Drifting, meandering and aimless wandering..the perambulations and musings of Mr H in London, Cambridge and elsewhere.
I carried out a preliminary excursion a few days in advance of Terminalia. I wanted to check if there was any safe and legal route I could take from the Beech Woods to Fulbourn Road. The Beech Woods are immediately South of the Worts Causeway, a road which sits on the boundary of the City and South Cambs District, at the Southern extremity of Cherry Hinton City Council Ward. But this is well…
At the fag end of 2023 the current Housing Secretary, Michael Gove, announced the formation of a new Development Corporation to oversee the expansion of Cambridge and the building of 'northwards' of 150,000 homes. This dwarves the figure of 50,000 previously identified in the Greater Cambridge Local Plan. Gove promised to reveal more about how the water supply issues would be dealt with later.…
I had seen it, several times out of the window as the train passed through the Northern outskirts of London. Somewhere near New Southgate, or so I thought. Its not easy to read the station signs in the run up to Finsbury Park. The distances between the stations at train speed is short. A less than rigorous internet search mentioned the last gas holder in New Southgate as if it was a thing of the…
I'd noticed scaffolding had gone up in front of the building formerly inhabited by a Tesco. It had been empty for a while, the supermarket oligarch having finally given up the ghost in Mill Road. For many this was a welcome departure. A few years ago, the No Mill Road Tesco campaign was well organised and culminated in a large demonstration. The Tesco opened anyway. But with no alcohol licence and…
Smoke and Mirrors (aka Crab and Bee aka) describe the town of Royston in ' The Pattern' thus: 'Royston is a place from which the power has been removed.A hollow left behind when the roof was pulled. There are many signs of the hooded crow but no hooded crows'. Re-reading that section of The Pattern prompted a long belated trip to the town of Royston and a visit to the Royston Cave. The Cave and…
I set out to mark Terminalia, Festival of Terminus, Roman god of borders and boundaries. I had missed the actual day of 23rd Feb due to not being able to get time off work. So was not able to participate in any of the events of the Terminalia Festival of Psychogeography , nor carry out any sort of significant perambulation on the actual date. Last year I did a walk along and about the A14, in the…
I met R at the top of Castle Mound, the agreed starting point for a Sunday afternoon random perambulation. On the way, I had passed Heavy Metal Bike Man near Christ's Pieces and Disco Kenny in the car park next to Castle Mound. Bike Man was parked up in a side street across the road, partially obscured from the view of the pedestrians crossing between the Grafton and the Pieces. I'd never seen him…
I took a lunchtime walk across Hills Road Bridge. This was promted by having passed a bizarre sculpture a few days earlier. And then a social media post showing another nearby that I would have walked past but not noticed in my near-somnambulant state en route to work. The bridge along one side is host to a number of pieces of public art. All in their own way strange and collectively making up a…
The almost total removal of Covid restrictions, for the time being at least, had been heralded by ‘Freedom Day’. I cautiously felt that the grip of the pandemic was finally loosening. At least for the time being. The beginning of the end and the beginning of whatever the ‘new normal’ would look like. I had been wandering along Mill Road, the main street in the vicinity, on most days during the…
I've finally got around to finishing writing and 'posting' this final 'postcard'', just shy of a month after we got back from Norfolk. Thus even surpassing my usual tardiness when sending physical postcards. We walked from the car park at Winterton, where sadly the cafe on the clifftop had disappeared, leaving behind just part of its floor. A coffee concession had appeared in its place, slightly…
I headed out of Happisburgh, along the 'Byway to Ostend (1/2 a mile)'. I didn't follow the Byway to its conclusion at Ostend, a hybrid of a chalet holiday park, old people's bungalow estate and Essex pioneer settlement, which seemed to be a sort of addendum to Walcott. Instead, I took a left turn to follow another route, across a field, through the grounds of All Saints Church and past the…
This is the first in an intended series of 'psycho-geographic postcards' from a trip to Norfolk. There's no set plan or itinerary and I'm not sure how co-operative the technology (my phone and it's data allowance) will be in this venture. The weather is also looking a bit dodgy, but I've got my raincoat. The first 'postcard' is a scene from the ghost caravan park on the clifftops of Happisburgh.…
Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE Preamble In an attempt to further reduce the digital burden, I acquired some dice to replace random number generator websites. The first roll of these new analogue catapults decreed that I would go grid square G7. This square, located to the North East of the city centre, contains most of the suburb of Chesterton, an area that had been developed…
Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE Preamble The random number generator selected square C6. Once again out to the edges of West Cambridge, this time to the North and a bit West of the previous walk. The square was bisected horizontally by Madingley Road. To the South the area known as ‘High Cross’ is shown as containing a British Antarctic Survey building, a laboratory and the…
Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE The Cambridge Map and Lockdown 3 Lockdown three has brought back almost identical restrictions to the first lockdown in March last year. The message on leaving the house for exercise, similar to before, is to ‘stay local’. ‘Local’ is not clearly defined in statute but in the guidance somewhere it talks about staying within your town, village or the…
Cambridge Airport is a place on the edge. Its airfield straddles the Eastern city administrative boundary that snakes across it from Newmarket Road to Cherry Hinton. But the airport's physical border with the city is with East Barnwell, the mainly residential area at Cambridge's Eastern Edge. The whole airport site occupies the majority of the land earmarked for development as part of the…
Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE The strange times brought about by the pandemic, in particular the spatial limitations and impact on movement associated with social distancing , have produced a lot worth documenting from a walking and psycho-geographic perspective. I’ve been walking quite a bit, walking differently and more locally than pre-pandemic and the way I’ve operated has…
Last week saw the imposition of strict restrictions on movement due to the ongoing Covid-19 situation, after the earlier and greyer guidlines contributed to a mass influx of people to beaches, National Trust properties and second homes in places like Cornwall on the previous weekend. One of the few exceptions to the current instruction to stay at home is an allowance for 'one form of exercise a…
Preamble The evening prior to the inaugural Barnett's Map project excursion, I carried out the rudimentary preparations and research as prescribed in the 'rules' set out in the previous post . The journey to Harpenden would be straightforward: into London (Kings Cross or St Pancras) and back out on the line to Bedford from St Pancras. Trains were frequent enough to not to have to think about…
To mark the feast of Terminalia, Roman God of Boundaries, I decided to walk around, within and to various points on the boundary of the Ward of Romsey. Residing in the ward, it seemed sensible to do something close to home. This was for two reasons. Firstly, it would be good way of seeing things always in close proximity in a different way. Psychogeography begins at home, or at least ought to more…
New year and time for a new project. Soon after my recent change of employment, I began to miss the element of frequent travel to random locations that my old job had provided. Most of the places I had been required to visit were in towns or cities off the tourist radar, probably considered not worth visiting, or more likely not considered at all, by the typical leisure traveller. Few would…
The Kite The Kite is an area on the edge of central Cambridge. It's shape, as defined by the four stretches of road that contain it, is easily visible on any contemporary map of the City. Since about 1983 the area has been dominated by 'The Grafton' shopping centre. Plans for a shopping centre in Cambridge were first muted in the 50s with the Kite a favoured location. In the end the Lion Yard was…
A change of jobs has brought an end to more commuting. I undertook a final lunchtime walk in Peterborough on Halloween/Samhain, the point in the year said to mark a thinning between the material/human and spirit worlds and also a transition in the seasons towards darker months. Coincidentally I was undergoing my own transition, back to being (mostly) based in Cambridge rather than existing in and…
A short lunchtime. I went to the nearby Peterborough Market and walked it's perimeter in a clockwise direction. An undertaking that could be carried out in about five minutes if done in the most efficient manner. But although time was short, maximum efficiency was not on the agenda. It was lunchtime after all. I lingered in Laxton Square and perused the plaque that commemorates Ray Laxton and his…
The original plan to walk between two WB Sebald exhibitions, from the Castle Museum out to the UEA, was abandoned. Emerging from the Museum, fresh afterimages were imprinted on my mind. Grainy scenes of Orford Ness and Sizewell sat alongside grim reminders of World War 2 concentration camps and colonial brutality. These were superimposed onto a liminal vision of the rural Suffolk coastal zone with…