BOTANIC WALKING

 

We went for a walk in the Cambridge Botanic Garden.  The day was too hot to do much 

serious or strenuous or fancy walking but it’s a very good garden.

 

Fountain:

 

Echiums:  

 

And if you like maps, quite a few maps, including this one:

 

 

The glasshouses are especially fine.

 

I was slightly familiar with those glasshouses because, more than half a lifetime ago, I worked as a dogsbody in this garden.  It seemed like a good idea at the time but I didn’t get on very well.  I was willing enough but at that point in history I could scarcely tell one plant from another and I didn’t last long.

 

I would be out there doing something menial like edging a mile and a half of lawn and some serious Cambridge matron visiting the garden would collar me and say, 'Can you give me some advice on my crocosmia?’  And to my shame, I could not.

 

On the occasional Saturday morning my job, under supervision, was to water the plants in the glass houses.  I quite liked that.  I’d walk around indoors, hose in hand, trying neither to under or over water, though I may not always have got that right either.

 

    Anyway, they’ve erected a kind of memorial, which some sources describe as a quernstone, in the garden.  

 

The caption reads ‘In acknowlegement & appreciation of the skill and dedication of the Garden Staff & Student Gardeners both past and present.’  That surely includes me, even if the skill and dedication were a bit lacking. Here I am looking and feeling honoured:

Photo by Caroline Gannon

 

 

 

EDGY WALKING

 I admit that I’d never heard the term ‘edgeland’ until I read Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’ book Edgelands, published in 2011, and subtitled ‘Journeys into England’s true wilderness.’

A look at the contents page tells you what kind of journeys to expect: Wasteland, Landfill, Sewage, Pallets, Ranges, Dens and 20 or so others.  As man who has a taste for ruins and deserts I’ve found myself walking in quite a few of these places.  And even if I didn’t know the word edgeland, I was certainly was familiar with the concept.

Farley and Roberts are poets, which gives rise to passages like this, ‘On a summer evening, stepping through a gap in the rusty corrugated iron and entering a well-established wasteland is to enter and arbour of scents.’  Or this: ‘Why is there always an abandoned TV in the rubble?  They are so ubiquitous in life that their bodies in death litter our wastelands.  And why does a dead TV’s blank face resonate  so much with us?  Is this our image of oblivion?’  I’d say not, but I understand how a man can get philosophical while walking in the wasteland.

Now, if I’d been paying more attention to trends in urban planning, I’d have known that the word edgelands was used, and possibly devised by Marion Shoard in 2000 or so, in an essay titled ‘Edgelands of Promise’ and revised before its appearance a couple of years later in the collection Remaking the Landscape simply as ‘Edgelands’.  This is Marion Shoard.

The essay is long and at first Shoard seems a bit sniffy about edgelands, which she also refers as ‘interfaces’ or ‘interfacial landscapes.   She writes, ‘The interface remains a dumping ground for activities considered unprepossessing and a frontier land in which private sector development rages unchecked by noticeable standards of design.'

         

Then she asks, ‘Should we have public parks in the interface?  Should we have cycleways and routes for pedestrians or continue to give these areas over to car use?  Should we encourage the development of cinemas, nightclubs and restaurants in the edgelands?’  To which the obvious answer is, I suppose ‘we’ could but then they’d no longer be edgelands.

 

She also reckons, ‘Guidebooks and guided walks should open up this new world.’  Look, some of my best friends are walking guides but the idea of them guiding me, or anyone, around abandoned factories and scrapyards (for instance) seems rather to miss the point. 

 

Finally Shoard concludes, ‘It is time for the edgelands to get the recognition that Emily Bronte and William Wordsworth brought to the moors and mountains and John Betjeman to the suburbs.  They too have their story.  It is the more cogent and urgent for being the story of our age.’  Sounds good to me.

 

Shoard also directs us to the work of Alice Coleman ‘who was taking part in a land utilization survey, (and) uncovered the existence of a large amount of frine land that did not fall neatly into the land-use pattern of either farmscape or townscape.  She called this land-type “the rurban fringe.” It’s a name that might have gained more currency if it had been more pronounceable.  This is Alice Coleman:

 

And now I discover (thanks to fellow edgelander Anthony Miller) that my finger is even further off the pulse than I thought it was.  I discover the existence of the term ‘terrain vague’ generally credited to Ignasi Sola de Morales, an architect and critic, and certainly he’s the author an essay titled ‘Terrain Vague’ published in 1995. The French term seems appropriate - both words having overtones that would be absent in a direct English translation.  This is Ignasi Sola de Morales:

 

The essay is good stuff.  ‘The relationship between the absence of use, of activity, and the sense of freedom, of expectancy, is fundamental to understanding the evocative potential of the city’s terrains vagues.  Void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible of expectation.’

And I was especially taken by the line, ‘The main characteristic of the contemporary individual is anxiety regarding all that protects him from anxiety.’  I’m not sure that wandering around edgelands is an absolute cure for anxiety but I think it does no harm.

 

         In all this I was reminded of the opening of Reyner Banham’s Scenes in America Deserta.   He’s asked by someone from the Bureau of Land Management who’s studying desert utilization, ‘What is it you actually do in the desert?’

         Banham replies, ‘Oh! Well, I ... er… stop the car and have a look at the scenery!”

The BLM person replies, ‘Hm?  I don’t think we have a category for that.’

 

Nobody has ever stopped me while I was walking in the edgelands and asked me what I was doing, but it they did I’d say I was wandering about  and taking a few photographs.  I imagine they probably do have a category for that these days.  Actually it looks as though Reyner Banham did some walking and taking photographs too.

 

THE ENGLISH ECCENTRICS

 In the days when I was trying to entertain my mum on Sunday afternoons, we once went 

for a walk around the grounds of Renishaw Hall, home of the Sitwells,  and a short drive 

from my mum’s house in Sheffield. 

 

We were greeted at the entrance, not all that warmly, by some venerable old party who may have been Sir George Sitwell, though I suppose it could have been some other venerable old party.  

 

I can’t remember anything else about the gardens or the walk.

 

I’m not sure that many people read the Sitwell’s these days (I’m not sure very many people ever did – though I seem to remember enjoying Osbert’s Great Morning) - but I did just find a quotation from Edith Sitwell about walking (more or less).

 

She writes

‘The great sins and fires break out of me 

like the terrible leaves from the bough in the violent spring. 

I am a walking fire, I am all leaves.”

 

Here she is walking her dog – some leaves, no fire:

 

 

How very different from the home life of our own dear Tilda Swinton who has done a photo-shoot for Tim Walker at Renishaw Hall, dolled up as Edith, to whom she is apparently distantly related.

 

She's wearing some schmutter by Michael Kors which I don’t think Edith, for all her eccentricity, would have been seen dead in.

 

 

 

WALKING IN GARDENS

Look, I’m not trying to turn this into a project or anything but last weekend I was walking 

around The Cotswold Sculpture Park, near Cirencester (the actual address is Somerfield 

Keynes) - my third sculpture park of the year. 

 

You could argue I was actually walking in two sculpture parks – see the Google map below-

 

the other one being the Elemental Sculpture Park, but I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. There was also the Zimbabwe Loop, home to this very fine pangolin by Tonderai Sowa.

 

Now, some people have told me they think a sculpture park is a good walk spoiled.  The walk in the park or garden, they say, would be more enjoyable without the art.  I don’t agree with that, obviously, but I think there’s something to be said for a comparatively small and crowded park.  The Cotswold is ‘just’ 10 acres and contains about 200 pieces.

 

 I like the experience of walking along, turning a corner and seeing, for example, an old engine transformed into a dragonfly.  This one is by Ed Hill.

 

How different from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (500 acres) where you see a chunk of art half a mile away and have to yomp over hill and dale to get there.  Though maybe that’s the point.

 

Admittedly the art in the Cotswold did not have the name-brand recognition of the art in Yorkshire – not a Moore or a Goldsworthy or a Hepworth in sight.  But brand recognition isn’t everything.

 

Back in the day when I occasionally used to find myself in a room with Benedikt Taschen, the very rich publisher and art collector, he always said he didn’t enjoy going to major art museums because you couldn’t buy any of the art on display.  A Giacometti would catch your eye at the Museum of Modern Art, but no amount of haggling would allow you to snap it up and take it home with you.  No such problem at the Cotswold Sculpture Park - with a few exceptions, the art was for sale.

 

And if they weren’t in the Damien Hirst price bracket some were not cheap at all – the polar bear below titled ‘Boris’ was quoted at 250,000 quid (‘will consider offers’).

Of course I liked some of works of art more than others, but I think what I liked best were some sculptures made from car exhaust systems – in the US they’d be ‘Muffler Men.’  I couldn’t see that these were attributed to any artist but perhaps they were and I missed it.

 

They weren’t hidden, but they were kind of lurking in the woods and the undergrowth.  And some of them were walking.  Not very far or fast, but definitely walking.

 

Also, while in Gloucestershire, I met a man who told me I really should go to a sculpture park in Trenton New Jersey, called Grounds for Sculpure.  It sounded well worth a visit.

 

OK, so maybe I am, kind of, turning it into a project. 

 

STAINS ON THE STREET

 Below is the best opening to an essay about walking and cities that I’ve read in a long time.  

It’s titled ‘Key to the City’ and is in the spring 2022 issue of the Los Angles Review of Books Quarterly Journal.  (I’ve got a piece in there too should you be interested in such things.). 

 

This is Lisa Teasley: 

 

This is the opening of her piece:

 

 

“Walking the streets of Los Angeles, wandering determined, puts me more intimately in touch with the map than driving ever could. It makes plain where my identity shifts in the city, reveals the infinite ways to read and reread place. 

“I was born in this city and raised in Baldwin Hills since midway through second grade, after the family spent a six-and-a-half-year interval in Durham, North Carolina. I went from racing turtles and hiking in woods lit by fireflies to banana-seat biking the Dons — as all of Baldwin Hills’s street names begin — where many Black TV, film, and music stars lived long before the recent influx of white residents. I was not walking the neighborhood streets until after a family friend’s 18-year-old kid tried to rape me when I was 13 and babysitting his kid sister. A month or so afterward, he died doing a motorcycle trick in front of his house, which was the scene of the crime. I then walked past to see how I would feel — and if the street itself might describe the terror of him crawling through the window, grabbing his sister, and locking her in her room, and then dragging me into his. I wondered if I would feel proud of how hard I fought for the hour and got away, or if because he was now dead it might feel like it never happened.  There was blood on the street. I was shocked to see the stain and wondered how many days of rain it would take to wash away the evidence of his existence.’ 

 

That’s damn good.  And there’s much more to come but you’ll have to find it for yourself.

 

And just to prove how well-connected I used to be in LA, here’s a very, very low res pic of me and Lisa waiting to read at a Black Clock event at The Last Bookstore in downtown LA.  Looks like we were having fun: