Tag Archives: London

City, Geography, Social

Immersion

Leave a comment

Re-visiting a BBC Radio 4 – Start the Week podcast from late last year (28 October 2013) in the context of a story that is in a continual state of creation I was returned once more to the subject of the city, and how the individual interacts with the city.

Three main topics came up that are all inter-related and weave in and out of each other:

  • Seeing the city – Seeing the city when you visit, and when you live in it. You see the city at different levels, you see different layers: different distances, perhaps, as visitors often see the up-close, the grime, the quotidien, whereas locals overlook these, at a different height, blending out the noise (different signal-to-noise ratio).
  • Re-using old buildings, re-purposing: building life, or perception of people living in them? – Are old buildings worth saving? What constitutes the criteria for preserving something? Is it a feeling of an era, something representative, something that fits into a temporal environment? And so when moving out of this frame/window, what happens to the building? Does it become a museum, attracting visitors, or can the building be used again to attract people who will live in it (again, the immersion question)? And how is the feeling of the building perceived, depending on which it will be?
  • Patrimonie, not heritage nor nostalgia – A call to define something that is not heritage (i.e., needs to be preserved as is) or nostalgia (i.e., go back to how they were), but rather that the old becomes incorporated into a library of “things” which the people living through an era, and those coming directly afterwards (since the effect wears off over time), share and can at any time dig into to root themselves, ground themselves, and find a framework.

Overall, the sense is one of what happens when one immerses oneself consciously in a city, beginning to see things that one might not have seen before. Light, layers, a built-up history of settings, buildings, an urban environment in which one is both forever a (transient) visitor as well as a permanent resident, leaving behind a scent, a trail, a kernel of existence.

 

City, Geography

“Farewell” to London (for now)

Leave a comment

So this was my personal “farewell” to London. I’ve had ample time to reflect on this topic, as the streams of geography and psychogeography wash over me and I prepare to go to Merrimoles for what will probably be a last visit.

London, of course, isn’t going anywhere: but I am certainly not expecting to be here again anywhere near as often as is currently the case.

It is not going to be possible to see everything, say a personal goodbye to all the different corners and roundabouts that have marked the paths trodden during 18 years in and around London, but I will try to visit the nodes, those points where the energy and the intersection of energy lines flows strongest.

For my interest in cities and urban life London has always served as the epitome, the example I hold up against the light whenever I am contrasting any other town or city in its light (for better or for worse). It has shaped my feeling things as diverse as weather and culture: the ever-changing seasons, spring and autumn in London, music (Royal Festival Hall), art (Tate Modern), the breeze driving in from the sea (the Thames). In all these things and many more, London as a geographical entity was intimately involved: perhaps because of the people it draws in, its multicultural nature, its location and island home, or simply because all the things that interconnect within me are also somehow interconnected within this urban conglomeration of Londinium.

London is, moreover, a powerful magnet: for most of my 18 years in the UK I did not live in London, but at what might be called London’s periphery, assuming that the focus is all. The focus, of course, in many ways was the family home: and a big part of my farewell will necessarily revolve around the center as seen from the perspective of Gerrards Cross and the years spent there. Walks in Cliveden and Kew, sports both in GX and in the satellite competitor towns spread around South Bucks, visits to friends’ houses in Amersham, Beaconsfield, High Wycombe, Missenden, and frequent mixed-bag days in Eton and Windsor.

Because although London beckons, it is these outlying fields that I should spend contemplating, since they are the least likely places to see me again soon. London will remain London, much as a broom remains a broom, no matter how many times the handle and the head are exchanged. The river will still be there, as will the Tower and the Houses of Parliament, and visits to Great Britain will inevitably focus on the great city itself, rather than the Home Counties.

So these should be enjoyed and stored in the memories of departure: the difference between city and country is never much larger than traversing these 30 miles across the M25, and both have shaped me and my being in the most formative years of my life.

City, Geography, Social

City states

1 Comment
Having lived in and around London for many years, and now finding myself in a place with an odd mix of urban and provincial character, a number of questions have arisen as I read more on pyschogeography, geography, behaviour, and city/country social aspects in general:
  1. Can one comment on cities and the city environment if one doesn’t live in a city?
  2. How is the city perceived by someone living outside the city? (suburbs, short train ride, long train ride away? increasing distance from the center of gravity?)
  3. How is the country perceived by someone living in the city?
  4. What is easier in the country, and why?
  5. What is more difficult in the country, and why?
A quote in a recent Financial Times article put a small part of this in a nice context:
“…cities are at the apex of human endeavour. High-density cities are creative, thrilling and less environmentally destructive than sprawling car-based suburbs typical of America. Cities are passports from poverty. They attract poor people, rather than creating them. They are where humans are at their most artistically and technologically creative.”
Perhaps here the meaning could be interpreted broadly, “poor” not in the financial sense but more along the lines of how someone would say of someone else: “that poor man.”
Writing

Pavement

Leave a comment
I have a whole series of pavement pictures taken in London many years ago (2006).

They are simply pictures with the camera pointed at the ground: the road, the pavement, blemishes and leaves and all. They remind me of London, of the many steps taken in that city, most often not looking down but frequently aware of the physical landscape I was traversing. One might look down to avoid the lines, perhaps to avoid “blemishes” of one kind or another: patterns and markers that formed a series of snapshots on the way to wherever I was going.
This was before the days of automatic geotagging: the pictures are pre-iPhone, meaning I cannot say exactly where they were taken. But I suspect that in any case this is not too relevant, as the roads will certainly have been re-worked and re-painted at least once in the intervening years.
I remember the patterns, the styles, the modes, little details that seem to be unique to the city. Another geography story that connects and defines moments in space and time.