellington Arch.

John Rogers at BBC Radio London at Broadcasting House

I then returned to Broadcasting House to talk about Welcome to New London on BBC Radio London.

Sonic Perambulation: Chrisp Street Market to Stratford

It’s great to be back on the essential Resonance FM. “Sonic Perambulation: Chrisp Street Market to Stratford” – is a collaboration with sound recordist Joel Carr with the intention of capturing the shifting sounds experienced on a walk – along with my spontaneous narration. This walk starts at Chrisp Street Market in Poplar as the market traders packed up for the day. It’s one of London’s older street markets and is currently caught up in a regeneration project. We then walk through the streets to the Limehouse Cut and follow this to Stratford via the Lea Navigation. Recorded in July 2023.

Podcast recording with Joel Carr and John Rogers on the Limehouse Cut - Sonic Perambulation broadcast on Resonance FM 24th November 2023
Podcast recording with Joel Carr and John Rogers in Poplar - Sonic Perambulation broadcast on Resonance FM 24th November 2023
Podcast recording with Joel Carr and John Rogers on the Limehouse Cut - Sonic Perambulation broadcast on Resonance FM 24th November 2023

We hope to record more Sonic Perambulations in 2024.

Talking about Walking & Sebald’s Austerlitz on Resonance FM

It was a great pleasure to go on Bob and Roberta Smith’s Make Your Own Damn Music Show on the brilliant Resonance FM last night where we talked about the recent walk we did following the footsteps of W.G Sebald in his celebrated book Austerlitz.

The Sebald chat starts at about 35 minutes in and includes some contentious opinions on echoes in the book with Patrick Keiller’s early photographic work. The show also features a fascinating interview with Curator and Art Writer William Corwin.

The video of this walk will be on my YouTube channel soon.

I would also love to hear from anyone interested in participating in my Kensal Rise project for Brent 2020 – please email me via the contact form on this blog or leave a comment. Thanks.

The first radio show

john-and-nick-fringe

Home from the school run, put the coffee pot on and press play on the CD player without looking to see what’s loaded. The intro track starts from a CD I burnt of Andrew Bird’s 2005 live session for a French radio station. I’d used this tune as the intro music to the Resonance fm radio show I produced and co-presented with Nick Papadimitriou, Ventures and Adventures in Topography.  I’m instantly transported back to the studio at Resonance fm feeling the excitement of preparing to go live on air. Then I realise that the first broadcast was on 4th November 2009, the anniversary approaching. The first walk to record the field recordings that constituted half the programme would have been around the same time. A damp cold day out looking for Monks Park somewhere near the North Circular in north west London as described in Gordon S. Maxwell’s The Fringe of London, the book that had given us the title of the radio show and had bonded Nick and I in the first place 4 years previously. Our walking buddy Peter Knapp was there taking photos and we ended up on an even greater quest to find IKEA meatballs on the Wembley Trading Estate (the meatballs had all gone by the time we got there).

monks_park31

photo by Peter Knapp

I loved making that radio show. The evenings spent editing the field recordings for Wednesday’s live broadcast, researching the next walk, recording my wife doing a reading from each featured book, Sunday afternoon walking with Nick somewhere on the ‘fringe of London’, and the pub after the show with the Resonance regulars.

John Rogers Nick Papadimitriou

photo by Peter Knapp

The show came to a natural end in March 2011, Nick head down writing Scarp, me deep into making a documentary about Bob and Roberta Smith (it was filming Bob at Resonance in 2009 that had led to the show coming about in the first place).  I then went straight into writing This Other London, and despite a couple of attempts to revive the show it just never happened. We got as far as a field trip to the Cross Ness Sewage Treatment Works in 2014 but those recordings are on a hard-drive somewhere unedited. I must get round to doing that some time.

 

 

A complete archive of Ventures and Adventures in Topography can be found here

Leytonstone on BBC London Robert Elms Show ‘Round Your Manor’

BBC London Robert Elms John Rogers Leytonstone

It was a real pleasure to go on the Robert Elms Show on BBC London yesterday to talk about the wonders of Leytonstone as part of the ‘Round Your Manor’ feature. There was a great response from Leytonstonians online to Robert’s request for information about the area – he was particularly amused to hear that Fanny Craddock had lived in Leytonstone.

You can listen again to the show here on the BBC iPlayer (I come in at about 1hr 38mins)