Walking Inside Out - Introduction

Introduction:A Wander through the Scene of British Urban Walking

by Tina Richardson

WHAT IS PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY?

Get a map of your local area and spread it out on the floor. Study the map, imagine the terrain, find your preferred route – perhaps a bridleway or a towpath – and trace it on the map. Grab your coat off the hook in the hallway and put on your sturdy shoes. Leave the house and dump the map in the wheelie bin. Forget the map. Go to the nearest bus stop and get on the first bus that comes along. Get off when you feel you are far enough away from home that the area is unfamiliar. Begin your walk here.

Psychogeography does not have to be complicated. Anyone can do it. You do not need a map, Gor-Tex, a rucksack or a companion. All you need is a curious nature and a comfortable pair of shoes. There are no rules to doing psychogeography - this is its beauty. However, it is this that makes it hard to pin down in any formalised way. It is also this ‘unruly’ character (disruptive, unsystematic, random) that makes for much discussion about its meaning and purpose - today more than at any other time.

This volume does not pretend to have a definitive answer to what psychogeography is, but it does propose to open up the space that can be defined as psychogeography, providing examples and encouraging debate. In his introduction to Psychogeography (2006) Merlin Coverley asks: “Are we talking about a predominantly literary movement or a political strategy, a series of new age ideas or a set of avant-garde practices?” and goes on to say that it is all the above (2006, 9-10). In just a couple of sentences we have opened up a can of nebulous worms on the ambulatory behemoth that psychogeography (or urban walking) is. What this selected volume of essays does is present the state of play as it is for psychogeography in the UK in the 21st century...

Click here to download a pdf of the introduction.

Psychogeography News - July 2021

Hello psychogeography lovers. I came across a lot of related news in the last month, so will continue to post the links with a brief description under a respective heading. I hope you find the newsletter interesting. More in August…

Psychogeography and Walking

It seems that Nick Cave (yes, he of Bad Seeds fame) has unintentionally been doing some psychogeography. You can read about him photographing lost gloves on his walks in The Guardian. Here’s another The Guardian articles on walking the Limestone Way of the Peak District. And, here, another piece of accidental psychogeography which includes interesting photos of bricked up windows in London, from the BBC website. Whereas this Youtuber is doing some ‘proper’ psychogeography by walking the most direct route on his “straight line mission” across Scotland (from The Guardian). The final two articles under this section look at ‘well-being’ and walking: one on walking with friends in The Guardian, and the other is research on mental health and hiking from The Conversation.

Architecture

Yanko Design has an interesting article which includes some lovely futuristic images of imagined spaces looking at green skyscrapers, while The Spaces has an alternative architectural guide to Venice. Here is a guide to the 2021 London Festival of Architecture in The Wallpaper and I am including this really useful link to all things Charles Jencks, as it has loads of useful resources on his work.

Cities

The Conversation has an article on the queer city and inclusivity and The Science Museum Group Journal has a brilliant journal article on science and the city, which seems to be open access. Here’s a The Guardian article about the pedestrianisation of Oxford Circus in London. And, on a more light-hearted note, here is a link to a novel entitled The Cat and the City by Nick Bradley (I am a big fan of both). Finally, under cities, this super 20 min film called ‘Organism’ by Hilary Harris (1975) from the Aeon website, shows “the city as an emergent form, with architecture as the skeleton and roads as the veins”.

The Weird or Random

On the more random side of all things spatial: bleak spaces that you come to love (this The Guardian article requires you to already to be a signed up member, although it is free). And, I will finish this blog on a bit of bonkerity: this chappy accidentally annexed France by moving some rock (from The Conversation).

Walking Inside Out – Contents

Walking Inside Out:
Contemporary British Psychogeography
Editor: Tina Richardson
Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield International
Due: July 2015

Below are the contents for Walking Inside Out. For the full details on the book by the publisher, please click here.

CONTENTS

Introduction: A Wander through the Scene of British Urban Walking
Tina Richardson

Part I: The Walker and the Urban Landscape
1 Longshore Drift: Approaching Liverpool from Another Place
Roy Bayfield
2 Walking the Dog: (For Those Who Don’t Know How to Do It)
Ian Marchant
3 Incongruous Steps toward a Legal Psychogeography
Luke Bennett

Part II: Memory, Historicity, Time
4 Walking through Memory: Critical Nostalgia and the City
Alastair Bonnett
5 Selective Amnesia and Spectral Recollection in the Bloodlands
Phil Wood
6 The Art of Wandering: Arthur Machen’s London Science
Merlin Coverley
7 Wooden Stones
Gareth E. Rees

Part III: Power and Place
8 Psychogeography Adrift: Negotiating Critical Inheritance in a Changed Context
Christopher Collier
9 Confessions of an Anarcho-Flâneuse, or Psychogeography the Mancunian Way
Morag Rose

Part IV: Practicing Psychogeography/Psychogeographical Practices
10 Psychogeography and Mythogeography: Currents in Radical Walking
Phil Smith
11 Developing Schizocartography: Formulating a Theoretical Methodology for a Walking Practice
Tina Richardson
12 Route Planning a Sensory Walk: Sniffing Out the Issues
Victoria Henshaw

Part V: Outsider Psychogeography
13 Rewalking the City: People with Dementia Remember
Andrea Capstick
14 Psychogeography, Antipsychologies, and the Question of Social Change
Alexander John Bridger

Conclusion: The New Psychogeography
Tina Richardson

RELATED LINKS:
Contributions
Book Talk in Leeds 14th May

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