An Alternative Writing Retreat
Sometimes as he walked, taking long and meandering digressions down side streets and across squares, through underpasses and over raised walkways that spanned like triumphal arches the segments of silent motorway, the architect liked to think that the very formlessness of his wanderings was a kind of pattern in itself…
In 2019 we launched Alton Towers, a Residency Book which records the results of a weekend residency at one of the UK’s oldest and weirdest theme parks. For anyone who couldn’t make the launch in Stoke-on-Trent, we’ve put together some video clips of the readings…
Half an inch from the south shore, a line is cast from nowhere, black dots, black dashes, almost north, almost parallel to the line of the Humber Bridge, red on green, half an inch to the left. The bridge is cut off by the ordnance grid. The dots and dashes float in a pale blue square…
A Google search for “Voldemort’s grave” will return more than 100,000 results, most of them pointing to Greyfriars Kirkyard – a modest graveyard in the middle of Edinburgh, best known as the final resting place of Greyfriars Bobby…
There are 24-hour gyms open around the clock in most cities and towns in the UK. Here we examine the daily rhythms of these strange, liminal spaces…
It’s so easy to gaze disparagingly, even mournfully, on the site of an LPG tank in a garden. Easy to consider it misplaced, miscreant, a boil on the face of a view. An objection at a local planning meeting to its placement was met with a wry smile…
I’d spent too many hours at the wheel, racing the December dusk to get to our destination before darkness fell. Too many hours scrutinising every junction, traffic lane and sign, of passing through new places and barely seeing them…
“Crystal Palace Park still carries the name of something that is no longer there, a building of plate glass and iron from the high Victorian age…”
“I’ve kept on being aware of sky since I lived in Norfolk. Up at Ivinghoe Beacon sky is paramount. Everything around you bleeds into it…”
A plane takes off or lands at London’s Heathrow Airport approximately once every 45 seconds during its operational hours. Some of them are empty, and they are empty on purpose…