WALKING WITH FOSTER

Last Sunday I walked from Uxbridge to Moor Park, Tube station to Tube station, most of it along the London Loop, much of it along the Grand Union Canal.  That’s not my usual kind of walking territory, which was an attraction in itself, and another attraction was that I was walking with Foster Spragge who is sometimes described as a walking artist, and at the very least is an artist who sometimes uses walking as part of her “practice.”  This is her:

The overall title of the project is "Drawing Dialogues on the London Loop," and it’s connected with an organization named tickbirdandrhino, the brainchild of Mat Clum, who was also on the walk.  It says on the website that Foster’s “current work involves a series of drawings created whilst investigating, walking and/or swimming in real time through specific environments - making marks that resonate within her sense of self and place.”  Sounds about right.

We met at Uxbridge station, which is quite a destination in itself.  Is it the only London tube station that has stained glass?  Surely somebody will tell me.

I was on Walk 9.  There are 15 walks most of them in 2 parts of about 5 miles each, though the last walk is 3 parts.  I’ll be there for at least some of that.

The project is partly about mapping.  We were following maps created by Transport for London and as we walked, Foster held a clipboard which made her look like a council official doing a survey rather than an artist, which in some way seemed a good thing.  It certainly stopped people asking questions.
On the board was a sheet of paper, marked up with a line of marks or holes.  Every 7 minutes as we walked she used a compass embedded in a clear plastic ruler with 2 circular holes in it (of nautical origin I imagine), and centered it on the spot marked by a hole, drew a line marking the east/west axis, and a couple of circles.  This created gorgeously inscrutable images that will, I believe, ultimately be used to inspire a different work of art.

We agreed that it would be possible to use this as a map to, as it were, reverse engineer the route, but why would anybody do that?

And so we walked – just 4 of us as it turned out – and we looked around and observed, and took some photographs. Much of the walk was quite watery;

There was some wild(ish) life – a fake crocodile (alligator?) and a real cat

And suddenly, as we got near to Moor Park, the path took us right into the middle of a very fancy bit of suburbia.  There were security cameras trained on us, so obviously we waved to them.  This part was wildly out of keeping with the rest of the walk and although I’m well aware of the contested evils of suburbia, I am fascinated by that kind neatness, by which I mean other people’s, since I’m quite incapable of living like that.  I am also a sucker for topiary: 

We covered about ten miles.  I could have walked further if I’d had to, but I was glad I didn’t have to.

This is Forster Spragge’s website:

http://www.fosterspragge.com

This is tickbirdandrhino

tickbirdandrhino.com

HOLLYWOOD TO GO

As I bounce around from Airbnb to hotel to people’s spare rooms, I have to consider the possibility that this makes me an e-nomad.  If so, it’s a damn exhausting way of life, although it does mean that you’re regularly arriving in some new place with plenty of options for walking, and “the exploration of a fixed spatial field” (as M. Debord would have it), and also of course for disorientation.  I get gently lost pretty much every day.

And it so happens that I’ve briefly ended up in a flat in Harcourt Terrace SW10, between Fulham Road and Old Brompton Road, an area which might possiblybe thought of as Chelsea, though the nearest Tube station is Earls Court.  Either way it’s a fairly swanky area, but here’s the thing for a man who sometimes styles himself as a Hollywood Walker: if you walk south down Harcourt Terrace, it suddenly becomes – now wait for it - Hollywood Road.

There’s a Hollywood Lodge:

These people are staring into Hollywood Mews, which has a very nice font:

There’s a salon offering Hollywood Hair and Nails:

There is even the Hollywood Arms, a pub that’s been there since 1865:

None of this, naturally, has much in common with the Californian Hollywood: there’s money there, but there’s also muck. Finding signs of patina and decay is a quite a job in this bit of London – but as I pounded the streets I did feel quite cheered when I saw this ghost sign:

It’s a former showroom for Metcalfe and Mundy who, I discover, were the sole Borgward concessionaires for the whole country.  

Borgward were good looking cars but they went out of business in 1961 (though the brand has recently been revived) so this is one very old surviving sign.  Fortunately Metcalfe and Mundy didn’t have to rely only on the Borgward.  They did a pretty nice line in Aston Martins too.

THE HANGING TREE

I’ve been walking in Oxleas Wood, on the top of Shooter’s Hill in Greenwich.  I was with my pal Hugh and his dog Fergus. This is Fergus:

Oxleas Wood is 77 hectares of ancient deciduous forest.  Its initial survival is thought to have been because the land was too hilly to clear for human settlements.  And it was part of the royal estate from the 14^thto the 20^thcentury which obviously guranteed that no riff raff would mess with it. 

Tucked into Oxleas Wood is Severndroog Castle a great bit of folly architecture built as a memorial to Sir William James by his widow, Lady Jane, after his death in 1783.  

Among other things, Sir William James was commander of the East India Company navy, and in 1755 he attacked and destroyed the island fortress of Suvarnadurg, off the coast of what is now India, what was then part of the Maratha Empire.  Suvarnadurg currently looks like this:

Severndoorg is the Englished version of Suvarnadurg, though it seems that historically other spellings have been used:

As memorials and follies go it’s genuinely impressive, some fine brickwork and possibly a Thomasson:

But on the day we walked there, another memorial was visible.  

It is a certain tree, unremarkable in itself, that Hugh tells me for a long time had a blue rope attached to one of the high branches, and local kids used to swing on the rope.

The rope has now gone and it’s not a place where children play because a young man, a single dad with a history of what we now call “mental health issues”  hanged himself from that very rope.  His name was Garry Guest.  He was, inevitably, found by a dog walker.

The lower part of the tree has now been turned into a rough, makeshift memorial that is gradually being worn away by the elements.  It’s strangely moving in its roughness and decay, not least the photograph and the empty Strongbow can.

No doubt it will not last as long as Severndroog Castle but in its way it's far more moving. 

WALKING MADLY

‘It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man. Walking along an asphalt road, I was on the final leg of a two weeks’ walking tour of Wisconsin. Late in the afternoon I stopped, ate some pork, beans, and a doughnut, and was preparing to stretch out and read when the Illustrated Man walked over the hill and stood for a moment against the sky.” 

Those are the opening lines of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, a collection of linked short stories posing as a novel. I can’t say I’d forgotten the lines because I’ve never actually read the book from beginning to end, though I have read at least one of the stories it contains – ‘The Veldt.’   

But I have seen the movie and I have never forgotten the sight of Rod Steiger, all naked and tatted up. The book describes him as “a walking treasure gallery.”

Gotta say I didn’t know that people went to Wisconsin on walking tours, but it seems they very definitely do.  The state seems to be dense with walkers and walking trails.

         When I first lived in Los Angeles, Ray Bradbury was alive and well and doing a lot of public appearances around town, many of them in Glendale.  I don’t know how much of a walker he was but sometimes apparently he walked while wearing a suit, like this:

And I think he must have been rather proud of his legs, perhaps honed and toned by walking, because he was always showing them off in shorts; like this:

Tangentially I have been reading Museum Without Walls,some collected essays by another writer who also walks while wearing a suit, at least when the cameras are on him; Jonathan Meades, a man I can’t quite imagine in shorts.

In a piece on Ian Nairn, Meades writes of “the ever-increasing battalions of soi-disant psychogeographers - who are distinguished from plain geographers by neglecting to take their Largactil before they release themselves into the edgelands of Sharpness or the boondocks of Sheppey.”  

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.

Largactil, as some of you will know, and some may not, is one of the trade names for Chloropromazine, an anti-psychotic.  Looks like good stuff:

NICHOLSON, DESTROYER OF CITIES

If you’re going to walk all the way around a city, it helps (in once sense) if that city is small.  On the other hand, all the great cities are big, and all the great walks are long. So perhaps some miniaturization is what’s required.

This is a model of Chicago I saw last month, in the Chicago Architecture Center, in a Mies van de Rohe building on upper Wacker Drive.

And this a model of London which is in the Building Center, in Store Street, “a bud for the built environment” since 1932.

The Chicago one even changes color:

I love miniaturization; model buildings, model railways, miniature golf courses.  

It makes me feel a bit like Gulliver and a bit like Godzilla.  I know I could destroy large areas of the tiny city long before any security could get there.  But I don’t do any destroying.  I just walk around.

Here's a picture of Mies van Der Rohe walking with Le Corbusier.  Oh the laughs there must have been.  

And here's another bloke who liked a bit of miniaturization:

AMBIGUITY - HOW MANY TYPES YA GOT?

“I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.”

That’s Henry Miller, the opening lines of Tropic of Cancer, an author and a book I used to spend a lot of time thinking about. I don’t anymore but those lines have evidently stayed with me.  This is a picture of Miller walking (more or less), I think in Brooklyn.  

For my own part, I am living, or at least staying for a couple of weeks, in an Airbnb, in Endsleigh Court, in Bloomsbury.  

The place is indeed very clean, and I can place the chairs wherever I want.  I am certainly alone, but the feelings of wanting to be dead are becoming rarer.  My therapist has views on this.

        Some would say that everybody needs therapy.

       One great thing about Endsleigh Court, since I’m on the 7^thfloor, is that you can look out of the window, down into the street, and at certain times of day the walkers in Upper Woburn Place, are very beautifully lit (or backlit).

         You know, in general I find that whole Bloomsbury Group franchise thing pretty insufferable.  And I’m sure the feeling would have been mutual.  If there were some shift in the space/time continuum and Virginia Woolf actually met me, I’m sure she’d have thought I was the kind of oik who should be taken down a dark Bloomsbury alley and given a good kicking.  Hard to imagine which member of the Bloomsbury Group could have done that: maybe Vanessa Bell.

Still, you can’t object to a geographical area simply on the basis of who used to live there.  Bloomsbury is a very decent area to walk around.  It may lack the grit and grime of the most interesting areas of London but it’s full of curiosities, and you can’t have grit and grime all the time.  

There are blue plaques everywhere, Dickens, Darwin, Dorothy L. Sayers, as well the whole Bloomsbury Bunch.  But this one’s very special:

Empson was the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, and given that he taught in Tokyo and Peking, he might have been enough of an orientalist to appreciate the Bangladesh connection. 

Empson was also, by adoption, another Sheffield lad, teaching at the university for the best part of 20 years – 1954 to 1972.  He had a bunker-slash-man cave in the basement of 17 Wharncliffe Road. 

Sheffield has always been an essentially tolerant city but the idea that a man could walk its streets with a beard like Empson's and not have the dogs set on him, suggests that the city used to be even more tolerant than I imagined.

Anyway, back in Bloomsbury, my Airbnb is close to one of my favorite London buildings, the Mary Ward House:

And I am suddenly reminded, though I never exactly forgot, of an odd and brief period in my life when I was dating a woman who was a doctor.  She was very accomplished, and obviously smart, saving lives wherever she went, from Nottingham to Lesotho and back again.  So she came down to London and we walked around and we were having a good enough time as far as I could tell, and we walked past the Mary Ward Centre and I said it was one of my favorite London buildings and she looked at me as though I was an idiot, and said something along the lines of “How can anybody have a favorite building?”  

        She found it both absurd and incomprehensible that a person might walk around the built environment and have feelings about what he saw. I didn’t even try to explain. On that same day we walked down to the ICA where there was an exhibition that included Meret Oppenheim’s Object which I said I found really great.

My date, the doctor, did not. You can imagine how well this relationship went. 

Meret in playful mood.

 A last thought about William Empson, from Kenneth Lo, the chef, who was (apparently) Empson’s lodger when they both lived in Hampstead. Lo said that “William was one step removed from contemporary reality and seemed to stroll through life unhindered by its troublesome details.”  Lucky old William, you might say.