WALKING WITH WORDS

 

I remember when I was a kid, when I was first learning to read, there was an occasion when I was walking with my dad, and we were in a part of Sheffield by the steel works, and I looked up at a big yellow sign, full of text, black on yellow and advertising Hillfoot Steel as I remember, and I stared at all those words and said to my dad, ‘I’m never going to be able to read all that.’  He did his best to put my mind at rest and said I’d learn soon enough.  And I suppose he was right.

 

One way or another, I’ve made my life out of words, and today when I walk through a city, I love the fact that I’m surrounded, beset, by language, by signs, by names, by advertising, by instructions, by warnings, by prohibitions, telling me what I should and shouldn’t do.  Of course there are also graffiti but I think that gets enough publicity.

 

Some of the words may be on street signs, for instance, though it seems to me there are rarely enough of those.  Here's an exception:

Some of these words express opinions, enthusiasms, philosophies, belief systems, though inevitably most of this isn’t very nuanced.

Some of it is downright inscrutable, which is perhaps to say that it’s not intended for everyone, such as me.  

Some of it, of course, is only directed at drivers.

 

As a walker I particular enjoy those messages that are directed specifically at pedestrians, some of which might make you think that walking is a hazardous, risky and confusing business. And you know, sometimes it really is.

EVERYBODY WALKS IN LA.

‘To perceive differences within the homogenous elements of the cultivated and inhabited urban landscape, I eschewed the common means of transportation, the automobile, and explored the entire area on foot … I closely engaged with people of different ages, occupations, social positions, and origins, I gathered oral narratives from people who seemed reliable and whom I encountered on my walks in different neighborhoods.’

These are the words of Anton Wagner, writing about his explorations of Los Angeles in the 1930s.

 

Until about three days ago I would have said I’d never heard of Anton Wagner.  He was a German geographer, who as a result of his LA explorations published a book in 1935, titled Los Angeles: Werden, Leben und Gestalt der Zweimillionenstadt in Südkalifornien, only now translated into English as Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Structure of the City of Two Million in Southern California.

 

I’ve only heard of Wagner now because I read about the book in the Los Angeles Review of Architecture, in a piece by Namik Mackic.  The book’s published by the Getty Research Institute and It costs 60 quid in paperback, so reviews are as close as I’m likely to get. It looks like this:

 

The publisher’s blurb says ‘Although widely reviewed upon its initial publication, his (Wagner’s) book was largely forgotten until reintroduced by architectural historian Reyner Banham in his 1971 classic Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.’ This was news to me, and I like to think I know that book reasonably well.

 

So I dug out my copy, the Pelican edition, and there’s one citation for Anton Wagner in the index – page 230 - but when you look at that page his name doesn’t appear. Only by going to Banham’s last chapter titled ‘Towards A Drive-In Bibliography’ will you find a mention of Wagner, which reads in part, ‘The only comprehensive view of Los Angeles as a built environment … The result is one of the few works of urban exploration that comes within sight of Rasmussen’s London: the Unique City, ’ – a book I’m pretty sure I own a copy of, though I’m damned if I can find it at the moment.

 

Anton Wagner, it seems, was something of a photographer and the California Historical Society has digitised a large number of his photographs.  He doesn’t appear in any of the histories of photography I’ve consulted, so I don’t know what kind of methodology or indeed camera he used, but the pictures are terrific.  They show a city that’s occasionally familiar but mostly alien, a city coming into being. Many of the photographs take a broad, distant, sometimes god-like look at Los Angeles, long and broad views, very few of them taken from ground level.

 

Now, if you’re a walker in Los Angeles, as I was for 15 years or so, you tend to meet other walkers, but I’m not sure that Wagner did.  There are remarkably few people in the pictures, even fewer people you can easily identify as walkers, which make the few who appear all the more intriguing, such as these people you can just about make out walking in, or through, Pershing Square.

And this is my current favourite, a single walker crossing a very quiet street, behind him a metal silo that looks like the kind of thing Bernd and Hilla Becher would have fallen in love with.  

 

The caption reads 'Looking north on South Andrews Place from south of West 62nd Street.' And thanks to Google we can see what it looks like now.  Still very quiet, in a different way, and not a single pedestrian in sight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ldest oil derricks, Mexican neighborhood

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE SOLACE OF WALKING

I was in Faversham last Saturday for the Literary Festival, being an author, and I was on stage with Sonia Overall, author of Heavy Time: A Psychogeographer’s Pilgrimage.  

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon

Among the many things we discussed and agreed on, was that a large part of walking and drifting is about noticing.  You walk, you see things, you record them in some way, in memory or a notebook or a photograph. and later, somewhere along the line, they become something else – a book, an essay, even a blog post.

 

After the event, the inamorata and I stayed in Whitstable for a couple of nights with pals Jacqueline and Nick (thanks kids), and it seemed only natural that we should all go for a walk and a drift Sunday morning and do some noticing. So that’s what we did.

 

And what did we notice?  Well I noticed this sign:

 I’m not sure that we actually walked along the Crab and Winkle Way – we certainly didn’t get as far as Canterbury - but we may have covered some small section of it

 

And I can’t speak for anybody else but one of the things I noticed was the the intersection of what we might call nature with what we might call the built environment.

 

We saw gardens including this one decorated with a stone bearing the message ‘One Who Plants a Garden Plants Happiness.’ 

Now you could argue that one who plants a garden is just as likely to plant frustration, disappointment and thankless labour, but I don’t want to rain on anybody’s gardening parade.

 

There was nature creeping up the walls of houses:

We even saw a couple of Nicholsons:

We saw some interesting ruin:

 

And we saw this classic VW bus – every drift is better when it includes a VW bus:

There was also this very noticeable mural of Somerset Maugham:

 

Now, I didn’t know that Somerset Maugham was a Whistable lad: he was born in the British Embassy in Paris.  But after both his parents died he was sent to England to live with his uncle Henry MacDonald Maugham, vicar of Whitstable.   

 

You know it’s a good while since I read any Somerset Maugham – I think the last book I read was Ashendenwhich I really enjoyed, so Maugham is definitely all right with me, but even so, from what I know of his life, I think perhaps he found some forms of solace even more supreme than writing.

THE DANGERS OF WALKING – ONE OF A VERY LONG SERIES

 

 

Here’s the kind of thing you don’t read every day. In fact I read it in the Evening Standard on January 12^thand have been waiting to hear further developments, but as far as I can tell there haven’t been any. 

There in the paper, along with the above picture, was the headline ‘Crumbling Justice’ and the sub-headline ‘Pedestrian hurt after old Bailey Masonry Crashes into the Street Below.’  

 

From this you and I would imagine a someone was walking down the street, and a lump of stone fell off the building from a great height and hit the walker below, But then you read the article (by Tristan Kirk, who I think also took the pictures), and it reads, ‘A member of the public was hospitalised after masonry over the “decaying” historic entrance to the Old Bailey crumbled and crashed into the street below. 

‘No one was hurt when the stone fell from the building, but a pedestrian was injured after tumbling over debris on the pavement before the area had been cordoned off.’

 

Am I wrong to be disappointed by this?  Walking along and being hit by an unidentified falling object has a lot of drama, maybe even cosmic drama, this kind of thing:

     But tripping over a lump of stone that’s lying on the ground, really lacks grandeur.  The fallen piece doesn’t even look to have been very big. The little white bit on the statue in the picture below is where it fell from. 

 

Interestingly it seems to me, the pedestrian is not named in the news item. I wonder if the journalist was sparing his or her blushes.  I don’t mean to mock this or any other pedestrian but falling over in the street and ending up in hospital is pretty hopeless and humiliating.  I know because I’ve done it.  And there wasn’t even a lump of masonry to trip over.

AN OCCASIONALLY WEARY AND SOMEWHAT LONESOME TRAVELLER

Life being as it is, it turns out I’m in the current issue of National Geographic Traveller, writing a very short piece about walking in the American desert.  The opening is below.

 

More than that they’ve got an illustrator (Jaqui Oakley) to do my portrait – from photographs not from life - a perfectly decent-looking man who only very very vaguely resembles me.

The first two paras of the article:

Geoff Nicholson

NOTES FROM AN AUTHOR

The memories of my first encounter with the California desert are so clear and intense that sometimes I wonder if I invented them, but I don’t believe so. I was hitchhiking across the States —it was the 1970s —and I was a young Englishman ‘on the road’, having read too much Jack Kerouac. My lift dropped me at a gas station near Barstow, a city in the Mojave Desert, in the south of the state. The car was air-conditioned and as I got out, I was hit by a wall of heat as strange and thrilling as anything I’d ever experienced.            

I was wearing a cotton T-shirt, and I went into the petrol station’s bathroom to drench it in water, then went out looking for a place to hitch. By the time I found one, the T-shirt was completely dry. It was a learning experience, proving that the desert has to be treated with huge respect. It isn’t a monster, it won’t bite you, but it does demand that you’re on your mettle. That was the start of a long relationship with the American desert, chiefly the Mojave, especially Joshua Tree National Park, Yucca Valley and Death Valley. I’d always lived in cities and done lots of urban walking, but the moment I set foot in the desert I knew it was a very special place for me. Nothing in the English landscape moved me the way it did. I began to make regular desert trips and for a decade and a half I lived in Los Angeles. I had many reasons for moving there, but the fact that I could be in that landscape in a couple of hours was a large part of the attraction.

MEANDERING IN EDEN

I was thinking about the viability of my ‘walking in gardens’ project, and how to make it interesting, when I had an idea.  Since walking in gardens is a low key, low intensity activity, I reckoned that what was needed was some added rigour.  

 

I wondered how it would be if, instead of just wandering around a garden, going wherever your feet and your eyes take you, you went to a somewhat well-known location, say the RHS garden at Hyde Hall, in Essex, set over 360 acres of more or less rolling hills, and made your walking schematic.  Now obviously there are different kinds of scheme and rigour that could be applied but I thought I’d begin simply enough, by walking systematically down every single path in the garden.  Fortunately there was a map.

I’d been to Hyde Hall before and found one or two favourite spots; the Dry Garden and the Winter Garden especially, but this was no time to back favourites.  As far as the walk was concerned one place was as good as any other, the Rose Garden, the Global Growth Vegetable Garden, Sky Meadow, the Queen Mother’s Garden, the Floral Fantasia, the Sky Meadow, and so on, all had to be treated as equals as I walked the paths.

 

My trusty amanuensis and I started in a section known as the Birch Grove and there was a rather poetic introductory sign that included the words, ‘Meandering paths immerse you in an airy woodland, dappled and cool in the summer sun.’   

In fact it was autumn, but even so that sign set me thinking: here it's the path that meanders, not the walker. And I wondered if you walked rapidly along a meandering path could you still be said to meander?  I admit it isn’t one of life’s greatest questions.  

 

And so we walked.  And inevitably we walked in places we might otherwise not have.  I’m sure, for example, I’d have avoided the Children’s Play Area and yet there was the Grand Bug and Pest Hotel.

 

Who’d have thought there were fans of Wes Anderson at the RHS?

We covered the ground and the paths. NB - that isn't us in the picture above. There were no Keep Off The Grass signs and occasionally we did stray off the path.  There were also one or two desire lines and you might well ask whether a desire line can be construed as a path, and I’d say it probably can, though I wouldn’t fight about it, and in any case we avoided them: the desire lines not taken.

 

To be honest I think by the end, as our resolve faltered, we may have missed a few short stretches of path but for a first expedition it wasn’t too bad.

 

There were others walking too. As a cross section of British society it was hardly representative but as a snapshot of the kind of people who like to walk in gardens it was probably typical – mostly older, mostly couples, mostly though not exclusively white, a few parents and children, some of the kids looking bored, others looking dangerously excited.  Nobody else seemed to be walking rigorously.

 

And somewhere in the course of the walk I started to wonder whether this could be considered a form of psychogeography. And you know, after deep reflection, I do believe it could. Debord says psychogeography is ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.’  And heck, a garden of any size is full of varying geographic elements and full of specific (and sometimes vague or downright ambiguous) effects, as you move from one part to another.  At Hyde Hall the ‘feel’ of the Birch Grove was very different from that of the Dry Garden, the Floral Fantasia was very different from the Global Growth Vegetable Garden.  So hell yes, walking in gardens may be considered a form of psychogeography. Whether this makes my walking in gardens project any more viable, remains to be seen.