laurencemitchell

[laurencemitchell]

Journey to Avebury

A Journey to Avebury is the name of a short silent film made by Derek Jarman made in 1971. Shot in wobbly Super 8, and saturated with burnt orange hues, it has an otherworldly eldritch atmosphere that is hard to describe. Suffice to say it is hardly be the sort of thing that the then English Tourist Board might have chosen to promote the stone-encircled Wiltshire village. Too painterly and…

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#Avebury #Derek Jarman #megaliths #neolithic #Silbury Hill #standing stones #timeshift #Wiltshire

[laurencemitchell]

The Ghost of a River - The Walbrook

Of all London’s lost rivers it is the Walbrook that is the most irrefutably lost: lost to time, lost to place… well, almost. An important source of water in Roman times, when its banks were lined with the workshops of Roman industry – tanneries, potteries and glass workshops – the river has not been visible on the surface since the 15th century when the last open sections were vaulted over.…

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#churches #ghosts #London #lost rivers #Romans #Thames #Walbrook

[laurencemitchell]

Ghost Factory

Much of the fabric of Birmingham’s history is, like the city’s modest river, the oft-culverted Rea, half-hidden or tucked away from sight. Occulted beneath flyovers and underpasses, the city’s past flows sluggishly beneath redundant factories and car parks. Unconvincingly disguised, and with the vaguest hint of rusting metal, it escapes as vapour from drains and manholes. It goes with the…

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#architecture #Balck Sabbath #Birmingham #Digbeth #ghosts #Industrial Revolution #music #Supersonic

[laurencemitchell]

Little Ouse, little bird

Here's my new blog post about a walk along the River Ouse on the Norfolk-Suffolk border

For a number of reasons it had been weeks since I had ventured out of the city for a walk. Cities are fine but brick, concrete and tarmac can get monotonous: too much noise, too much body swerving of fellow humans and traffic. I wanted water and trees, a church or two maybe; breeze and birdsong, a chance to breathe. So I took the train to Brandon in the Brecks. Leaving the station I walk south…

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#birds #Brandon #Brecks #forest #Little Ouse #rivers

[laurencemitchell]

A midwinter walk – Horsenden Hill to Harrow-on-the-Hill

In the past I have chosen a rural walk to celebrate the turning of the year; this year though, I have opted for something more urban. Together with my friend, Nigel Roberts, I continued along the route we had both been following for some time: London’s Capital Ring. For this midwinter walk it would be the moderately hilly stretch that lies between Greenford and South Kenton in London’s northwest…

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#birds #Harrow #Horsenden Hill #London #parakkets #solstice #winter

[laurencemitchell]

Dungeness

Now, with the promise of autumn in the air, it feels almost nostalgic to look back on those hot days of just two months ago: the end of July, record temperatures; the countryside baked and arid. A visit then, to Dungeness on the Kent coast, a headland jutting out to sea just to the east of the Sussex border. One of the largest expanses of shingle in Europe, it is a fabled place. Hitherto unknown,…

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#Derek Jarman #Dungeness #English Channel #flint #Kent #migration #nuclear power #Pebbles #psychogeography #shingle

[laurencemitchell]

Rathlin Island

For one week this June this small island off the Antrim coast was a constant presence. The cottage we had rented stood high on a hill a couple of miles outside the resort of Ballycastle and the view to the north was an uninterrupted panorama of sea, sky and the long, low profile of Northern Ireland’s only inhabited island. The view depended on the weather, of course, which was something that…

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#Antrim #archaeology #Atlantic Ocean #birds #geology #museums #neolithic #Northern Ireland #Rathlin

[laurencemitchell]

The Greenway

Picking up from where we left off, back in November, my friend Nigel Roberts and I travelled to London on Wednesday* to walk Section 14 of the Capital Ring. We arrive at our starting point at Hackney Wick by way of the 26 bus from Liverpool Street Station, whose upper deck gives excellent views of upwardly and downwardly mobile Shoreditch and Hackney along the way. Hackney Wick, an East London…

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#Capital Ring #City of London #Greenway #Hackney #Joseph Bazalgette #London #Olympics #sewers

[laurencemitchell]

A Solstice Walk – Boudicca Way

A Solstice Walk – Boudicca Way

In recent years I have got into the habit of taking a walk on the day of the winter solstice, December 21. Yesterday’s walk was along the section of the Boudicca Way that lies between Venta Icenorum and Norwich. Venta Icenorum, which lies a few miles south of the city close to the village of Caistor St Edmund, was a walled Romano-British settlement that served as the civitas or capital of the…

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#Boudicca #henges #Norwich #Romans #Venta Icenorum #winter solstice

[laurencemitchell]

Walking the Ring: Stoke Newington to Hackney Wick

Walking the Ring: Stoke Newington to Hackney Wick

Stoke Newington, London N6. We are here to walk part of the Capital Ring that circuits the capital by way of 15 stages. Slightly perversely we decide to begin at Stage 13, which links Stoke Newington with Hackney Wick by means of a park and a path alongside the River Lea and Lea River Navigation. Less defiantly, we will follow the overall route clockwise as suggested. To go widdershins might be…

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#Abney Park #canals #Capital Ring #cemeteries #graffiti #Hackney Wick #London #marshes #River Lea #Stoke Newington

[laurencemitchell]

Black Country

Here is another brief extract from my book Westering that was published earlier this year by Saraband. This time it concerns my transit on foot through the territory of the Black Country that lies to the west of Birmingham. I have included a few black and white images to illustrate the text here. These are not in the book itself but might help give a flavour of what the area is like. Extract…

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#Black Country #Brierley Hill #canals #Delph Locks #Dudley #Merry Hill #Stourbridge #Westering

[laurencemitchell]

The Hare and the Point

The Hare and the Point

A warm, slightly hazy day on the north Norfolk coast; a day caught on the cusp as an unusually cold spring stumbles into an, as yet unknown, summer. We walk west past a few lobster boats from the beach car park at Cley-next-the-Sea, scrunching through the shingle to reach a meandering path that leads through low glaucous shrubs at the edge of a salt marsh. Just beyond the shingle ridge to our…

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#birds #Blakeney #Blakeney Point #Cley-next-the-Sea #hares #North Sea #plants

[laurencemitchell]

A Welsh Chapel

The isolated Calvinist Methodist chapel of Soar-y-mynydd is often claimed to be the remotest in all of Wales. Certainly, it lies in a very quiet spot: close to the eastern limit of Ceredigion, eight miles southeast of Tregaron within the parish of Llanddewi Brefi (of Little Britain fame) Built in 1822 to serve a widely scattered congregation of farmers and sheep drovers, it would have originally…

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#Ceredigion #chapels #reservoir #Wales #Welsh

[laurencemitchell]

Fogbound: Heacham to Old Hunstanton

Fogbound: Heacham to Old Hunstanton

Earlier this week we walked from Heacham to Old Hunstanton along the seawall. To say that it was a bit foggy would be an understatement as the whole of northwest Norfolk lay shivering under a thick blanket of dense fog – a white-out, or rather ‘grey-out’, that rendered visibility poor in the extreme.

We made our way through Heacham village, past gingerbread carstone cottages and then…

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#carstone #chalk #fog #Heacham #Hunstanton #Old Hunstanton cliffs #The Wash

[laurencemitchell]

Irkutsk

Ten years ago, when travel was altogether an easier undertaking, I travelled by train to Siberia. Following the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and taking a few detours along the way, I eventually got as far as Lake Baikal before I turned around to head back home once more. The most easterly city I visited was Irkutsk. Lying at about the same latitude as Birmingham but as far east as…

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#Irkutsk #Siberia #Trans-Siberian

[laurencemitchell]

Abandoned Ferris wheel

Ferris wheel, Toktogul, Kyrgyzstan

One of the enduring images from Pripyat, the main town in Ukraine’s Chernobyl disaster region, is that of an abandoned amusement park. A totem for the fall from innocence, here are rides that children once played upon but will never do so again. Rising above the park is an abandoned yellow Ferris wheel – a dejected structure that has fallen in grace from a…

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#Bishkek #crows #Ferris wheel #Kyrgyzstan #Soviet Union #Toktogul

[laurencemitchell]

To the Lighthouse

They are taking the lighthouse down. It was really just a matter of time. Time and tide, it is said, wait for no man, and the two make for a powerful combination on this rapidly changing shoreline. The Orford lighthouse has stood here on the Suffolk coast since 1792, the 11th to stand on the same spot. All the previous lighthouses, mostly flimsy wooden structures, were lost to the sea; this one…

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#cooling towers #lighthouse #Mostar #Orford Ness #psychogeography #Sheffield #Syria #W G Sebald