Paths Made By Walking
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Media Flâneurie
When the pandemic began, I tried to see the lockdown as an opportunity to really get to know my physical surroundings. On my daily walks, I tried to familiarise myself with the details I normally missed: a crooked lamppost, a paw print stamped into once wet concrete, a graffitied street sign with an ‘e’ crossed…
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Beyond Walking Alone
When I first heard this issue’s title, ‘Paths made by Walking’, two pieces of western contemporary art from the 1960s came to mind. The first, Richard Long’s A Path Made by Walking (1967) and the second, Yoko Ono’s Walking Piece (1964). As the titles suggest, these artworks focus on the act of walking in nature.…
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Fifty Meters Above
Being fifty metres above Central London proved to be a cathartic retreat from the sound of enervated car engines and the stifle of the congested tube. Fifty metres above Central London, the city was a human body and I was but an insignificant, microscopic cell living in it. I have been irrationally grappling with billions…
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Bata-Ville: 87 Years Later
Surrounded by the Thames and a southern Essex landscape, the remains of what once was a perfect Utopia still reside in East Tilbury. Summer 1933, thousands of families would move to this brand new town miles away from London. Polish, Czechoslovak, Irish and Maltese would promptly join the colony, along with Brits who would move from across the country to…
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Lunar Footprints
A rumbling explosion of engines roar to life, billowing smoke rolls across the desert. The fragmented spike of Icarus 13 rises slowly from its base in Angola and begins its long journey on an expedition to gather information from the surface of the sun. This is the conceptual reality photographer Kiluanji Kia Henda wove around…
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The Drunk Walk Home
“What is wrong in my life, that I must get drunk every night?” Fine Young Cannibals – Johnny Come Home When I was 15, I went to a house party for the first time. I quickly finished the 2 bottles of beer my parents had given me and swiftly moved onto sharing the vodka my…
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The Amber in the Grey
I will begin with a few ideas about the city from theory and social science literature. It is not my attempt here to delineate quantifiably a list of trends and traits of city dwellers in Autumn, but rather to persuade that there is a disillusionment at stake. The Traffic in Women is a piece by…
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Lesser Northern Cave System
The Lesser Northern Cave System, often overlooked for its sister cave (Greater Northern Cave System) presents the academic community with a resource previously unknown. Ecosystems within caves have been little explored or recorded, especially seemingly small and unimportant ones, which also do not attract the attention of amateur potholers. The Lesser Northern Cave System (which…
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From Grass To Concrete
It’s an hour and fifteen to New Cross. I go from winding single-lane roads cutting through fields to the towering corporate buildings of London Bridge. Each day I wake up to silence and light through the trees, and end up on concrete pavements with the rattle of trains and constant sirens. As I commute from…
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Mutate to Survive
When I sat down with my flatmates to watch the BBC documentary ‘I Am Mutoid’, there was instantly an understanding in the room that we were watching something vital. That we must watch closely and try to learn a thing or two. I have since thought about why, and concluded that in that room, and…
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Interview: Noga Levy-Rapoport
On the 6th of November, named the ‘Global Day of Action for the Climate”, up to 100,000 people marched through Glasgow – this year’s location for the UN’s climate change conference ‘COP26’. On the same day, marches were staged across the world to demand climate justice at a crucial moment in time. I was in…
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Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now
“But the most pleasant of all outward pastimes is … to make a petty progress, a merry journey now and then with some good companions, to visit friends, see cities, castles, towns” The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton, 1621 What I have been in the pursuit of the most during 2020 was definitely the sensation…
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Am I at the Mercy of the Pathmaker
Feet tread carefully on a path that has been Planned and paved for three hundred years. Etched into the stones of their lives and mine, Only the weight of water could save some, So, what will do I have stop it now? There is no wave to wash away a journey from which we’ve never…
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A Stumble Through the History of New Cross and its Favourite Boozers
Nobody needs to read an article about the cultural significance of public houses in British culture as every high street in every town, village and city in Britain on a Friday night will do the talking for you, as will most Stella fuelled people on them. Yet despite the hours we spend in them and…
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Around Twenty Miles Over Two Days
A photo series documenting a way across Icknield way, one of the oldest paths in Britain