WORDS: Alex Cochrane In the 18th century the secret world of the molly house was a place for gay men to socialise, cross-dress and role-play. But it was also a place of danger and treachery. It must have taken some
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WORDS: Gareth E. Rees PHOTOS: Various excellent Twitter followers At the end of their careers. Forgotten. Abandoned. Dealing with their demons. The icons of our childhood don’t always have it easy. Some fall prey to drugs and drink. Others can’t
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LOCATION: A supermarket car park near you, probably. WORDS: Gareth E. Rees In 2014, Plymouth’s Crownhill retail park hosts a nocturnal gathering of around hundred cars and five hundred people. A twenty-year old named Christopher Budd enters a skills competition with
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WORDS: Gareth E. Rees LOCATION: Yorkshire Benjamin Myers’ The Gallows Pole [Bluemoose Books] is a novel about the Cragg Vale Coiners, a band of forgers led by David Hartley in the 18th Century. The Gallows Pole opens with a taxonomy
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LOCATION: The Submerged Coastline of the UK WORDS: B G Nichols In September 1931 the trawler Colinda set sail from Lowestoft on a routine trip towards the Leman and Ower Banks some 25 miles off the coast of Norfolk in
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MUSIC & WORDS: Spaceship (Mark Williamson) LOCATION: Epping Forest A Prospect of Loughton Brook was recorded using binaural and hydrophone recordings, augmented with piano, synthesizer and strings. It traces the journey of Loughton Brook, a stream in Epping Forest as
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WORDS: Gareth E. Rees LOCATION: Hastings, East Sussex The Stone Tide: Adventures at the End of the World is an apocalyptic black comedy set in Hastings, written by Unofficial Britain founder Gareth E. Rees, featuring Aleister Crowley, the Piltdown Man
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LOCATION: Hertfordshire WORDS: George Sandison Arthur saw it first, or what was left of it after the digger had sheared through the legs. It sounded like squealing hydraulics, the visceral potential of the moment drowned out by machinery, and left
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LOCATION: Wiltshire WORDS: Gareth E. Rees It’s a long road to Little Imber, Salisbury plain’s ghost village. The MOD have opened it for public access, as they do occasionally at Easter and Christmas. Turning off the A360 from Tilshead, the
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WORDS: Gary Budden LOCATION: Kent There was all the stuff you’d expect; heart lungs liver kidneys etc. Baleen thick and numerous like bristles on an old paint-brush. But nothing in the gut, half-digested and smelling of pricey French perfume. Empty
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LOCATION: The Firth of Clyde, Scotland This is an extract from Angus Farquhar’s photo essay in the new book St Peter’s, Cardross I set up NVA, an independent arts company (the letters stand for nacionale vita-activa, meaning ‘the right to
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WORDS & PICTURES: Gareth E. Rees This is an edited Transcript of the talk I gave at the Hastings Storytelling Festival, Wednesday 9th November 2016. I want to tell you a story. It’s about how an erotic encounter with an
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MUSIC: Andrew Weatherall. This atmospheric mix by Andrew Weatherall first appeared on the Rotters Golf Club website. It was inspired by the book ‘Marshland: Dreams & Nightmares on the Edge of London‘ by Gareth E. Rees (Influx Press, 2013). “Cocker
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WORDS: Gareth E. Rees EVENT: Uncanny Landscapes at The Hastings Storytelling Festival, November 9th, 7pm, Havelock Road, Hastings (FREE) I’ve been kindly invited to speak at this year’s Hastings Storytelling Festival. Because it’s a festival of storytelling, I am going to
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LOCATION: Southeastern Rail, London, Hastings WORDS: Ben Thompson The first time I saw Tex (and although at that point I didn’t know his name, it would probably have been one of my first guesses) was at about eleven o’clock on
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A review of Stripped Tees: Endurance and Hope in the North East by Richard Milward and Natalie Hardwick [Influx Press, 2016] LOCATION: Teesside REVIEWER: Laura Harker “This remarkable place, the youngest child of England’s enterprise, is an infant, but if
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LOCATION: Manchester WORDS: Gareth E. Rees I only remember Makro because of its car park, the space outside the place. The interior of Manchester’s warehouse cash ‘n’ carry store was forbidden to children under twelve, so my parents would leave
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LOCATION: Hastings, East Sussex WORDS: Ben Thompson Piers are by definition irrational structures – temporary institutions, neither sea, nor land, living on borrowed time until the inevitable conflagration. But then, which of us hasn’t felt that way at one time
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LOCATION: Cornwall ALBUM: Kemper Norton, ‘Toll’ LABEL: Front and Follow WORDS: Gareth E. Rees Kemper Norton’s new concept album brings together the lost Cornish kingdom of Lyonesse and a 1967 oil tanker disaster that occurred in the same stretch of
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LOCATION: Hartlepool & its environs “What does it mean to belong to somewhere?” Another England is a cycle of films by Maxy Neil Bianco and Michael Smith exploring a town on the edges of England, between land and sea. Hartlepool becomes
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LOCATION: London WORDS: Alex Cochrane Victorian London was a charnel house of the dead; a city oozing horror and nowhere more so than a small chapel where they danced on the dead. By 1842 London was the modern mega city
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WORDS: Justin Hopper Born Into the Waves is a series of offerings, not of events; of settings, not actions. It presents a landscape in which the sea is as deadly in its calm as its torrent, the world swirling around
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WORDS: Gary Budden I spoke to author Nina Lyon about her latest book Uprooted: On the Trail of the Green Man (Faber, 2016), a brilliant piece of creative non-fiction about our attitude to nature and the environment, the resonance of
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LOCATION: Canvey Island, Essex WORDS & FIELD RECORDINGS: Natasha Zielazinski I recently did some cycling and recording at Canvey Island. It included 45 minutes outside a pub called the Lobster Smack, stood next to a hedge full of garbage and
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LOCATION: Cumbria WORDS & IMAGES: Eijls ‘When heard and felt for the first time it does not seem so very extraordinary; but when we find it blowing and roaring morning, noon and night, for days together, it makes a strong
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WORDS & FILM: Owen Davey This film is the inaugural White Paint Spills In Public Places Biannual Review 2016 and a follow up to last year’s White Paint Spills In Public Places Introductory Review 2015. White Paint Spills In Public
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LOCATION: Yorkshire WORDS & PICTURES: Maxim Griffin ABOUT THE ARTIST: Maxim Peter Griffin is a landscape artist, cartographer and walker based in Lincolnshire.
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WORDS & IMAGES: Eijls Eijls is the author of a steadily growing body of works that recall “the lost, forgotten, abandoned and mythic” landscapes of Britain. His work encompasses experimental texts, photography and found fragments. These are sometimes accompanied by
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LOCATION: Hastings, East Sussex FILM: Featuring the work of Mark French, Richard Heslop, Kate Adams, Nick Pilton, Nichola Bruce, Rebecca Marshall, Sam Sharples and Andrew Kotting Made by Hastings Film Makers for the Coastal Currents project, inspired by the theme of
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LOCATION: Fields, churches and rivers. MUSIC: Spaceship ART: Maxim Griffin Fields: Churches & Rivers forms the first volume of a projected ‘Fields’ series by Spaceship, with cover art by Unofficial Britain stalwart Maxim Griffin, whose work you can see reviewed
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LOCATION: Lincolnshire WORDS & PICTURES: Maxim Griffin Striking out on a bright Friday in March – I’ve got a job on with some archaeologists and I’m heading to the far side of the bypass to scope out the bronze
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LOCATION: Erm…. WORDS: Gareth E Rees If you’re a regular reader of Unofficial Britain, you’ll know that I like to walk around chain store car parks, writing things down. It’s something of an obsession. On this website I’ve described my
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LOCATION: East Sussex WORDS: Gareth E. Rees In the mid-nineteenth century, Hastings was one of the only towns in Britain where women greatly outnumbered men. The health craze for sea bathing and temperate climate attracted elderly spinsters and wealthy
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LOCATION: Essex WORDS: Gary Budden PICTURES: Maxim Griffin The book I chose to take deep into Essex’s marshland (from a choice of many) was The Hamlyn Guide to Birds, revised edition, published 1987. It’s been with me as long as I
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WORDS: Gareth E. Rees In the new documentary, Sleaford Mods: Invisible Britain, Sleaford Mods (Andrew Fearn and Jason Williamson) tour parts of Britain that don’t exist in the minds of many: boarded-up streets in towns bereft of their founding industries, left to
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A NEW YEAR BOOZE SPECIAL WORDS: Gareth E. Rees An autobiography told through the prism of a classic British spirit. Originally written and performed for a gin tasting event at Borough Wines, Hastings. The First Age of Gin: Adolescence My
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LOCATION: Yorkshire FILM: John Ledger Lost Bus Routes and Pre-Election Rambles is a spoken word account of a series of rambles myself and a friend, Michael Hill, did around former mining villages we grew up in, on the eve of the 2015
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FILM: Owen D. Davey The above video is a ten-minute essay by Owen D. Davey about why he photographs white paint spills in public places and encourages others to do the same. White Paint Spills In Public Places is an
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LOCATION: Cribbs Causeway, Bristol WORDS: Gareth E. Rees “Experience the joy of 7,000 free parking spaces.” There’s something evangelical about this declaration on the Cribbs Causeway mall website. The joy of parking spaces. You know what they mean, too. Oh,
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LOCATION: Loch Ness, Scotland WORDS: Gareth E. Rees Hastings resident, Kevin Carlyon, high priest of the British Coven of White Witches and former wrestler, was born under a full moon in an outside toilet. On his website he tell of how, as
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LOCATION: Kent WORDS & PICTURES: Kit Caless One gentle morning the post arrived when I was working from home. I opened an envelope that had something flat, rectangular and solid inside. It was a wedding invitation from an old school
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LOCATION: Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire WORDS: Paul Case (with help from Glen Reid) It’s 2004. Glen and I sit in his front room, gazing over our purchase of two bags of magic mushrooms. In April 2005, the Drugs Act will be passed, rendering
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LOCATION: Lincolnshire WORDS & PICTURES: Maxim Peter Griffin ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Maxim Peter Griffin is a landscape artist, cartographer and walker based in Lincolnshire. You can read Unofficial Britain’s profile of the artist here: Wobbly Lincolnshire Landscapes Click here to read Walk
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WORDS & FILM: Emma Bolland LOCATION: Somewhere in Staffordshire, possibly… This is a true and faithful transcript of the story of the cave-wood as related to me by B––– in the autumn of 2015. Whilst she assured me that the
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WORDS: Gareth E. Rees This is a transcript of my talk at the Walking Inside Out Symposium, an event in Sheffield to launch the new book Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography, edited by Tina Richardson. I’m an author of
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WORDS: Gareth E Rees I’m honoured to be on the judging panel of the Dead Albatross Prize 2015. Originally set up two years ago as an unofficial alternative to the Mercury Prize, the Dead Albatross takes an inclusive look at cross-genre music
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LOCATION: Black Mountains, South Wales WORDS: Eddie Procter Transcript of a talk given at the Tertulia: Radical Pastoral event on 13th September 2015 at the Arnolfini, Bristol. In Museum Without Walls, Jonathan Meades contends that “We are surrounded by the
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LOCATION: London WORDS: Ben Austwick Streatham Common Boundary Ditch Rivers of the southern Thames basin, the Wandle and the Graveney The Effra and the Ravensbourne, running through the Great North Wood Between the hills of Streatham, Sydenham and Honor Oak
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LOCATON: Dunbar, East Lothian, Scotland WORDS: Gareth E Rees During a research trip to Scotland this Summer I stopped off at my friends’ house in Dunbar, a coastal town 25 miles east of Edinburgh. It’s famous as the
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LOCATION: Fairlight, East Sussex WORDS: Gareth E. Rees The village of Fairlight is built on a cliff that’s eroding at the rate of twenty-five metres a year. Its inhabitants rely on the protection of a sea barrier made from Norwegian
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WORDS: Michael Hampton LOCATION: London Terry Farrell’s MI6 building, aka 85 Vauxhall Cross, occupies a major traffic intersection beside the arterial A202 road over Vauxhall Bridge. Such crossroads have long been renowned as places of decision-making and thus fatefulness. Speaking
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MIX: Gareth E. Rees COVER ART: Hollis Toot! Toot! Time for another psychedelic cross-dimensional adventure with Unofficial Britain. This time your tour guide is Aldous Huxley, with guest chanting by Aleister Crowley, folk tale nightmares by Angela Carter, terrifying views
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WORDS: Gary Budden interviews Rob Cowen I recently spoke to Rob Cowen, author of the excellent Common Ground, about his new book, edgeland literature and psychogeography, the debates around what does and does not constitute ‘nature writing’ and the importance
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LOCATION: Swanscombe, north-west Kent MUSIC: Hand of Stabs Unofficial Britain is delighted to share another site-specific performance by the experimental sound collective Hand of Stabs. In Barnfield Pit, the bones of our ancestors groan and shift uneasily in the shadow of Bluewater shopping centre.
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LOCATION: Bristol WORDS: Adam Smith There exists an alternate version of Britain, one which I am totally fascinated by. In this alternate Britain the national mood never shifted away from the scientific primacy and modernistic optimism of Tony Benn –
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LOCATION: Lancashire, London, Tahiti, Outer Space MUSIC: Rhia Parker In a small Lancashire Village in 1639, Jeremiah Horrocks was looking through his telescope and beheld the most unusual sight – the planet Venus crossing the path of the sun. He
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LOCATION: Britain, in a pub near you (most likely) WORDS: Kit Caless JD Wetherspoons is the Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva of British booze. The creator, preserver and destroyer of pub culture. The great trinity of cheap drinks, pub snacks and
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LOCATION: Ramsgate WORDS: Gareth E. Rees I was on a trip to Ramsgate with the kids at the weekend. Approaching the harbour from the west I found myself walking down the B2054, otherwise known as the Royal Parade, an elevated
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WORDS: Mark Blackmore In London, 1783, there occurred a battle of wills between the personal surgeon of King George III and the city’s most popular circus attraction, as Mark Blackmore relates This is the story of two men: Scotsman John Hunter,
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LOCATION: Soho, London WORDS: Will Burns interviewing Robert Rubbish Robert Rubbish is an artist and filmmaker based in London and hailing from Jersey. He was founding member of the Le Gun art collective and studied at the RCA between 2003 and
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LOCATION: London WORDS: James Stirling IMAGES: Jamie Rowlands Saturday morning, late March. I rise early and drift along to Ciaran’s flat on Deptford High Street at a perfectly reasonable Saturday morning hour. Ciaran, a close friend and consummate pedestrian, had
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Unofficial Britain was honoured to host an event at Influx Press’s day at The Stoke Newington Literary Festival, 6th June 2015. Below is a recording of that event. Thanks to Influx Press for their support, Meghna Gupta for the photo and
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LOCATION: London WORDS: Alex Cochrane Now a street in London’s lost history, Holywell Street was a narrow alleyway once notorious for radical politics and erotica… Holywell Street was set amongst the kind of narrow, twisting streets and dingy courts that
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LOCATION: West Wales WORDS: Gary Budden ‘It’s hard to paraphrase; if I could paraphrase all this stuff then I wouldn’t have been arsed to write a whole book about it.’ It’s Election Day 2015, and I’m feeling oddly hopeful that something,
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LOCATION: Barnsley / South Yorkshire / West Riding WORDS and FILM: John Ledger The Mary Celeste Project (The Scene of the Crash) uses photographs of the former West Riding of Yorkshire area, layering sounds and thoughts of near pasts, lost futures
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LOCATION: Kent WORDS: Gary Budden The sky is moody and grey. We park up in a windy carpark by Reculver towers, see two sand martins dart by towards the sandstone cliffs. They’re specific to this place and newly back for the
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LOCATION: East Sussex WORDS: Ben Thompson I first saw the flyer for the Salvation Army Soundclash in a Clive Vale launderette. It was on the table next to an old copy of Now magazine. What caught my eye was the way
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MIX: Gareth E. Rees Extinct butterflies, spilled whisky, fickle seas, peregrines, weird villages and haunted magpies… From the Scottish Coast to the Sussex seaside, the latest Unofficial Britain musical tour criss-crosses a most peculiar country. [You can find out more
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LOCATION: Hackney WORDS & FILMS: Josh Alexander & David Kelly-Mancaux (Erkembode) This trilogy documents the Lea Marshes and what ensues… Breathe Wizard Breathe is a swirl of marsh dwellers (leafy mummers, car parks, tree spirits, pylons, goalposts) but ultimately a singular, omnipresent, character. A
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LOCATION: Brighton WORDS & PICTURES: Gareth E. Rees Brighton on a murky Easter Friday. A spectral mist scrubs out the sea and tall landmarks, leaving visible only streets and gravestones. It’s appropriate weather. I’m heading to a pub to listen
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LOCATION: Hastings WORDS: Gareth E. Rees When I was 12 I fell off my bike and lost all my maths. Since then I’ve staggered through adult life with a childlike bewilderment about numbers. I haven’t a clue what they mean.
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LOCATION: Hastings WORDS: Gareth E. Rees I came across this story in the book Hastings of Bygone Days – and the Present [1920] by Henry Cousins…. On the day Victoria was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
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LOCATION: Yorkshire FILM: Tony Todd A short film tour of what appears to be an ancient monument but is, in fact, a folly built in 1820 by wealthy landowner Willian Danby. Check out the full story here. For further updates, you
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LOCATION: East Sussex WORDS: Gareth E Rees Charles Dawson was the Uckfield solicitor who discovered Piltdown Man in East Sussex in 1912 – a broken skull buried in million-year-old gravel deposits alongside a carved elephant femur and other fragments. Proclaimed
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LOCATION: London WORDS: Gary Budden One Saturday morning, maybe half nine, wake to a hubbub outside the bedroom window. Down on the street the sound of a crowd, murmurings, overlapping conversations. Something going on. Blearily peer through slatted blinds. Women in
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WORDS: Tina Richardson The solitary walker situated within the landscape is not a modern phenomenon, even if the term psychogeography is. The cover of Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) shows Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer Above
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LOCATION: Leeds WORDS: Morticia I’m not sure when my love affair with graveyards began. My Mum sometimes used to take a short cut through one with me on the way home from school but it was always hurried as she
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WORDS: Gareth E. Rees LOCATION: Plymouth, Devon The Crownhill Retail Park is on the road into Plymouth from Tavistock, via Dartmoor. My friend, Professor Dan Maudlin, is an architectural historian who lives in the area. He’s been to the B&Q in
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LOCATION: Flintshire, North Wales WORDS: Bobby Seal “The most wonderful and the strongest things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see.” Charles Kingsley – The Water-Babies We followed the river upstream, pressing on
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LOCATION: Hastings, East Sussex WORDS: Gareth E. Rees East Hill, a promontory of the South Downs: rolling green contours on a plateaux of sandstone high above Hastings. A funicular railway lift rattles up its seaward face. To its east, cliffs
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WORDS: Gary Budden “Delving into traditional folk is on the one hand like hearing the voices of people whose names are long forgotten, their stories, their creativity, dreams, hopes and struggles, and on the other is just a natural expression
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LOCATION: Ayrshire, Scotland WORDS: Alex Cochrane I am perched on top of a disused roller coaster ride, at the point where the coaster reaches the summit before it pauses, there’s a view of the Ayrshire countryside, adrenaline curses through the
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LOCATION: The Sea WORDS: Gareth E. Rees MUSIC: Martin Fuller AKA Dead Gull Below is a poem I performed in a series of coastal gigs for The Outer Church in summer 2014, now put to music by fisherman, film maker and
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LOCATION: Cleethorpes & Southport WORDS: Morticia When I was little I loved Sooty – well the Sooty show that is. I didn’t actually like Sooty himself as I thought he was a bit of a goody two shoes sneak all
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LOCATION: Britain WORDS: Tina Richardson In September 2015 Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography will be released by Rowman and Littlefield International. Edited by myself, contributions are from academics and researchers, and those working in the area of urban walking.
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LOCATION: Scotland WORDS: Aleks Scholz I’ve never been to Aberdeen’s airport before. I’ve seen all other public amenities of Aberdeen, harbour, train station, bus station, but not the airport. It is very exciting. The names of the airport hotels at
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LOCATION: Swansea MUSIC: ‘Amser’ by Fernhill Inside. Outside. Byth (Ever. Never). Tock Tick. A collision between mechanical time, seasonal time, life time, generational time, cultural time, poetic time, no time < particles of eternal love… Fernhill’s guitarist Ceri Rhys Matthews
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LOCATION: Brecon Beacons, Wales WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHS: Matt Botwood In this ongoing project I am trying to capture views of the Brecon Beacons that are edited out of most landscape imagery, and show more of the everyday life that goes on
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LOCATION: Lincolnshire WORDS & PICTURES: Maxim Peter Griffin You have to walk to the hill. Out of town, through the holloway at Deighton Close – by the old school for naughty boys – at the right time of year you’ll
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WORDS & MIX: Gareth E. Rees Cover illustration: Maxim Peter Griffin Below is a selection of UK-based music, all released in 2014, which touches upon themes of landscape, time consciousness, folklore, horror, hauntology and uncanny narratives. In other words, a
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LOCATION: Kent WORDS: Ben Thompson The 13th Century church of St Leonard’s occupies the kind of hillside position – looking down over the stranded Cinque Port of Hythe and then out across the English channel – which is traditionally described
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LOCATION: London WORDS: Gary Budden ONE – On why you are at Staples Corner In the weak and watery November light of a Monday afternoon, you sit with your nose pressed against the cold glass of the 266 bus. You
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LOCATION: Birmingham FILM: Andy Howlett A film about typography and ghost signs on the streets of Digbeth… Digbeth – A Hundred Thousand Welcomes from Deadly Serious Productions on Vimeo. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Andy walks around Birmingham and The Black Country
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LOCATION: Dover WORDS: Gareth E. Rees In the waters of Dover harbour, there was an eel with a head the size of an armchair. That was the rumour I heard anyway, aged 15 or thereabouts. Back in the late ’80s.
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LOCATION: Bristol (via Hackney) WORDS: Gareth E. Rees On November 27th, I’m going to be at Spike Island in Bristol, talking about my book Marshland, a trip through the marshes of East London, where I encounter a lost world of Victorian filter
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WORDS: Gareth E. Rees LOCATION: Cornwall, Sussex, Wales, Unnamed Cities Night time. I’m at my computer, listening to Kemper Norton’s new album, Loor. Loor is Cornish for moon. There’s no moon on the coast of East Sussex tonight. Not from my window,
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LOCATION: London WORDS: Gareth E. Rees. In which I discover evidence of mythical battles in the abandoned Victorian filter beds by Hackney Marsh…. Extracted From Marshland: Dreams & Nightmares on the Edge of London (Influx Press, 2013). [“Layered London, black, funny, marshy,
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LOCATION: London WORDS: Paul Hawkins I spent three years occupying properties and protesting in the (in)famous squatted community of Claremont Road in Leyton; the final bastion of resistance to the building of the M11 Link Road. Dorothy (Dolly) Watson, was
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LOCATION: Wiltshire WORDS: Gareth E. Rees The town of Amesbury, nestled in the heart of Salisbury plain by a loop in the River Avon, is the final stop on the A303 before Stonehenge. It’s one of the oldest consecutively inhabited areas in
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WORDS & SOUNDS: Mark S. Williamson (Spaceship) Constructed from field recordings collected on Walthamstow Marshes, this single track plays out an afternoon’s walk. Sounds, natural and man made, compete in this area of wilderness in London’s East End. Though for the
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WORDS: Gareth E. Rees & Gary Budden FILM: S J Fowler, recorded at #Camaradfest October 25th 2014, Rich Mix arts centre, Shoreditch A live performance of Rye’s Valhalla, in which Rees and Budden become disorientated on the Sussex coast.  
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LOCATION: Dover WORDS: Kit Caless This week I visited my mum in the idyllic village of Barham, Kent, home to celebrated racist David Starkey. She was there long before the historian though, and is a popular, active member of the
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LOCATION: Gateshead, Tyne & Wear MUSIC: High Rise by Caisson – recorded on location at the site of the former Dunston Rocket, Gateshead, 2012 WORDS: Craig Johnson Derwent Tower (also known as The Dunston Rocket) will be remembered as both
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LOCATION: Battle, East Sussex WORDS: Gary Budden recounts his merry day out at a Battle of Hastings reenactment It’s hard to ignore the fascination with death and bloody murder, the schoolkids and grown men alike fondling replica blades with a fetishist’s glee. For
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A mix of haunted ambience, analogue electronics, drones and telephone boxes by the wonderful The Geography Trip label. Find out more about their releases here. “The receiver sways slightly although the morning air is still. Something glints in the returned
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LOCATION: Thamesmead, London IMAGES: Mark Hollis Thamesmead is vast social housing development in South East London, built with GLC funding in the mid ‘60s on former marshland by the Thames. At the time it was hailed as the town of the future.
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LOCATION: East Sussex WORDS: Gareth E. Rees The train stops at a level crossing in an East Sussex field. As the train pulls away I’m left on a tiny platform beside a sign which reads: Winchelsea Ancient Town, Cinque Port
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LOCATION: Margate WORDS: Gary Budden ‘4.6 million shells, 2000 square feet of mosaic and one big mystery.’ The Shell Grotto (or Shell Temple as its sometimes known) is a subterranean passageway in Margate, Kent, discovered in 1835 and opened to
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LOCATION: Hastings WORDS: Gareth E. Rees Morrisons is at the bottom of my road, via an arched pedestrian underpass. It’s my quickest route into town by foot. It feels strange to walk through a car park without having a car
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LOCATION: East Midlands WORDS: Jo Dacombe Many of us collect things, picking up objects on a walk and taking them home. Why do we have a compulsion to do this? For a while I’ve had a fascination with walking: why we
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LOCATION: Hastings, East Sussex WORDS: Gareth E. Rees East Hill is a high promontory overlooking Hastings Old Town. From the top you can gaze out to sea across a jumble of lichen-speckled roofs and mediaeval Churches. Look up from the Old Town in summer
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LOCATION: London In this video, John Rogers uses the power of Google Street View to take you on a narrated guide through Finsbury and Pentonville, then onto Hounslow Heath, revealing the many layered myths and legends beneath the innocuous streets.
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MUSIC: Concretism FILM: The Kill Shop WORDS: Gareth E. Rees Here’s some music from the ever-excellent Concretism. Chris Sharp’s world is a sonic exploration of a rabies-blighted parallel past, frazzled by microwaves, where people in carefully-planned towns live in perpetual fear of
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LOCATION: Brede High Woods, East Sussex WORDS: Gareth E. Rees Something big has been moving through these ancient woods. On a dark slope, many of the trees are tilted and broken. Uprooted trunks like Gorgon faces. My dog, Hendrix, is
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LOCATION: Kent WORDS: Gary Budden Mention the words megalith and Neolithic to many people and they will instantly think (unless their eyes, understandably, glaze over) Stonehenge. Maybe Avebury, Silbury Hill or the standing stones at Callanish. Postcard-ready sites away from
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LOCATION: Brede High Woods, East Sussex WORDS: Gareth E. Rees Walking the ancient Brede High Woods, in the High Weald of Sussex, I came across some memorial benches… Nothing unusual in this. Their proliferation is what writers Ken Worpole & Jason Orton
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LOCATION: London, Newhaven, wherever this man takes his phone. WORDS: Gareth E. Rees Martin Fuller is a fisherman who also makes films about his meandering walks and bike rides through East London’s hinterlands – from the marshes and the Olympic
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LOCATION: Birmingham WORDS: Fife Psychogeography Even though I was a complete stranger in this city, I knew where I was going. Or I could feel where I was being led. It’s only when it moves out of sync that you begin
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LOCATION: London DOCUMENTARY: How We Used to Live [2013, Dir. Paul Kelly] WORDS: Gareth E. Rees “Whenever you go down the roads in Britain, you travel not in three dimensions but four. The fourth dimension is the past. And as
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LOCATION: London DOCUMENTARY: A Message to the World [dir. Caroline Catz] WORDS: Gareth E. Rees This is a fine slice of unofficial rock history, helping quash any notions that somehow the Sex Pistols and the Damned were created by some
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MUSIC: Lutine ~ White Flowers ~ a new album of haunting minmalist folk by Brighton-based duo, Heather Minor and Emma Morton, available to pre-order here LABEL: Front and Follow WORDS: Gareth E. Rees The debut album by Lutine emerges, shimmering, through a rift
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Location: ASDA, Silverhill, Hastings Words: Gareth E. Rees Superstores and their car parks are generally considered non-places, like budget hotel chains, storage facilities and motorway service stations. It doesn’t matter where in Britain you are, the Premier Inn, IKEA, Tesco,
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LOCATIONS: Southend-On-Sea, Ramsgate, Brighton WORDS: Gareth E. Rees I’m honoured to have been invited to read aloud some new pieces on the forthcoming Outer Church tour. The three night run includes gigs in Ramsgate, Southern-On-Sea and Brighton. Appropriately the tour is called
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LOCATION: Whitstable WORDS: Gary Budden ‘An old lady up the street told me there was a dead giant laying in the forest’ The oddest entry I’ve come across in the nebulous genre of landscape writing/psychogeography/white blokes walking around taking notes,
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WORDS: Gareth E. Rees In 2001 I became a weekend DJ in Filthy McNasty’s, a pub in Islington, sadly no longer with us. I was paid in beer to put one song on after another, while the pub ebbed and
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LOCATION: On a road between town and country, wakefulness and dreaming MUSIC: Hand of Stabs FILM: Giles Whitehead WORDS: Gareth E. Rees This is the new work by Hand of Stabs, a progressive bone-age pagan skiffle band previously featured on Unofficial
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LOCATION: A Warren, Somewhere WORDS: Gary Budden When most people my age think of Watership Down their minds tend to immediately turn not to the classic 1972 novel by Richard Adams, but to the animated film adaptation that traumatised legions
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WARNING – contains explicit, violent imagery. Not for the squeamish or the easily offended. LOCATION: London WORDS & PICTURES: Martin Hayes Ten-past Six, Already Dark Mossy skulls line the Effra in my red imaginings of you. I will cut this
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LOCATION: West Wycombe Melmoth the Wanderer makes queasy, occult music mixes that explore uncanny British geographies. Snippets of dialogue ooze through ambient drones and electronic beats. In The Hell Fire Caves, he explores the subterranean terrors that lurk in the diabolic warrens
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Duality Field #1 by Laica LOCATION: DEVON Electronic artist Laica specialises in dark, broken techno and brooding industrial atmospheres. A recent piece, Environs, pushed the field recordings to the fore and eroded the beats and pulses, until the whole piece evoked the sort of fevered
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By Gareth E. Rees Signs, signs, they’re everywhere on our streets, telling jokes and stories. Here are some favourites, taken on my walks. 1. Sign Warns Cyclists About Itself 2. Pairings 3. Let’s Move Here 4. Polite Notice on
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LOCATION: KENT Neolithic soul drone collective Hand of Stabs perform ‘Hallux Working’ by a derelict monument to a man who chopped his toe off in 1835… “In February 1835, the 5th Earl of Darnley was walking in the grounds of
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By Gareth E. Rees LOCATION: Hastings It’s a wintry Wednesday night at The Stag, a Tudor pub in the old town. I sit beneath a cabinet containing two smoke-dried cats, discovered in the pub’s chimney in the 1940s. The official
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By The Lowland Hundred [Exotic Pylon, 2014] LOCATION: West Wales A howl of wind and drone. Thunder rumbles. Birdsong mangled in a slew of dragged chains and steel jaws. Suddenly, piano. A tremelo voice singing: “On a south facing slope, hill
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(1975, dir. David Gladwell) LOCATION: Norfolk Words: Gareth E Rees This film from 1975 is as close to the spirit of my own book Marshland as I’ve come across in film or literature. It has the feel of a documentary,
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Location: Lincolnshire Maxim Peter Griffin is a landscape artist, cartographer and walker based in Lincolnshire. He also makes very short films. Super Grass It seems that this grass is super. So Mote It Be Blink and you’ll miss the horror
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Artist: Maxim Peter Griffin Location: Lincolnshire Words: Gareth E. Rees Maxim Peter Griffin is an artist, cartographer and walker based in Lincolnshire. He catalogues the contours, colours and latent energies of his county’s landscape. Fields. Motorways. Holloways. Paths. Pylons. He
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[With thanks to Gary Budden @gary_budden] Across Romney Marsh rides the ‘Scarecrow’, AKA The Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn, leader of Kentish smugglers in Russell Thorndike’s novels. Here are the credits form the Disney TV series from 1963… The Disneyfication of 18th
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By Gareth E. Rees LOCATION: The Human Body Times past, I’d go to the doctor with a health complaint. Stomach pain. A persistent cough. An incessant urge to wee. That kind of thing. Times past, the doctor would frown, ask
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WORDS & PICTURES: Gareth E. Rees A short story, originally published in Wyrd Daze (more information here). There was a rat beneath the floorboards, I could tell by the gnawing. Gnrrrk. Krrrrrrrrk. Gnnnrk. Krrrrk. I don’t know what it was
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A review of On Walking, by Phil Smith [Triarchy Press, 2014] Words: Gareth E. Rees Location: East Anglia Phil Smith (aka Crab Man, Mytho, Anton Vagus, Spacetart) fuses walking with performance art. He describes his practice as mythogeography – a
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In my book Marshland I write about my hallucinatory experiences while listening to music and walking. At certain moments, the music blends with the sound of wind, hooting horns, dog barks and human voices, creating a unique audio mix. At times
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LOCATION: Hastings Words: Gareth E. Rees The Stade is a shingle beach from where fishermen launch their boats. At low tide the shingle is strung with fish heads and crab claws. A harbour wall protects the beach. Herring gulls stand
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By Chris Lambert “This is a beautiful, compelling book of folklore. What’s most haunting about this book is that the stories feel like they’ve been lingering at the back of your mind all your life. The sparse, propulsive prose gives
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By Ætheric Anomalies Drone, ambience and cinematography meet in this mashup of Ben Wheatley’s ‘A Field in England’ with additional material from Julian House Trailer’s for that same film. This was originally performed by Ætheric Anomalies, an alias of the
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Influx Press Connecting Nothing with Something explores the conflicted and shifting landscape of the south east English coast. This anthology looks at art led regeneration, hidden history, the ghosts of youth culture, white cliffs, empty holidays and kisses under
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On the day we moved into a dilapidated Victorian town house in Hastings, my wife’s grandfather died. But death was already in the house, waiting for us. We bought the house from a woman who bought it from the family
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By Gareth E. Rees, illustrated by Ada Jusic [Influx Press, 2013] Marshland is a deep map of the east London marshes, a blend of local history, folklore and weird fiction, where nothing is quite as it seems…. “Layered London, black,
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Jetsam and Gareth E. Rees [Clay Pipe Music, 2013] A dark sonic journey through the edgelands of London, mixing spoken word, acoustic and electronic sound… ‘Unique & unexpectedly beautiful. Expand Collapse’ – Seance Radio ‘The ensemble works around the words
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By Sam Berkson Influx Press Life in Transit is a poetry collection from Sam Berkson that explores the experience of public transport in neoliberal Britain. Whether it’s protesting the third runway at Heathrow, questioning Tannoy announcements in railway stations or celebrating
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by the Psychogeographical Commission “This recording documents the inner circle of the Glasgow Subway system which travels in an anticlockwise direction (widdershins), a constant banishing ritual performed daily upon the whole of the west side of Glasgow. The Subway first
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A video of John Rogers in Gilbert’s Slade, a boggy triangle in Epping Forest after he felt “the call of the wild.” After reading about druids out in Wiltshire and the usual expected places, John says: “I’m interested in
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