Walking Men

I love this art project by Stephen Wragg - a photographic record of the painted men who walk under our feet, striding, dancing, or mincing across the tarmac. Better still, he's inviting photo submissions, so keep your eyes peeled for your local walking men!

You might imagine we live in a country with tight design standards and control - but no, self-expression is flourishing in Highways Authorities throughout the land. This is a project, begun in 2004 by Stephen Wragg to document the unique diversity of painted 'walking men' on the streets of the UK. Take a look; the collection of photographs on the pages men and street are arranged by country: England & Scotland,and in alphabetical order by county and metropolitan districts.

On not walking, but writing

It's two months now since I was heaved off the tarmac of a tennis court to take up a supine position with a bag of frozen peas. Even now my right leg doesn't quite keep up with the breezy swing of my left, and protests if it goes too far or has to tackle inclines.

Although quite seriously disabled by my torn hamstring, I never completely stopped walking. At first it was only the 200 yards or so from my front door to the Co-op, taken at a literal snail's pace. Normally at this time of year I would expect to be quite active, so perhaps it was fortunate the summer has mostly been fairly similar to winter, except with light evenings (and just about without the snow). Perhaps I have been a little less frustrated than otherwise. I have also learnt a few things from the experience:

If you walk at toddler pace, the world is revealed differently. My eyes have been glued to the ground, alert to impending jolts and slips, and so my observations have been at foot level and in miniature. The discarded shoe lace or shopping list; lost buttons; the postie's trail of red rubber bands; flowers forging up between cracks in the pavement; a beetle poised on the end of a blade of grass. These tiny miracles, these embryonic stories, I would normally overlook.

I've developed a sense of affinity with people who walk with sticks (not the sort who bound along with hiking poles). There are many of them, I've discovered. I want to ask the younger ones about the nature of their injuries; the older ones I've admired for their bravery in taking to their feet at all and joining the unbalancing flow along pavements. That sense of vulnerability is not something I'm used to.

In the initial weeks, my work involved more teaching than writing, and unfortunately this included a day's walking and writing workshop for Edinburgh University Geosciences students, and a week roaming about in the woods at Abriachan with about 100 schoolchildren. (I hope they didn't take my pained expression and mental lapses personally.) After this came the period allotted to writing. You might think this would be a really good time to sit down and get it done. But my pattern of heads-down thought and word-pulling (as in teeth) is usually followed by a walk. It loosens everything up, allows for obvious solutions of word, character or plot to float into my slightly removed mind. How incomplete my writing days have felt without the daily walk.

One early morning in late May, I took myself, my fast leg and my slow one for the much missed 'turn' about the Birks of Aberfeldy. I'd forgotten the sense of elevation when I leave the trees for meadows at the top, the sense of getting away from the hum of roads. There I found a look of surprise in a lamb's eyes, the sway of calf-high bluebells, the cuckoo's insistent alarm call, the soft smirr of dew on grass. I felt ridiculously thankful for the return of my mobility; the intensity of it made the exile of injury seem almost worthwhile.

The art of walking - two rambles about London

Here are my top tips for creative walking enthusiasts in London. Both have a foot in the art gallery and a foot firmly outside.

Although I have probably seen before the majority of Richard Long's work that is currently on show in major retrospective 'Heaven and Earth', I found its expansion into the large spaces of Tate Britain unexpectedly moving. Perhaps it was the humbling effect of a walk through a life dedicated to using his body, the land, the rhythms of sun, moon, tide, walking and resting as his art. Or perhaps it was the chime with my own solitary walks that moved me, I'm not sure.

The show is fascinating for revealing the evolution of ways he has represented his walking art in a gallery space - 'the knowledge of my actions, in whatever form, is the art.' (I find his gallery-specific pieces much less engaging and appealing.) His walks, which first began just as the first human steps were taken on the moon, were first communicated as photographs; later as a line on a map; and then a series of words capturing a narrative of discovery along a route. His work is conceptual to some extent but, at least for me, totally translatable into a sense of interaction with place. Also see Robert Macfarlane's excellent article on Long for the Guardian.

Second top tip: the newly refurbished Whitechapel Gallery which celebrates the democratisation of art and doesn't charge for entry, has an almost hidden gem, in addition to its less hidden ones. A tiny white card next to a pile of books in the lobby alerted me to a site-specific audio walk by Janet Cardiff and George Bures-Miller devised in 1999.

Borrow an MP3 player from the reception to be guided by the compelling voice of Janet Cardiff into a physical journey around the lanes and alleys of the East End. The world you find yourself in between headphones, and between real walls is a curious mixture created by binaural sound recording and the real sounds of the places you share with Cardiff. A narrative begins to emerge about a woman with red hair, running from something.

I was never quite sure whether the overheard conversations happened in her time or in my own. She has an acute way of predicting one's own observations. There's a wonderful moment where you are guided into a church to sit in its cool and quiet. As the doors bashed behind me, for real, and on the headphones, I was struck by a smell of incense 'Mmm, smells like incense', said the intimate voice in my ear. When I took off the headphones to walk back to the gallery, I found myself highly attuned to the peculiar qualities and possible meanings of what I heard and saw.

I listened to many of Cardiff's audio walks on her website when I tutored workshops related to the Fruitmarket Edinburgh's exhibition of her work last year, but this was my first opportunity to experience the richness and mystery of walking real spaces with her, and the powerful suggestiveness of two sets of sound.

Highly recommended!

walking to work

Today is National Poetry Day and this years theme is 'work'. I'm no poet, so instead I offer this (a prose poem?) about a walk to work...

For five years I walked that way, head down probably, ploughing a furrow from Waverley Station to my theatre of work. The costume went over my head as I entered the inmost cave. I tugged my face into the right shape, my hand on the door triggered the bell and I was clanged into role, arrived at my desk in Old Playhouse Close.

I wonder now, what traces I left, fossilised residues on the repeated route? Do the stones hold the memory-trail of my breaths? Did I scatter pale pebbles; breadcrumbs; sounds that I can still follow echoing underfoot? Or perhaps I trailed a scent – the coconut cream from my hands, fading morning toothpaste. Or maybe each time I walked it, I laid a thread like Ariadne’s clew, a different colour for each new mood. When the routine came to an end, perhaps they wove themselves into a colourful web I can use now as a rope to guide me.

I watch now for what people trail, what markers they leave as their clews as they move through the unscratchable, unprintable city. Shadows sometimes. Coffee-scent flowing in curls of vapour behind a Starbucks trophy. A child by the length of two arms – one long, one short. Tinkling splinters and half beats escaped from headphones in a discordant wake. The invisible electronic tracks of mobile phones. And the girl in stiletto-heeled boots, thigh-high, draws after her the long, absent glances of distracted men.

It was a journey of verticals as well as horizons. From Hades-shade to light, through the stacks of the old town cliff, its stairways and closes climbing to the High Street and then down into another darkness in the Canongait. In this part of town there are pavements for a pacing rhythm, or other ways, gaits, that invite us to saunter, shamble, stride, strut; twisting ways for us to stalk or goose-step, turn back on ourselves. A silly-walk towards the Canons of Holyrood, even a plowter in Stevenson’s time. But my train came in at 8.48. Hurrying to be seated for nine, I chose the ‘stride’ and the most direct route.

A watery light splashed through thirteen acres of cantilevered glass. It shocked up the fluorescent orange working jackets, hands stretched from them for tickets, a baton passed without a pause. Fan-tailing from ticket barriers, we danced a criss-cross quickstep on the white esplanade, dodging each others’ eyes, made our bee-line for paths up, and out. Drowning in sound, we were chased out by warped voices announcing trains, the mish-mash of whistles, coffee machines, taxi rattle, words not properly swallowed by mobile phones, heels, the rumble of suitcase-carrying wheels. Did we even notice the lapping of the ghost-loch at our ankles, sewer-strong?

Up steps, past platform eleven towards the Market Street exit. Up steps to the once-a-week Socialist Worker sellers, replaced by Big Issue sing-song when that came along. We headed now into the labyrinth, the un-mappable wilderness to the south along Market Street, the mountains and valleys of Waverley’s glass roof stretching away below us. Snatching our heads back over our shoulders, snatching for the traffic gap, the legs must keep up their clip-clop, scissor-swing till they’d stopped us at our desks. Togethering brave we jaywalked between buses, taxis, the silent swipe past of cycles, crossing for the curve of Geoffrey Street somewhere under North Bridge.

Here the grand hotels turn their dark backs onto Market Street, reserving doorways in low clean elevations for their guests on the street above. We traversed their underworld. They abandoned broken glass and empty tomato boxes in piles for collection, disgorging them amongst the pigeon shit at our feet. This is where white vans line up at lunchtime. Flasks on dashboards. A slash of red letters against the glass: The Daily Record. Men, arms folded, sleeping.

So many possible routes I could have taken, between The Mound and The World’s End. The Scotsman steps, a spiralling porthole telescoping between two layers of life, screwing you around and up past hiding smokers, dark corners with last night’s vomit piles, a door opening onto a breeze block wall. They dizzy you, steal your breath, then push you out high onto North Bridge, polished gold letters on a wall, air all around, a long view to the sea and the buses’ upper decks fabricated more of light than substance.

So many chances here for enchantment, distraction from the destination. Diversion. Play. To glimpse a volcano or watch a seagull soar from the centre of a city. Let the Playfair Steps lead you to Art. Duck into the open door of the ‘Escape Club’ and do as it says. Sneak into Chalmers Close through Jury’s Inn with its windowfulls of postcard writers, a siren wobbling into the distant streets below, leaving you with peace amongst the brass rubbings. To pedestrians who risk the narrow corridors through the precipice, the closes flourish, in different proportions, history and piss. ‘No fly posting’. Pant up one of them - Fleshmarket or Carrubers – onto the High Street. Here the walkers clutching guide books, strolling pilgrims pursuing experience, will show you your blinkered errand. Another experiment in enchantment: speak to each person you meet. Try it. They might speak back.

But why have I started to tell you how to walk to work? I ignored it all, strode on, glancing across at the World’s End, a busy cobble-purred crossroads, and down towards the bell, work, my non-play in the Playhouse. And the five years’ worth of steps I laid so loyally along my chosen way? Vanished, evaporated, rubbed quite away. The streets don’t remember.

how to make an audio walk

Last Sunday I finished co-tutoring a workshop for the Fruitmarket Gallery with sound designer, Jules Rawlinson - three sessions to develop an intimate narrative focused on a walk around Edinburgh's old town which creates interest whilst also being open-ended. We were using Janet Cardiff's audio walks as our inspiring starting point, and like her, using binaural sound. There was a lot to learn - how to use sound recording equipment and edit the results, how to combine voice, image and captured sound to develop different textures and suggest narrative, and the whole sensitivity to what's dictated by the physical spaces we passed through. Robert Louis Stevenson provided us with some resonances with his descriptions of the decaying splendour of the old town in his day, describing it as a 'huge old human beehive', 'a black labyrinth', the great cliffs of houses piling up and up so that 'the population slept fourteen or fifteen deep in a vertical direction'.

One thing I found interesting was how quickly a narrative developed out of observations of the places we went to. The cool dark enclosure of the little-visited Advocate's Close slowed our pace after the public hub-bub, buskers, and walking tours of the High Street. A small garden amongst scaffolding and graffiti suggested the magical beneath the mundane and began to imply a character who had tended it and had perhaps sat in that abandoned, broken chair. But then the close itself, its broken windows, urine stench and Buckfast empties, started to tell another story, suggest a threat, and so the pace increased again, towards an exit.

The resulting sound piece is quite rough and raw as you might expect from several of us working together under pressure of time and at our own pace of learning, but if you'd like to listen, it can be downloaded from Jules Rawlinson's website listed as 'audio walk' (use headphones).

Street Haunting

image from 'urban tapestries' - a research project by Proboscis

I turn from the Alps now to the old town of Edinburgh. I have wondered if being the daughter of a great Victorian alpinist helped make Virginia Woolf a writer. Presumably walking was part of family life, and might have got her observing, speculating at the people and places she saw, thus allowing her imagination to roam beyond her feet. In her 1927 essay Street Haunting: A London Adventure, it is clear that her aimless walks in the urban environment, the anonymity of walking amongst strangers, was her great adventure. ‘How could I think mountains and climbing romantic?’ she once said. ‘Wasn’t I brought up with alpenstocks in my nursery, and a raised map of the Alps showing every peak my father had climbed? Of course London and the marshes are the places I like best.’

Canadian artist Janet Cardiff is another ‘street-haunter’ and her audio walks are eerie evocations based on observations in real places laced with teasing fragments of narrative and memory. Cardiff uses binaural recording techniques that envelop you in sound - a sudden whisper in your ear, or the distant sound of feet running ahead. Her beguiling voice leads you – intimate and authoritative - and has you collaborating, as you walk, in reconstructing the ‘story’. Her installations with George Bures Miller, exhibiting at the Fruitmarket Gallery until the end of September use sound and narrative in a similar way, but it is the walks that myself and sound artist Jules Rawlinson will focus on as starting point for the workshop we’re leading for the next two Saturdays.

One of our principal resources for the workshop is the immediate area of the old town around the Fruitmarket (and of course the legs of our participants to move them around it with sound recorders). Three levels nest one above the other over the same coordinate – North Bridge, Market Street, and the esplanade of Waverley Station. Dark and shade. Underland and overland. Parallel worlds associated to different journey-purposes. The odd geography is linked by dark passages and stairways, rich in suggestion, and in sound. They are liminal places where you might pass from one imagined state to another.

In Woolf’s essay she sees streams of walking commuters as if they’re wrapped in some narcotic dream, imagining themselves to be great cricketers or famous actresses before the enchantment is broken by being ‘slung in long rattling trains’ and embraced once again in the conforming influence of their homes. I commuted for five years between Stirling and Edinburgh, walking from Waverley station for five minutes to an old town office, losing the hooted train announcements for the sound of tyres on cobbles, and the echo of a dark passage before the clang of the bell on the office door as I opened it, arriving into my non-dream, office self.

The possibilities for my own work in this environment are exciting, having spent so much time walking the rural. The anonymity of walking amongst strangers and finding mystery in every face has long fuelled my short fiction writing. But I’m also curious about the forms in which we leave marks and traces as we move in criss-cross pathways about a city, in an environment of stone and tarmac which refuses to take impressions. There are many avenues. The real and the imagined; the line of a walk coupled to a non-linear story; or as Rebecca Solnit puts it, 'the magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany'.

we make marks, we leave traces

Further to my post about solitary to social paths below, I recalled this quote from walking artist Richard Long:

'My materials are elemental: stone, water, mud, days, nights, rivers, sunrises. And our bodies are elemental: we are animals, we make marks, we leave traces, we leave footprints.' Walking and Marking catalogue, Richard Long, (National Galleries of Scotland)

So I am still pondering - what form do our marks and traces take on pavements, and surfaced paths? Narrative lines drawn in snatches of conversation or thought left hanging? Scuffs and smells and litter trails? Furrows of displaced air?

from solitary to social paths

When solo footsteps are followed by others, a path is worn - like the one on the right in East Africa.

But when I studied the hillside below and the web of paths woven by sheep and wild goats, I started to think about the webs we lay in urban areas where the most dense walking patterns seem to now exist. What kind of resonances do our interlocking ways leave when concrete and tarmac refuse to hold our marks?