On the Trail of the Green Man: An interview with Nina Lyon
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
An Unreliable Guide to London
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
Between Place & Imagination
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
Common Ground: Rob Cowen on Edgeland Literature, Psychogeography & Nature Writing
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
The Walker and the Landscape
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
The Death of a Fish in Hackney’s Abandoned Filter Beds
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,
The Transhistorical Folk Landscapes of Lutine
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
The Drinker’s London & the Poems of Salena Godden
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
Requiem for a Village
(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,
On Walking… And Stalking Sebald
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
