From Ivory Towers to Passionflowers: Tina Richardson Interviews Fenella Brandenburg

 

My interview with Fenella Brandenburg coincides with her move from academia into the world of a full-time writer-author. Here we talk conference storm-outs, academic superegos, psychogeography and passion projects. I hope you enjoy our dialogue: as C. S. Lewis said ‘Fenella is on the move’!

I find Dr. Brandenburg sitting - not coincidentally, I’m sure – in the Islington café she insisted we meet in, called ‘Tina, We Salute You’ (her little psychogeographic joke). When she told me we were meeting here, I honestly thought she was making up the name. I’ve included the photo above to prove its existence.

Dr. Brandenburg, who was promoted to Reader just before her retirement from academia (it turns out this was her way of saying ‘f**k you’ to Higher Education), looks very unlike the person I saw last at the 2017 4WCOP Psychogeography Conference. It transpires she was wearing a white bobbed wig and was dressing like a ‘bag lady’ in order to maintain her disguise. It seems there is now no reason to keep up the pretence. I note that she actually has somewhat Titian hair (not unlike my own) and is a zappy dresser: not a fleece or ankle sock in sight!

Brandenburg, who recently moved from somewhere in the North of England (she seems reluctant to say where, for some unknown reason – although the academic rumour mill says it is related to reports of stalking made by another academic) to Islington to, as she says “Be with my peoples”. The pressing questions are ‘why her move from academia?’ and ‘what was the fallout of 4WCOP?’. Here is the transcript of our interview in full and unedited:

TINA: Thank you for meeting me, Fenella. I love the choice of venue. How have things been since you left academia a month ago and how did the university feel about being snubbed when you resigned the day of receiving your readership?

FENELLA: Well, it had been a long time coming, the Readership, and I had been overlooked on a number of occasions. I actually only hung on in HE for that long so that I could resign when I finally received it. You know the adage ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’, well the ‘cold’ was about 5 years of torture, but was well worth it. The adage turns out to be true, but for all the reasons that are the opposite of what is implied by the adage, if one wants to get semantic about it. That, and also I heard rumours that that Bollinger bloke was moving to my university, and I just wasn’t up to having to deal with his ‘advances’ any more.

T: I’d like to talk about David Bollinger later, if that’s alright with you, but for the moment, what have you been doing, since you left?

F: Well, I very speedily set up a local writing group. I plan to take the same approach that the postmodern university does to how it ‘tasks’ its own academics. This is oriented around what HE calls the Work Load Model (WLM), however I will be calling my model of work allocation applied to the members of my fiction writing group the WLF, The Work Load Fiction. I think this will work out well for all concerned and it allows me to take a firm hold on what is happening and provide a hypodermic approach to the management of the group (for those of you not familiar with the term it comes from communications theory, it means top down and coming from above). People love being micromanaged, despite their protestations to the contrary.

T: So what do you see as being wrong with academic workload being managed by those who are clearly qualified enough to be managers?

F: The WLM epitomises the postmodern university par excellence. It is the moment where the university’s bureaucratic superego reaches its full potential in the daily control of its academics. For Freud, the superego represents all authority figures (initially the Father), but eventually the part of the individual that negotiates with the id (the basic instincts), producing the ego, the aspect of the individual that is presented to the world. On the level of power, say a Foucauldian model of power, if you will, this is tantamount to a kind of self-surveillance. I am absolutely behind the WLM and have no problem in bringing it into the creative sphere, in this case fiction writing. Creative people can get completely out of control, there is no absolute structure for them to adhere to, and they must be constrained at all costs.

T: Thank you, Fenella. I’m not sure everyone would agree with you there, but I appreciate your candour. Can I ask you: Why the move to creative writing?

F: Well, I’d met my 5 year plan: to leave at the point of my Readership. Let me just say, plans are incredibly important: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 year plans are not fiction at all, whatever academics say. They help keep you on track and ensure you meet targets, which are not at all unreasonable despite what you may read in regard to those adversaries of HE research-related policy. In regard to my move: I’m a well-published academic (as you know, your own publishing company has published some of my work on 'presupposed actualization'). I’m already an author. Really, how hard can it be?

T: Can we talk about psychogeography? What are you currently working on in that field and do you still consider yourself a psychogeographer?

F: Well, I am currently working on a project on abandoned shopping centres in the US. Partially inspired by your research on the Trafford Centre. I am also looking at a rural space, the Black Forest national park in Baden-Wűrrttemberg. As you know, I was born near there and I inherited my family cabin in the area. I am however, somewhat offended by your second question: that I may no longer consider myself a psychogeographer. I appreciate the damage done by the paper Bollinger and I delivered at 4WCOP 2017, but I feel we more than made up for that in our paper based on Ballard’s Concrete Island in 2019.

T: Talking about David Bollinger: can I ask you some questions about some of the gossip about where you and he were located. During 2016-2020 rumours abounded about where you were both working. I heard that Bollinger had an office in the Psychology Department at Huddersfield at one time. But managers in that school denied that he even existed, despite him clearly having a desk and a label on the door. One of the academics - a friend of mine, Dr. Alex Bridger - said he knew Bollinger was there as he saw his coat over the back of the chair. That, and he actually shared an office with him. I also heard that you had a temporary office in the old Maltings building, that once was the Geography Department at the University of Leeds, but has now been demolished. You also, purportedly, had an office in the School of Design at one point. But then, I also heard that you were popping up in online Zoom meetings at MMU in the early days of Covid.

F: I cannot vouch for Bollinger. You could ask Charlotte Tilbury, his wife. She’s a counsellor and also writes for The Guardian, I believe (good luck with her psychoanalysing that miscreant, is all I can say!). However, I can confirm that I did work at Leeds during the period you mention, and I will supply proof of that, which you can include on your blog. [included above]

T: Thank you for your clarification of the rumours, Fenella. Can I just ask one more question before we end the interview, for our psychogeographic audience? Where do you see psychogeography going?

F: Well, as you know, you very arrogantly labelled the current phase of psychogeography as ‘The New Psychogeography’ in your own book Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography. I have to say, however reluctantly, that I am more on the same page as Bollinger with this: psychogeography is reaching its zenith inasmuch as it is now all about its own undoing and negation. This is best summed up by an urban-walking colleague of mine, who will remain nameless, who said, when I asked him the question ‘Why did the psychogeographer cross the road?: ‘I’ve no idea why the psychogeographer crossed the road, but I bet when they got there they found Iain Sinclair had already written about it’!

T: Thank you so much for your time, Fenella.

The Alternative Conclusion to Walking Inside Out

 

A few weeks ago I posted the 'official' version of the conclusion of Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography (Rowman and Littlefield International 2015). However, if you would like a copy of the first version, the one that wasn't published, you can get a copy here. It deals specifically with the detractors of psychogeography. For those of you who don't want to download and read the full alternative conclusion, below is an extract:

Conclusion: Psychogeography PLC

by Tina Richardson

So as to keep up-to-date with any current media-related references to psychogeography, from time to time I type into my search engine ‘psychogeography’ followed by the month and year. In April 2014 I did the same and an article in the The Guardian paired psychogeography with the name of a Britpop singer: ‘Damon Albarn and the Heavy Seas Review – Rich in Personal Psychogeography’ (2014). If Coverley thought ‘the game was up’ following Self’s articles in The Independent, I wonder what this says about psychogeography today? Even though it could be easy to be cynical about its current populist and mutable use, this is not a particularly constructive approach to take towards psychogeography. Rather than seeing it as a co-opting of the term, or an aligning of some individuals to something ‘trendy’ that we feel they have little connection to, we might see this as a compliment.

In the introduction I mentioned how Sinclair has often been placed in the position of defender of the field of psychogeography. Psychogeography has plenty of detractors and, while this could be seen as a negative reflection of it, I prefer to see it as promoting valuable discussion. It also enables an academic engagement with critics who are often outside academia. While I do not see myself as the current ‘union rep’ of psychogeography, I would like to look at some of the comments by some critics and work through the issues they have raised, since they are a reflection of what individuals think about psychogeography in Britain today and are, therefore, part of the project at hand.

Sinclair has expressed his own concerns about the term, however these are often decontextualized by others into snappy quotes and at times represent a specific strand of psychogeography that he may be commenting on, or even another period of time in its development. For instance his references to it being a ‘franchise’ in the The Fortean Times are referring to an aspect of 1990s psychogeography: “There was a kind of strategy to this rebranding, I was quite happy to run with it as a franchise, as a way of talking about doing the things I'd always done and providing a useful description that could be discussed in public. It became a bit of a monster on the back of that” (Pilkington and Baker 2002, 3). [cont...] Please, click here for the full conclusion.

Conclusion of Walking Inside Out

When I author-edited Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography (Rowman and Littlefield International 2015) back in 2014, I wrote two conclusions. The first one was, in the most part, a reply to the critics of psychogeography. Below is an extract from the second draft, the one that was published (please click here to download the whole chapter), which I am making available for the first time. I will post the original draft in the next blog post. 

Conclusion: The New Psychogeography

Tina Richardson

Resurgence and Revival

In an interview in Fortean Times in 2002, Sinclair was asked what his involvement was in the revival of psychogeography during the 1990s, he replied: “In a classic sense I don’t think I had anything to do with it. But the whole term has been dusted down and reinvented and re-used by people like Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association” (cited in Pilkington and Baker 2002, 3). Of this period in psychogeography, Sinclair explains that “there was a kind of strategy to this rebranding, I was quite happy to run with it as a franchise, as a way of talking about doing the things I'd always done and providing a useful description that could be discussed in public. It became a bit of a monster on the back of that” (ibid.). He goes on to explain that by the time he was using the term it was “more like a psychotic geographer…a raging bull journey against the energies of the city” (ibid.).

At the point of writing this conclusion, well over ten years on from Sinclair’s comment above, what has psychogeography become in the second decade into the 21^st century? And, is the current resurgence just a continuation of the one Sinclair mentions (the one of the London Psychogeographical Association), or has it morphed into something else?[i] James D. Sidaway says of human geography and its related fields that “increasing attention is being dedicated to the social relations of emotion and action under the label of ‘affect’” (2009, 1092). If there is a current focus on the affective response to space then this could be connected to what is called placiality (Edward Casey). Postmodern space has become so complex in its palimpsest form that our reaction to it has reached a kind of critical mass whereby we feel compelled to attempt to articulate our response to the terrain. This is also reflected in cultural theory on space/place of the late 20^th century (such as that of Henri Lefebvre and Gaston Bachelard), as discussed by Stephen Hardy in ‘Placiality: The Renewal of the Significance of Place in Modern Cultural Theory’ (2000). In 1984 Michel Foucault stated that “[t]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space” (2001, 237), but of today’s epoch we can confidently say that it is one of ‘place’. The concept of place is now finding its way into popular/everyday vocabulary. In December 2014 a BBC Radio 4 programme entitled Sense of Place was broadcast. It included an interview with Joanne Parker who, on the concept of place, said: “one person’s place is very much another person’s space…landscape is first and foremost a way of creating belongingness and tying us together” (2014).

Writing at the same time as Sidaway, Bonnett says that “British psychogeography should be understood as a site of struggle over the politics of loss within radical imagination” (2009, 46). Our desire to not only explore the social history of a particular space, but also to express it in a personal and affective way that responds to the aesthetics of that place as it is for us, is one that comes about through description via our imagination, an individual expression which is different for everyone, in other words a psychogeographically articulated response. Bonnett says a “much broader group of people are now interested and involved in psychogeography, many of whom have no interest in the Situationists. It may be argued that this is a form of depolitization or that psychogeography has outgrown the limited and exclusionary world of the revolutionary avant-garde” (2013). If this is the case, then the sharing of psychogeographical accounts from whatever perspective (activist or otherwise) have been enabled through contemporary technology, with websites, blogs, social networking and aided by new ‘geo apps’.

Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have granted individuals access to data and aided them in creating representations of space/place in a totally different way, as the hobby of geocaching attests to (geocaching involves individuals locating secreted packages, with clues to their location loaded online, via GPS). Even navigating the internet itself has been compared to exploring urban space (see ‘Psychogeography, Détournement, Cyberspace’ by Amy J. Elias [2010]).[ii] Often appearing under the umbrella of neogeography, the use of the internet and mobile technologies opens up space for groups and individuals and enables them to readily share the products of their walks. For example, OpenStreetMap is open source software by the OpenStreetMap Foundation and is a collaboration by its contributors providing free geographical data and mapping. Anyone can contribute by signing-up online. The data of routes walked can be picked up by using GPS software on a smartphone, then made into maps and freely shared.[iii]

This digital and satellite way of creating maps enables a synthesis with the older peripatetic method of simply talking and writing about walks. It allows the psychogeographer to include more tools for tracking their walks, presenting their information and making it available for others to access. These maps and forms of data collection show the infinite possibility of cartographies and ways for walkers to present personal and qualitative information. They offer a large degree of control of the mapping process to the user/cartographer. The open source software that is often used for these types of collaborations to a large extent disengages the data from capitalist production and, hence, provides more freedom of expression, production and distribution. This enables their use in explorations of space, creating mapping-oriented art for pleasure or for a variety of community-based projects.

The current resurgence in walking has coincided with a renewed interest in cartography encouraged by the availability of digital tools. While these tools are often used by non-specialist users in community and arts-based projects, the contemporary psychogeographer is at once embracing and critical of the new technology, preferring to use it as one tool amongst many for creating, recording and producing output from the dérive.

In The View From the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes (2013) Keiller says that the current revival in the UK is very much Situationist oriented and is connected to the desire to explore the urban landscape with tools such as the dérive (2013, 133). While this seems to counter what Bonnet says above, this is may be more to do with a matter of perspective. Both seem to be occurring, separately and simultaneously. The objectives for walking are over-determined. Some groups and individuals are interested in the process and practice of the dérive-type walk and are not politically-oriented. Others are attempting an activist pursuit, on differing scales. And some, even though they are not overtly being interventionist, nevertheless will be intervening in the space as a side-effect of what their other intentions might be.

---

[i] In an online article in June 2014 on The Quietus ‘‘A Living Memory’: Iain Sinclair on Life at 70’ describes the term ‘psychogeography’ as having “threatened to become an albatross around his neck” (Burrows 2014).

[ii] The flexibility of psychogeography enables it to be extended into many field, such as tourism, as can be seen in Charles McIntyres book Tourism and Retail: The Psychogeography of Liminal Consumption (2012).

[iii] For those who are interested in technology and its uses in psychogeography, the geographer and psychogeographer Tim Waters provides examples of his own work in this field on his blog www.thinkwhere.wordpress.com.

Let’s Talk About What People Don’t Like About Psychogeography – Part 3

The Situation...

Please click here for part 1 and part 2 of the blog.

Despite these criticisms (which I do actually consider to be constructive to discussion, even if the actual criticisms themselves are negative ones), I believe psychogeography brings something useful forth. In particular it draws attention to overlooked places (often these liminal spaces criticised by Owen Hatherley). In a series of articles in the Guardian newspaper in 2009 called 'Secret Britain' Sinclair explains the affect of stumbling across these types of places:

These sites, come upon by accident, prick our imagination, provoke reverie. Questing for one story, we blunder into another: we must train ourselves to expect the unexpected. The thing hidden behind a high wall is still part of our true 'legacy', but buildings and sites sometimes have to wait to achieve a haunting dereliction, to become legitimate targets for vulgar curiosity. That's how the Secret Britain guide philosophy works: when you don't see it, it is still there. And when you do, it is on the point of disappearance. (2009, 5).

As the ‘Secret Britain’ article demonstrates, the homogenising effect of neoliberal space coupled with signs that prohibit action and entry at every turn, discourage our questioning of how urban space got to be the way it is. One needs to de-familiarise these spaces for them to be seen clearly for the first time. David Prescott-Steed discusses this de-familiarisation in regard to the dérive, although what he says applies to any critical form of urban walking: “de-familiarisation not only fosters critical thinking but, furthermore, finds it manifest in the form of a creative negotiation” (2013, 75). He explains why the dérive has been useful as part of his own practice. In connecting critical thinking to the physiological act of walking he believes this makes “theory actionable” through “praxis” (2013, 72) and it is formed through “the application of a theory to everyday activities” (2013, 81). This is somewhat echoed when Rebecca Solnit says: “Walking the streets is what links up reading the map with living one’s life” (2002, 176).

One of the most engaging things about psychogeography, or even urban walking in its broadest sense, is that anyone can do it. Since most of us in Britain live in urban space, 82.4% as of the 2011 census (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs 2013, 1), all we have to do is open the door and step into it.

Even if you do not carry the walk out in any critical way, simply thinking about the physical act of walking, and the somatic sensation of thoughtfully connecting oneself with the ground, turns the walk into something entirely different from a regular stroll. Your walk has then become a form of critical psychogeography: “Walking has created paths, roads, trade routes; generated local and cross-continental senses of place; shaped cities, parks; generated maps, guidebooks, gear, and, further afield, a vast library of walking stories and poems, of pilgrimages, mountaineering expeditions, meanders, and summer picnics. The landscapes, urban and rural, gestate the stories, and the stories bring us back to the sites of this history” (Solnit 2002, 4). This quote by Solnit, reflects the complexity of the relationship between urban space and walking, in particular in regard to texts on the city. The output of walking in the form of, say, maps and stories cannot be separated from our own impressions of the city itself.

Please click here for part 4 (final part).

Related Links:
Iain Sinclair in Walking Inside Out – Extract
Lose Yourself in Melbourne – David Prescott-Steed

Bibliography:
Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. "Rural Population and Migration." 2013.
Prescott-Steed, David. The Psychogeography of Urban Architecture. Boca Raton: BrownWalker Press, 2013.
Sinclair, Iain. "A World You Never Knew Existed." Secret Britain, April 2009 2009, 4-6.
Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso, 2002.

Let’s Talk About What People Don’t Like About Psychogeography – Part 2

Please click here for part 1.

The Setting...

In recent times there have been what could be described as forms of low-level snobbery that have sprung up around psychogeography. For instance, for a reason I do not particularly understand, Will Self's column-turned-books on psychogeography have been harshly judged. Many people do not consider Self to be a psychogeographer, although it is unclear why. He certainly travels urban spaces on foot and also brings a personal perspective to his walks, so this may be more to do with a dislike of his media profile as a broadcaster/writer than as a psychogeographer. Sinclair, too, does not consider Self to be a psychogeographer, but he does not consider himself to be one either – so I appreciate something else might be occurring there. This is what Sinclair said to The Guardian journalist Stuart Jeffries in 2004: “For me, it's a way of psychoanalysing the psychosis of the place in which I happen to live. I'm just exploiting it because I think it's a canny way to write about London. Now it's become the name of a column by Will Self, in which he seems to walk the South Downs with a pipe, which has got absolutely nothing to do with psychogeography. There's this awful sense that you've created a monster” (cited in Jeffries , 2004).

In the same interview the writer and co-expounder of London history, Patrick Wright, is quoted as saying of Sinclair: "I don't care about Iain's hokey-pokey malevolent stuff", however, he praises Sinclair's work overall and its critique of Thatcherism's colonisation of space in the East End (cited in Jeffries, 2004). Wright’s criticism is levelled at Sinclair’s occult writing, though, but the language, nevertheless, is derogatory. Even if there is some elitism around what criteria should be attached to someone in order to classify them as a psychogeographer, attempting to locate a definitive criteria is not easy.

There also exists disapproval directed at the broad field of psychogeography. The most recent outspoken criticisms seem to be from Owen Hatherley. For instance in Tough Crowd in 2010 he said (in relation to his, at the time, new book): "I don't want Militant Modernism to be totally associated with the psychogeography industry that's around now. There are no ley lines in my books, there's no pentagrams" (2010, 32). I do find this somewhat presumptuous: a form of psychogeography practiced by one person is invariably different from that practiced by the next. I also feel there might be a slight flavour of high-handedness against the people he is alluding to here. Also, what, exactly, does he mean by "the psychogeography industry"? If he is referring to the co-opting of psychogeography by the marketplace, this is a criticism that should be levelled at the marketplace, not psychogeographers. In The London Review of Books, he brings up the subject again when discussing Jonathan Meades' book Museums Without Walls. He says: "However, unlike Iain Sinclair or the London 'psychogeographers', with their taste for pathetic fallacies and loathing for anything remotely new, Meades does not fetishise spaces between" (2013, 27). So, it seems, psychogeographers are also being 'called to task' for their discussions on liminal spaces.

Geoff Nicholson also has levelled some pejorative comments at psychogeography, although they are aimed rather more at the Situationists (as is the case with Rebecca Solnit) and some of the experiences he has had when attending specific events, such as the New York Conflux festival, where he attended a Situationist-type walk made by drawing around a martini glass on a map and following the route, of which he concludes: “It occurred to me, not exactly for the first time, that psychogeography didn’t have much to do with the actual experience of walking. It was a nice idea, a clever idea, an art project, a conceit, but it had very little to do with any real experience of walking, And it confirmed to me, what I’d really known all along, that walking isn’t much good as a theoretical experience” (2010, 150).

Doreen Massey also directs criticism at the Situationists’ perambulations in For Space (2005): “At its worst it can resolve into the least politically convincing of situationist capers – getting laddish thrills (one presumes) from rushing down dark passages, dreaming of labyrinths and so forth. (Is this not itself another form of eroticised colonisation of the city?)” (2005, 47). This expresses the often masculine approach to a particular form of psychogeography, also the colonising aspect already discussed in the introduction. Not that I would dismiss these “capers” outright. While they might not be considered critical in any way exploring our towns and cities in a way that opens up the space to us in a productive way, and that responds to our inner desire, is a form of self-expression and could be considered a counter strategy to the dominant signifiers that abound in urban space: “It doesn’t matter what the motivation is. What matters is that in each instance a kind of motivation nevertheless exists. It is that expectation in mind that informs which route we will take and, in this way, what we will see along the way to achieving it” (Prescott-Steed 2013, 45).

Related Links:
Tough Crowd
The Situationists

Bibliography:
Jeffries, Stuart. "On the Road." The Guardian, 2014.
Hatherley, Owen. "Re-Imagining Modernism." Tough Crowd, 2010, 31-48.
Hatherley, Owen. "Joe, Jerry and Bomber Blair." The London Review of Books, 2013, 27-30.
Massey, Doreen. For Space. London and Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2005.
Nicholson, Geoff. The Lost Art of Walking. Chelmsford: Harbour Books (East) Ltd, 2010.
Prescott-Steed, David. The Psychogeography of Urban Architecture. Boca Raton: BrownWalker Press, 2013.

Let’s Talk About What People Don’t Like About Psychogeography – Part 1

The Set...

So as to keep up-to-date with any current media-related references to psychogeography, from time to time I type into my search engine ‘psychogeography’ followed by the month and year. In April 2014 I did the same and an article in the The Guardian paired psychogeography with the name of a Britpop singer: ‘Damon Albarn and the Heavy Seas Review – Rich in Personal Psychogeography’ (2014). If Coverley thought ‘the game was up’ following Self’s articles in The Independent, I wonder what this says about psychogeography today? Even though it could be easy to be cynical about its current populist and mutable use, this is not a particularly constructive approach to take towards psychogeography. Rather than seeing it as a co-opting of the term, or an aligning of some individuals to something ‘trendy’ that we feel they have little connection to, we might see this as a compliment.

In the introduction to Walking Inside Out I mentioned how Iain Sinclair has often been placed in the position of defender of the field of psychogeography. Psychogeography has plenty of detractors and, while this could be seen as a negative reflection of it, I prefer to see it as promoting valuable discussion. It also enables an academic engagement with critics who are often outside academia. While I do not see myself as the current ‘union rep’ of psychogeography, I would like to look at some of the comments by some critics and work through the issues they have raised, since they are a reflection of what individuals think about psychogeography in Britain today and are, therefore, part of the project at hand.

Sinclair has expressed his own concerns about the term, however these are often decontextualized by others into snappy quotes ripe for media comment and at times represent a specific strand of psychogeography that he may be commenting on, or even based on another period of time in its development. For instance his references to it being a ‘franchise’ in the The Fortean Times are referring to an aspect of 1990s psychogeography: “There was a kind of strategy to this rebranding, I was quite happy to run with it as a franchise, as a way of talking about doing the things I'd always done and providing a useful description that could be discussed in public. It became a bit of a monster on the back of that” (Pilkington and Baker 2002, 3). I am not sure if this reflects the practice as it is in the 'noughties', at least not for the practitioners themselves and certainly not for the contributors included here. Nevertheless, the term 'franchise' alludes to the co-opting of it, such as its capitalisation as a 'product', which is a valid issue. While I believe the benefits of psychogeography far outweigh its negative effects, attempting to prevent its co-optation are difficult and ongoing, perhaps impossible (but this goes for culture in general - hence, the 'culture industry'). In postmodernity everything is potentially 'up for grabs' by consumer society.

In February 2014, on his blog The Great Wen: A London Blog, Peter Watts uploaded the post ‘New London Writing, or What the Fuck is Psychogeography Anyway?’. The title of the post implies that this is simply going to be a completely negative critique of the practice, where actually it is not unsympathetic and raises an important issue about property developers: “By my experience, then, psychogeography is used as much to shift property as it is to expand and combine the frontiers of space and mind, which is perhaps inevitable in London, where any amount of folklore and fauna only has any value if it can be seen to have a positive effect on land price” (Watts 2014). This, however, is a criticism levelled at the selling and procurement of real estate, and not one directed at psychogeographers or the work they do. Some of the potential problems in regards to capitalising on psychogeography include: unethical organisations aligning themselves with psychogeographers under the guise of appearing to address community-living issues, businesses adding it to their profile in the same way they do with corporate social responsibility, and the hijacking of it by capital by applying it to consumer products in order to exploit its commercial potential. However, I think it is still not popular enough for it to be re-appropriated to any real degree at this time. Also its, sometimes, political and/or often activist association might repel many (although this did not deter capital from co-opting the potential commerciality of punk). Alastair Bonnett says: “A much broader group of people are now interested and involved in psychogeography, many of whom have no interest in the Situationists. It may be argued that this is a form of depolitization of that psychogeography has outgrown the limited and exclusionary world of the revolutionary avant-garde” (2013).

While the elusiveness of the categorisation of psychogeography lends it to being a useful tool for the urban walker, this might also work against its co-opting within neoliberal discourse because it is so difficult to qualify (although the opposite might also be the case, its vagueness makes it pliable and, hence, appropriable). It is also possible that a 'bandwagon' of spurious psychogeographers could lead to the de-valuing of the term 'psychogeography', although this does go against the basic principles of the critique of the spectacle (as it would have been for the Situationists). However, none of these scenarios would be difficult to critically evaluate in a given setting providing you understand the political implications and marketing potential of media-hyped trends...

Please click here for part 2.

Related Links:
Iain Sinclair
Schizocartography
STEPZ: Psychogeography Zine

Bibliography:
Bonnett, Alastair. "Psychogeography." In Oxford Bibliographies Online: Geography, 2013.
Pilkington, Mark and Phil Baker. "City Brain." Fortean Times, 2002.
Watts, Peter. "New London Writing, or What the Fuck Is Psychogeography Anyway?": The Great Wen, 2014.

The World Congress of Perambulatory Sutures

The World Congress of Perambulatory Sutures took place in the North of England this last week, culminating in two extraordinary events, one held in Huddersfield and one in Leeds. I use the word ‘extraordinary’ here in the definition of both ‘unusual or remarkable’ and also ‘specially convened’. These events were ‘Class Wargames’ at the University of Huddersfield (13th May 2015) and ‘The Inside Out of Walking Inside Out’ at the University of Leeds (14th May 2015). Psychogeographers travelled through time and space for these events. From as geographically far away as Paris, as temporally distant as the London Psychogeographical Association of the 1990s and as virtually far away as the online Outbounding forum, The Art of Exploring.

Class Wargames
University of Huddersfield 13 May 2015

Dr Alexander John Bridger arranged for Fabian Tompsett, Richard Essex and Dr Richard Barbrook to introduce Class Wargames to interested parties: gamely academics, itinerant psychogeographers and general ne’er do wells with a curious nature. Class Wargames is based on Guy Debord’s ‘The Game of War’ and in his honour alcohol was included in order to help channel the God of the dérive. Sides were taken, swords were drawn, turrets were stormed – all in the name of class and psychogeographical boundaries.

Anyone partaking in Class Wargames may put themselves forward for ‘activist’ or ‘associate’ status once they have played. However this title can only be tenuously attributed to those who drank so much they could barely even pronounce ‘Debord’ and also those whose attention span was equivalent to that of a single-celled organism.

The 8 hour long game culminated in a win for the underdogs – or rather underdog as by this time three of the four players on that team had found the Harold Wilson statue and spent the last two hours of the game discussing the Bolsheviks and feeding him crisps. For some, the event was a dérive in itself, as they walked from Huddersfield through the night straight to the event that took place the next day at the University of Leeds, sleeping under a bush in the Vice Chancellor's garden till woken by maintenance staff at around 7.00am.

The Inside Out of Walking Inside Out
University of Leeds 14 May 2015

At ‘The Inside Out of Walking Inside Out’ Dr Tina Richardson not only led us on a wander through her new edited volume, but also through the scene of British urban walking in the 21st century. Plying the audience with wine gums, marshmallows and chocolate buttons, she attempted to bribe the audience into buying the book by giving away key rings. One of the audience members stormed out half way through in protest at “the lack of alcoholic beverages at a freakin’ book launch” and threw his key ring at Richardson, knocking off her trilby. Richardson had to pass over to Dr. Bridger to continue reading while she snorted from her Bach Rescue Remedy teat pipette in an attempt to recover.

Richardson was her usual contentious and unagreeable self, throwing terms like ‘post-Sinclairian’ into the mix in order to start an argument, at the same time alienating all the literary psychogeographers in the audience and the London-based ones in one fell swoop – not least Sinclair himself. She explained ‘the new psychogeography’ to everyone, stating pretentiously that since she hadn’t got too much time left before she retired “one must strategically carve out a place for oneself in order to become part of psychogeography’s heritage”.

The talk ended with the swearing in of a new World Congress secretary and treasurer, followed by an indoor psychogeographical trip, led by Dr Andrew Evans, around the School of Geography.

We, The World Congress, believe that the cumulative effect of the geographical concentration of these two events in the week beginning 11th May 2015 has probably shifted psychogeographical ley lines across the UK, or at the very least at significant points north of Birmingham. It is also quite likely that at what are known as ‘perambulatory hinges’, such as the one located at the University of Loughborough near the brutalist halls of residence (Towers) and also that situated on the roundabout near Burley’s Flyover in Leicester, have been totally thrown off orbit!

You can also see Dr Bridger's account of events, including much more information on the game itself, here: Not Another Psychogeography Blog:

"Lest we forget to mention, there was a special guest appearance by David Bollinger, Director of the West Yorkshire Association for Psychogeography at the Class Wargames event at the University of Huddersfield. His contribution was vital to enabling the Austrians to win the battle of Marengo, thus turning history ‘on its head’ and preventing the French from winning!"
 CEO of Huddersfield Psychogeographical Network

Walking Inside Out – Introduction Extract 3

Where to Now, Psychogeography!

Please click here for part 1 and part 2

In 2002 Iain Sinclair said of psychogeography that "the next step is to bury it completely! Let it go and let it re-emerge. I think it needs 15 years to gain some new energy, as I think this energy is rapidly running out" (cited in Pilkington and Baker 2002, ‘City Brain’, Fortean Times). Since we are now fast-approaching the end of Sinclair's 15 year embargo, perhaps this is a salient moment to begin to discuss psychogeography again in a critical way, and take a serious look at the work being carried out in the field. I hope this text contributes to this discussion. Sinclair further comments on this problem when discussing the work Stewart Home did with the London Psychogeographical Association (LPA): “Stewart Home says that the LPA deliberately mystified and irrationalised their psychogeographical ideas in order to prevent them from being academicised in the future. But they inevitably will be because Stewart himself is a sort of rogue academic, so it's self-contradictory in some ways. By doing it, it becomes part of this machinery in talks and interviews” (ibid.).

Nevertheless, Sinclair is in praise of walking despite his concerns with the term psychogeography. One thing that many walkers are preoccupied with, from activists to The Ramblers, is not just the marginalisation of our public spaces, but the marginalisation of the very act of walking itself. As Sinclair says in an interview in the Ramblers own publication: "We're at the bottom of the food chain and the day will come when we'll have the equivalent of bike lanes: a narrow suicide strip chucked in among the traffic. We'll have to have ghost walkers, like the white ghost bikes you see to commemorate dead cyclists" (2012, ‘My Perfect Day’, Walk). So, it seems, psychogeographers perhaps do have more in common than can be expressed in their differences.

Related Links:
Walking Inside Out – Available for Pre-order

The New Psychogeography - Update

I had originally planned to do a series of blogs following on from my first blog on The New Psychogeography, but since then I’ve decided to make the whole final chapter of Walking Inside Out about the new psychogeography instead of turning these blogs into an article. The first blog sparked a lot of discussion online, a considerable amount of hits and, also, the related slides from the Huddersfield lecture, that this all stems from, has been downloaded a number of times on academia.edu.

So instead, I am posting some of the original section on the new psychogeography from the first draft of the introduction to the book. I’m afraid you will have to wait for the book to be published to see the full concluding chapter which will now be dedicated to ‘The New Psychogeography’. I really appreciate all the input and discussion, etc – thank you.

*

In 2002 Iain Sinclair said of psychogeography that "the next step is to bury it completely! Let it go and let it re-emerge. I think it needs 15 years to gain some new energy, as I think this energy is rapidly running out" (cited in Pilkington and Baker 2002, 7). Since we are now fast-approaching the end of Sinclair's 15 year embargo, perhaps this is a salient moment to begin to discuss psychogeography again in a critical way, and take a serious look at the work being carried out in the field. I hope this text contributes to this discussion. At the same time I appreciate criticisms of the academisation of psychogeography might be levelled at this volume, but since I am oriented in academia and my field is psychogeography, it is impossible to do the work itself without being caught in this trap. Sinclair further comments on this problem when discussing the work Stewart Home did with the London Psychogeographical Association: “Stewart Home says that the LPA deliberately mystified and irrationalised their psychogeograhical ideas in order to prevent them from being academicised in the future. But they inevitably will be because Stewart himself is a sort of rogue academic, so it's self-contradictory in some ways. By doing it, it becomes part of this machinery in talks and interviews.” (cited in Pilkington and Baker 2002, 3).

But, nevertheless, Sinclair is in praise of walking itself despite his concerns with the term psychogeography. One thing that many walkers are preoccupied with, from activists to The Ramblers, is not just the marginalisation of our public spaces, but the marginalisation of the very act of walking itself. As Sinclair says in an interview in the Ramblers own publication: "We're at the bottom of the food chain and the day will come when we'll have the equivalent of bike lanes: a narrow suicide strip chucked in among the traffic. We'll have to have ghost walkers, like the white ghost bikes you see to commemorate dead cyclists" (2012, 98). So, it seems, psychogeographers perhaps do have more in common than can be expressed in their differences.

In The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker (2012) Merlin Coverley includes a chapter on ‘The Return of the Walker’. Situating the preceding 30 years within a literary tradition that is also reflected in the creative arts, he finishes his closing chapter with Nick Papadimitriou, whose rise in popularity followed Coverley’s previous book. Walking Inside Out presents the work of some of the contemporary literary psychogeographers alongside those working in academia, thus bridging the gap which means these texts are commonly presented to different audiences, but also demonstrating the inherent value to academia of the ‘creative’ psychogeographical account. On May 1 2014 the BBC online news magazine published an article by Finlo Rohrer ‘The Slow Death of Purposeless Walking’, which is posed rather more as a question than a statement and alludes to the number of recently published books in the field. While his article was not about psychogeographer per se, it provided walking tips to the novice, some of which supported and some of which countered psychogeographical practices in the broadest sense. But despite this, it is an encouragement to walk and one of the tips that is common to ‘purposeless walking’ and psychogeography is to “walk mindfully” (Rohrer 2014). This mindfulness will be apparent from the chapters of the book.

The beauty of the inexact art that is psychogeography, appearing in the innumerable forms that it has and continues to, attests to the durability and relevance of it still. It can be crafted, manipulated and even re-appropriated to suit your particular needs. It can be carried out fundamentally, creatively or ironically. And it can be picked up and put down like a handy tool that helps you metaphorically whittle away the parts of urban space of which you disapprove, rather like the SI did with their maps. Psychogeography is continually being reworked, reflected upon and reimagined. It has the ability to absorb the urban space in which it occupies, situate itself socio-politically and creatively employ innumerable tools in order to express itself.

Bibliography:
Pilkington, Mark and Phil Baker. "City Brain." Fortean Times, 2002.
Rohrer, Finlo. "The Slow Death of Purposeless Walking." In BBC News Magazine, 2014.
Sinclair, Iain. "My Perfect Day: Iain Sinclair." Walk: Magazine of the Ramblers, 2012, 98.

Sleeping Northern-based Psychogeographer Invents New Unit of Time

Lady Macbeth by Johann Heinrich Füssli.

The Leeds psychogeographer, Tina Richardson, has invented a new unit of time for psychogeographers, while sleeping! This unit of time lasts anything between 10 mins and 1 hour, but is significant because the quantity of time is uncertain to the psychogeographer due to the psycho-aesthetic state they are currently experiencing (what the psychogeographer Iain Sinclair would describe as 'reverie').

This unit of time is called a 'purse' and is rather like a pocket of time. The term refers to both the personal carrying device that contains items for the owner (these items are clearly subjective and reflect the individual owner of the purse), but also to the work of the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced 'purse'). Peirce's system contains 1) a sign 2) an object, and 3) an interpretant. The purse refers to the interpretant such that it is a subjective response to an object/sign that causes a specific state of consciousness for that particular person. For the psychogeographer these objects appear in the form of urban décor that have specific signs attached to them and are responded to by that individual (signs that could be compared to the Barthesian 'myth' e.g. connotative signs or second level semiology).

Ms. Richardson, who runs Leeds Psychogeography Group and guest lectures in schizocartography, said: "I hope that the 'purse' becomes a useful term for psychogeographers because it enables a form of recognition, and hence indexing, to take place that will encourage discussion on these very states that are what psychogeographers both experience and value in their own work." She added: "Also, I am designing an actual psychogeographers purse for wealthy wannabee psychogeographers who like the idea of urban walking but can't be bothered to do the actual walking itself. These designer purses will appear in the form of miniature distressed-looking rucksacks and will include a tiny chest-strap that will enable you to attach it to the designer dog of your choice."

"When you don't see it. It is still there."

I've been reading Ken Knabb's edited volume Situationist International Anthology and came across a paragraph that reminded me of something Iain Sinclair discussed in a series in The Guardian in 2009, called 'Hidden Britain'. Sinclair explains how it is only at the point of near extinction that some buildings become visible to us for the first time: “When you don't see it, it is still there. And when you do, it is on the point of disappearance.” I think this is philosophically interesting from the perspective of a kind of reverse subjective causality. This is what the Ivan Chtcheglov says in 'Formulary for a New Urbanism (1953)':

We know that an object that is not consciously noticed at the time of a first visit can, by its absence during subsequent visits, provoke an indefinable impression: as a result of this sighting backwards in time, the absence of the object becomes a presence one can feel.

Please note: I have included one of Claude Lorrain's paintings, above, because the preceding paragraph mentions him in the context of creating 'situations', and also because of the SI's interest in 'ruins'.

Links:
Situationist International Online
Situationist International Anti Public Relations Notice

Ghostly Figures That Look Suspiciously Like Ray Davies

The Psychogeographer in the Urban Landscape

In a series of articles in the Guardian in 2009 called 'Secret Britain' the British psychogeographer Iain Sinclair explains the effect/affect of stumbling across 'hidden' places in the urban terrain:

These sites, come upon by accident, prick our imagination, provoke reverie. Questing for one story, we blunder into another: we must train ourselves to expect the unexpected. The thing hidden behind a high wall is still part of our true 'legacy', but buildings and sites sometimes have to wait to achieve a haunting dereliction, to be come legitimate targets for vulgar curiosity. That's how the Secret Britain guide philosophy works: when you don't see it, it is still there. And when you do, it is on the point of disappearance. (2009: 5).

And it is these sites that most contemporary psychogeographers write about and show in their films. The writing often takes the form of a personal account which is interspersed with historical or literary references - a subjective response to a particular place that "provoke[s] reverie" (or other psychic responses), combined with an interest in pursuing a particular historical direction engendered by that affective reaction. These accounts are what give the best 'flavour' of what psychogeography is, much more than any theoretical analysis or discussion can. So, I shall include a few paragraphs from some writers and will also comment on some psychogeographic films.

One of the chapters in Will Self's Psychogeography recounts a walk around the nuclear plant known as Sizewell, in the UK:

Sizewell again. This patch of Suffolk coastline, psychically irradiated by the untold ergs of electricity generated by the two nuclear power stations, exerts a strange hold on me. I far prefer it to the environs of Southwold, further up the coast, which have become overwritten by scribes as various as P.D. James and W.G. Sebald. I lived inland of here for a couple of years in the mid-1990s but was forced to evacuate when the wife of the one local acquaintance I'd made invited me to 'drop by' her gift shop in Saxmunden. I was on the phone to the self-drive van hire company that very evening. (2007: 141)

Self is known for his caustic wit and it is this type of subjective response to place that seems to be permitted in textual representations of psychogeographic walks. Below is the transcription from part of one of the films that Nick Papadimitriou and John Rogers made together about one of Papadimitriou's walks. Papadimitriou's geographic concentration is the English county that used to be called Middlesex. What was left of the county Middlesex (after the forming of the county council system in the 1800s) was taken up by Greater London and other counties before World War II. However, it is still considered a geographic area, so it remains so in that sense. Papadimitriou investigates the urban detail at its fundamental microbe-like level, almost down to the very molecules that make up the urban décor, as you will see when we look at him examining a concrete post. This film is called Deep Topography with Nick Papadimitriou. At about 53 seconds into the film we see Papadimitriou standing facing the camera with his right hand on a concrete post. There are a couple of trees to Papadimitriou's right, a road behind him; at the far side of the road we can see a building and a car. We are in Golders Green in North London. The concrete post reaches approximately the level of Papadimitriou's chest. From its appearance it looks like it is made from a mix of concrete which also contains shingle. The post is old, part of it is worn away, we can see its inner metal skeleton has been exposed. Rogers says: “Tell me about this post Nick”. This is Papadimitriou's reply:

I don't know anything about this post, but I like it and I think that, you know, I'm basically a religious writer and if I were to invent a religion this would be the type of object that people would kneel to. I think it's a kind of storage vat of regional memories, and they are contained inside it like a sort of, [pause] they radiate out slowly. Sometimes when I am in certain frames of mind, particularly on very hot days around the North Circular, I can feel time radiating off of pre-moulded concrete lintels and I've kind of developed a way of accessing them. And, I think what these things store are conglomerate images, eras passing, people's hairstyles, ghostly figures that look suspiciously like Ray Davies [pause] or his brother Dave Davies. I love this, this machining. It's fantastic isn't it?

Papadimitriou's connection with this concrete post, whilst highly imaginative and also cultural, philosophical and existential, is also extremely tactile. Papadimitriou sees the post as, somehow, storing “conglomerate images” and he explains how it has seen the change of fashion (hairstyles) and popular music (the Davies brothers from the band The Kinks), and that this history has become stored in the very matter of the concrete.

This subjective response to space will become a large part of the psychogeographic walks used in my own project and will tie in to the theory of Félix Guattari that looks at the subjective processes that can become a challenge to dominant modes of power - his Molecular Revolution texts in particular. Below is another example of Papadimitriou's which demonstrates how an individual can respond to a space in a different way to the 'intended' one. At a showing of The London Perambulator at the Curzon in Soho, London, the literature made available to the audience includes a note from Papadimitriou:

I imagine sometimes that I am on a powerful and yet undiscovered hallucinogen, one that dissolves the ego-boundaries so effectively that subject and object fuse, so that, were I to ingest this substance while visiting Watford, I would in some way pass into and become the town centre. It would be a transtemporal, multiplex, experience; a monad amidst conflagrations of men and women; young girls' eyes at Chicken Hut; your story, one among many as you surged through the Studham for work at your tattoo parlour. (2010)

In Lights Out for the Territory (1997) Sinclair traces a number of routes across London, showing us its darker side and at the same time historically connecting people and place. The extract below provides an example of how individuals - in this case a published writer and psychogeographer - who do not fit the model of a certain 'type' in the capital, can become persona non grata:

And so it was, on the fine and pleasant afternoon of Saturday 8th April, 1995, that I found myself trying to walk in through the front entrance of the Barbican Arts Complex and being treated like a bogside bomb-carrier. The sensation is not uncommon in the new City. It's how they want you to feel, uncomfortable: the stranger in town. They want you to carry a card, with a photograph and a number, that defines you as some sort of non-person lowlife. (2003: 99)

The Barbican Exhibition Hall is located in the heart of the finance district in London and during the 1990s British security was becoming very constricted because of the IRA bombings in the capital at that time. This is a common side-effect of being a psychogeographer, being treated suspiciously because a definitive label cannot be attached to you. In The Fringe of London: Being Some Ventures and Adventures in Topography (1925) Gordon S. Maxwell, a walker and writer, includes his experiences of how he is received by others when they ask what he does 'for a living'. On meeting a "commercial traveller" in an inn, the travelling salesman assumed that he was of the same profession, yet wondered where he kept his samples. Maxwell explained that his samples were too large to carry with him because he was a topographer. The other, commenting on the art of cutting trees into the shapes of animals, confused it with topiary. (1925: 27-28)

Prohibitive signs that appear in the environment are a form of urban phenomenon that can be intriguing to psychogeographers. In his essay on walking around Bromley-by-Bow in London, Dougald Hine explains how the signs that forbid action are the ones that predominate: "Spaces are defined by the games we can't play, the activities which won't be tolerated." (2011) He then remarks: "Where are the suggestive signs, I wonder - the signs which invite you to try something you might not otherwise have thought of? [...] Even the sign at Prospect Park which reads 'Play Here' feels like a command, rather than an invitation. (ibid.)

Psychogeographers have to decide what boundaries they are prepared to cross, legal or physical, in order to find their 'story'. Maxwell states: "The true rambler must never be afraid of committing the crime of trespass; fair words are a better help than fast legs." (1925: 22) However, this was 1925, when society was far simpler in structure and crimes, such as trespass, may have not even been reported. Maxwell goes on to say:

On the whole, people are courteous, when they know your errand is harmless [...] I have known an Ordnance Survey map works wonders if prominently displayed. You are sometimes then mistaken for a Government surveyor by a farm labourer - a mistake which is often useful. (ibid.)

This innocent comment is starkly contrasted to Sinclair's experience outside the Barbican. Nowadays a map in the hands of someone whose appearance might be deemed suspicious, could be the sign of a potential 'terrorist' threat. Maurice Beresford's text on the University of Leeds Walks Round Red Brick (1980) also includes similar experiences to that of Sinclair and Maxwell, and interestingly, since his walks took place in the 1970s, could be situated somewhere in between the other two, both historically and culturally. Beresford explains how one day when discovered hiding in the shrubbery of a private garden by a research fellow, his explanation for being there was dismissed by the other. The fellow exclaimed: "You're no professor, you're a thief!" (1980: 104)


Bibliography:
Beresford, Maurice. 1980. Walks Round Red Brick (Leeds: University of Leeds Press).
Hine, Dougald, 'Dériving Scarcity', Dougald Hine, (2011), [accessed 08 July 2011]
Gordon S., Maxwell. 1925. The Fringe of London: Being Some Ventures and Adventures in Topography (London: Cecil Palmer).
Self, Will. 2007. Psychogeography (London: Bloomsbury).
Sinclair, Iain. 2003. Lights Out for the Territory (London: Penguin).
Sinclair, Iain. 'A world you never knew existed', 'Secret Britain', The Guardian, April 2009, pp. 4-6.

Armed for Armley - Part 1

Armed for Armley - Part 1
Leeds Industrial Museum Reconnaissance

In preparation for a psychogeographical expedition with the Design School students at the University of Leeds, I set off on August Bank Holiday Monday to do a 'reccy' of the Leeds Industrial Museum (nee Armley Mills):

Leeds Industrial Museum

Armed with my phone-camera but not my usual notepad, I checked out the online museum map before I left and also took my Leeds A-Z.




Could you tell me where the Industrial Museum is, please?

This museum must be the least well signposted museum in the UK. I did not see one brown signpost denoting cultural-places-of-interest until I was right outside the museum car park which was already well signposted. This may be because most people drive and then you would need to approach the museum from the opposite side than I did. I walked and entered from Kirkstall Rd.




However, do not be put off by the lack of directions for walkers, as it is well worth the doubt once you get there and I have provided directions for you here, if you are walking from Kirkstall Rd. The walk from Kirkstall Rd is interesting and well-worth the psychogeographical experience, so if you drive why not park near the Vue cinema and follow my directions as well.


Mission: Armly Mills

1) Enter Milford Place from Kirkstall Rd - well, I've worked out it was Milford Pace, going by my A-Z, but as you can see from the image below, the road sign seems to be missing. However, don't worry as it is the road opposite the Rising Sun pub and also there is a sign that points to Kirkstall Industrial Estate.



2) You will know you are in the correct road once you see this sign, about half way down on the left:



3) At the end of the road there is a narrow bridge slightly to the left. Here is the view from the bridge:



4) At the other side of the bridge go up the steps to the road:



4) Once you get to street level, turn right across the bridge and keep right. The museum is a few yards along on the right.

5) There is a lane to the right of the car park which leads to the museum.

This plaque is outside the entrance to the museum and so are the painted metal bollards, one of which had a disabled parking sign on:





A Psychogeographer Undercover

It is really cheap to get in, only £3.10 (max) and £1.60 for students! I got in for a student rate but the nice chap at the reception later said that, as I was doing a reccy, I could have got in for nothing. However, £1.60 is a bargain and we need to support our local museums in case the government takes them away from us!

You cannot take photos inside the museum, but do not worry, as by far the best shots for the psychogeographer are outside. I took one photo from the inside, of the fabulous chimney. Here it is alongside a shot of the chimney from the outside, notice the difference in the sky of the two shots, only taken a short while apart:





Engine Room Surveillance

For me the 'Small Engine Room' was by far the most exciting section of the inside museum. Also, it was semi-outside, so I took this to mean I could take photos. The first picture is blurry, but I have kept it in as the machinery itself is so massive and interesting. Please just attach some artistic licence to the blurryness and pretend it was intentional:




This wheel has also come out blurred, but I like it as it looks like it is turning.




Hunslet was an engineering company and also the manufacturer of 'Jack' the steam engine that is located at the museum. Hunslet is also a region of Leeds and the engine company is named after it. The mini steam train is named Jack after Jack Lane, where the engine manufacturer was located in Hunslet.


EMDs: Engines of Mass Production

Here is the wiki page on the Hunslet Engine Company:

Hunslet Engine Company

Another engineering company located in Hunslet was J & H McLaren:

J & H McLaren

Here is a picture I took of Jack, just before he started moving:



This is a blog/website dedicated to the area of Leeds called Hunslet: Hunslet Remembered

The following images are of the engines, or engineering-related equipment, that I took outside. The first one looks like waves made out of iron. The grill is strange-looking but I like it as it has a warp and weft (woven) look about it; very appropriate for a textile mill:




The situating of the the original mill on the Aire, and in particular on a bend where there was fast-moving water, meant that this site was perfect for the wheels that ran the mill. Here is a photo of the river, and some kind of sluice, inside the museum site:



I don't know what this object is, but I like the shape and colour. It also looks like it is being caressed by the ivy:



The nature/culture dichotomy is something I have written about in a previous blog:

The Disinhibition of the Persistence of Gaia

Here is a nice picture of a plant growing in the pointing of a wall on the museum land, along the same lines of the above blog:




Peripheral Observation

The following images are taken on the edge of the museum site, just before the steps that take you down to the river and back to the industrial park. The first picture shows some piping that runs parallel to the bridge that you cross to get to the steps. I like this image, with the pipes in the middle, the bridge one side and the trees the other:



But, I think the following photo is my favourite image of the trip. I'm guessing this wooden outbuilding will either fall down or get pulled down at some point. However, in the meantime it potentially makes for a good composition. I have named it Water Shed:



I also like this roof, with the interesting chimneys and the dilapidated sign:




Homing Device

On the way home I didn't take too many photos as I didn't want to make this blog any longer than it already is. Here is a nice piece of paving(?) in Milford Place. I have called this image Chocolate Pavement:



I bumped into a cat I know from working in the area a few summers ago. Her name is Mimi and here she is on the wall of her garden in Argie Rd. I like it when cats do that arched-back-cat-thing that they do when they rub up against something. Mimi is quite friendly, with a little bit of encouragement, and according to her owners she likes corn snacks:



And, finally, here is a sign outside a convenience store in the Burley area:



I really like these newspaper pull quotes that get placed in signs. I'm guessing this one might well sell some papers as people would be interested to see if Leeds noisiest neighbour lives in their own street or, maybe, if they are indeed Leeds noisiest neighbour!


A Psychogeographer Decommissioned

I enjoyed my mission to Armley Mills and would recommend it to anyone. I consider it to be one of Leeds best kept secrets. I know people who have lived here for years and have never been. Please buy the guide book when you are there, it is under two squid and will help keep the museum going. It also has some lovely images in it and a concise history of the mill. Also, coffee/tea is only 75p, although it is help yourself. I think you can take your own picnics and eat outside.

The area surrounding the mill is particularly interesting for psychogeographers as it runs along the River Aire and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. These waterside areas often contain signs of our industrial past (and often present) and also conceal all those interesting liminal spaces. For a previous blog in the same area please click here:
Kirsktall Valley Subdub or The Prozac Walk

I would like to conclude with some quotes from the psychogeographer Iain Sinclair. They are very pertinent to how psychogeography can reveal the history in the palimpsest postmodern urban landscape. He states that the most hackneyed of objects appear intriguing when examined from a new perspective:
“These sites, come upon by accident, prick our imagination, provoke reverie.”
“When you don't see it, it is still there. And when you do, it is on the point of disappearance.”
From: 'A world you never new', 'Secret Britain', The Guardian, April 2009