A Veritable Bewilderment of Delights
I’ve always quite liked the style of old handbills: the erratic punctuation, jumbled type sizes and overuse of exclamation marks especially. If I produced a handbill for this blog, it would look something like this…
Dream dapples, Pied-beams and Tantalights
As the beam touches you, it has a near instant effect, quickly drawing your thoughts out through the window and filling you with a desire to be out there, on the other side of the glass, walking in the sunlight, exploring the city streets, or escaping over the horizon, (I like to think of this particular effect as a positive variety of Corpse-light or Willow-the-wisp, but without the danger of being drawn into some terrible dark and boggy end).
We are the Lambeth trees: Open Orchard
Nationally, many, if not quite all, orchards have vanished; having been abandoned or grubbed up because there’s no longer any money in them.
Yet, in Lambeth one inspired and dedicated group of people have set out to plant a series of new orchards, filling South London with saplings of hope.
Vanishing sky
I had a Charlie Brown moment this morning.
Up early, I glanced out of the window and was struck dumb by the sky.
Digital Photography and the flattening of landscape
Photographers have been taking pictures of places for as long, if not longer than they’ve been capturing faces.
In the digital age, what happens when the camera’s gaze is turned upon a landscape? An innocent snapshot or, as some have suggested ‘the death of the imagination’?
Blackfriars Beach
mid-stream on a shit-spattered barge,
cormorants unfold themselves as crosses,
anchored to a Thames, expectant
A half-hidden route to the past: Bristol’s Johnny Ball Lane
For a long time it didn’t have a name. It was just the lane that ran along the back of Mum and Dad’s bookshop…Sometimes I’d dare a peek over the top of the wall, but all that could easily be seen was an area thick with buddleia and other wild flowerings.
My imagination was quick to populate the space further with various other unnamed horrors and I’d quickly scramble back down to the ground and in through the door before sliding the bolts back across in delicious relief.
A glimmer of hope on a street corner: Tritton Vale Pocket Garden
How a once-derelict patch of ground, is helping to galvanise a community in one corner of South London.
A dark square with potential: Brooke’s Market, EC1
To the left of the hostel, and contrasting with its lime-white walls, the soot darkened, red and yellow bricks of St Alban the Martyr, stretch up and up – in one direction forming the church’s hulking tower, in another eventually tapering into a gabled roof with turrets, topped with a crucifix – and just a little lower down, mammon’s TV aerial.
St Alban’s grand scale crammed into a tight spot, give this half-hidden Neo Gothic edifice an uncomfortably, squeezed appearance; like a fat parochial priest squashed into the corner of a Southern Train vestibule.
Saving Pages: A selection of vintage bookmarks
As a child of second-hand booksellers I had ready access to books and their offshoot – bookmarks. I recently rediscovered a box filled with some that once upon a time I had hoarded.
A futile list of sounds (with an explanation of sorts)
It doesn’t take much to make a familiar place unfamiliar. A change in the weather – rain, bright sunshine, or more dramatically, snowfall or fog can all do it. Smells too – who hasn’t found themselves aware of sniffing more consciously than normal when drains are blocked, or there’s a whiff of barbecue, bonfire or worse in the air?
And then of course there are a place’s distinctive sounds.
Balham enters the Anthropocene
At the inaugural Balham Literary Festival, a gathering of Nature Writers, Landscape Writers and Writer writers came together to discuss the state of the natural world. Here’s my report on what I saw and heard.
A child’s map of Crystal Palace Park, or panic fear in the unwild.
Is it acceptable to call replica Sphinxes ‘The Guys?’ Who is The Headless Lady with no arms (who has arms)? What terrors await when you stop paying attention in the maze?
All back to Asselega’s place
Is it possible to be haunted by a place? I think that I may be. In this case it is Ashley Vale in Bristol – an exceptional urban oasis caught between the tracks, containing allotments, woods, hilltops and a pub next door to a farm.
Along a side street Somewhere: In search of an anonymous suburb
I recently went in search for an ‘anonymous suburb’.
This is what I discovered.
No one should mourn a coffee shop
Today a coffee shop near where I work in Clerkenwell disappeared…
A time for shelf analysis: New Year reading resolutions
It’s dark. It’s raining. January is upon us and the season of reflection, projection and resolve is underway. For voracious readers, this means that the perennial question: what to read next will be nagging at their shoulders more urgently than ever.
The Impossibility of Worthington lakes
Let’s say I was there.
For work.
In a hotel near three reservoirs for Wigan.
Let’s say I slipped out back on an unexpected walk,
on a circular path…
Under Norwood: West Norwood Cemetery’s catacombs
Norwood is yawning but awake: shopping, grabbing coffee, heading for breakfast, haircuts, workouts, dates. Watching Saturday unfold beyond the cemetery gates, it’s a little difficult to picture a time when almost none of this was there.
In 1837 London was growing rapidly and expanding at the edges. The city had an urgent need for space and not just for its living. Traditional city centre churchyards and dissenters’ burial grounds were full to bursting – the metropolitan dead also needed somewhere to go.