What’s going on here. Not only are most of my historical comments on this blog inauthentic but somebody else is now writing the blogs themselves. Home use the word ‘horrid’ ? I should coco! Comment by mistertrippy on 2009-04-30 17:45:03 +0000

loved the discussion afterwards and was great to have a drink with everyone afterwards and discuse the film 🙂 Rogers is an excellent storyteller surrounded by excellent stories” Los Angeles Review of Books on This Other London

Exhibition opening event programme

We emerge near the Hanger Lane Gyratory – a churning vortex of motor vehicles spinning out of its gravitational field into orbiting suburbs. Long arms of brightly tiled pedestrian tunnels feed into a large central rotunda gathering the echoes of footsteps and conversations into an aural soup. It feels like a sanctuary from the autogeddon above, a safe haven for the traveler on foot. It’s also nice to be out of the rain – the steady drizzle that has fallen throughout the day has hardened into proper raindrops with added attitude. We shelter in a café in the parade of shops that adorns the gyratory for as long as possible, watching the rainfall intensify and people scampering to the refuge of the subway. Eventually we accept that the downpour is unlikely to ease up and head out in search of Twyford Abbey.

Our topographical patron saint, Gordon S. Maxwell described a day spent here in 1927 in Just Beyond London under the heading of, ‘The Monks of Middlesex – a haunt of Ancient peace at Twyford Abbey, missed by the growth of the mighty city’.Philips appeared shaken by Self’s odd reply to her question, which might explain why having opened the session by talking up her own academic expertise in the areas of psychogeography and urban walking, she closed by asking why these activities appealed only to men. Sinclair soon put her straight by explaining that most of those wanting to do walks with him were women, and of course Philips’ own academic research also served to disprove her final assertion. Afterwards a good number of those present headed up to the Whitechapel bar, where Self’s claim that Papadimitriou was a contemporary Rimbaud came in for some heavy criticism. On the basis of the Rogers’ film, it would appear that Papadimitriou is principally concerned with observation, whereas Rimbaud’s focus was transformation; such differences clearly render Self’s claim untenable. I’m enjoying your series on London churches and the rest but have a minor beef re: your references – in the Church films and elsewhere – to the role of the ‘great and the good’ in building many of these epic buildings. My point, such as it is, was made far more eloquently by Bertolt Brecht in 1935:

Part meditation on nature and walking, part memoir and part social history, his arresting debut is first and foremost a personal inquiry into the spirit of a place: a 14-mile broken ridge of land on the fringes of Northern London known as Scarp. Conspicuous but largely forgotten, a vast yet largely invisible presence hovering just beyond the metropolis, Scarp is a vast storehouse of regional memory. We join the author as he explores and reimagines this brooding, pregnant landscape, meticulously observing his surroundings, finding surprising connections and revealing lost slices of the past. Truth is not like some finished product in which one can no longer find any trace of the tool that made it” (Hegel). Comment by Ricardo Terrori on 2009-05-02 02:17:24 +0000

Hidden Histories

Edgelands presents the work of six visual artists who explore and document the wastelands and the neglected environs to be found on the margins of urban living. Housing estates, out of town retail parks and industrial areas, these spaces are the great ‘unnamed and ignored landscapes…places where our slipstream has created a zone of inattention’ * and yet where all manner of interest and beauty thrive. Walking and writing are as old as the hills, and the writing of walking not much younger. Not only did those feet in ancient time tramp almost all of Britain, but someone was also there to write it down. We haven't stopped. There is barely a scrap of ground that hasn't been walked into words. And now two more journeys hike over hills into this sodden summer, a good year to prefer armchair travel to the real thing perhaps, walking books to boots. Clitterhouse Farm means ‘clay house’ farm. Earliest known origin of this farm dates from c.1321 when it was owned by John de Langton. Up until around the 1770s it was a manor and was owned by St Bartholomew’s Hospital from the 15 th to 20th centuries. ” The survey by Cranfield University mentions that some of the farm buildings still exist in one corner of the playing field.

And Mr Building, I have a copy of “The Falconer” coz I’m in it, although a friend snapped my good video tape copy when they borrowed it, after which I managed to get a DVD copied from a version taped off the telly. But Chris Petit and Emma Matthews promised me a good DVD copy as they were copying some for other people last time I saw them, so I must chase that up….. Comment by Will Self on 2009-04-30 17:04:18 +0000 You have a great affinity with the natural world, from the mating cycles of urban foxes to the ‘lunch meat’ of adders. Have you found yourself in any tight spots when encountering the wildlife around London? TH: This is your first book but it has had a long gestation period, both in terms of the writing time and the vast amount of walking you’ve done along this unusual and captivating landmass. To what extent do you find the two activities, of composing sentences and putting one foot in front of the other, are linked for you? Go out on your own without any maps and without a digital camera. Digital cameras are the death of the imagination. The Clitterhouse Brook gushed from a concrete pipe and flowed beneath the North Circular to make its confluence with the River Brent on the far side of the road near Brent Cross Shopping Centre. It was a majestic sight to see this suburban stream rushing to meet its mother river before working its way to the Thames at Brentford.

TRENDING

Go in any direction that suits you. Go in unfamiliar directions. Go in familiar directions and try and see things in a new way. And just because they’re shakey walkers, doesn’t mean you have to use a shakey camera. This is the mimetic fallacy, the idea that you’ve got to write a mad novel because you set it in a madhouse etc. The sections on his arrest for arson in 1977 strike me as bearing a naughty sense of humour underneath the 'tragic' events and I wondered if the whole thing wasn't a tall story.