The first radio show

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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).

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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

Ventures & Adventures field recordings

We’re starting to think about another series of Ventures and Adventures in Topography on Resonance fm so I’ve been sorting through some of the field recordings from walks from the first two series.
The first recording here is a reading from the introduction to The Fringe of London – this is the credo that inspired our walks. 
The complete podcasts can be downloaded here

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Afoot Round London

“Exploration, I hope no-one has said this before, begins at home. Now that the North Pole has been reached and Cook’s tourists penetrate to Patagonia there is very little undiscovered country left outside England for the roving adventurous individual to explore. But in England and especially within an hours ride from London there are vast tracts of terra incognita still left. It would take a long investigation to determine why in the last 40 years these formerly traveled districts have ceased to attract the foot of the wayfarer and explorer”.

Pathfinder – Afoot Round London, 1911

Posted via email from fugueur’s posterous

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Merlin’s Cave, Penton Mound

I recently remembered that we didn’t play the whole of this field recording from the walk Nick and I did around the Wells, Springs and Pleasure Gardens of Islington and Pentonvile – so here it is. One of my favourite walks this one – on a cold January Sunday night starting as we pass Merlin’s Cave on Penton Mound.
You can read more about the walk and the pleasure gardens here on the Ventures and Adventures blog.

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An winter stroll along the arbours of the Pleasure Gardens of Finsbury and Pentonville

Since I started this blog over 6 years ago there has been a preoccupation with the sites of the pleasure gardens, wells and springs of Islington – spread out along the slopes of what E.O. Gordon calls, The Penton Mound.
So it gave me great pleasure to return to this, admittedly half-researched, area for an episode of Ventures and Adventures in Topography.
Here is the resulting radio show and also link to previous posts on the blog about the pleasure gardens of Islington.

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