Author: Stuart Butler

The Blackpool of the West (A Tale of Two Bridges Or Two Bridges and a Tunnel)

The Blackpool of the West

It’s so close to the endless edgelands of Avonmouth,

That warehouse-dystopian modernity,

Where no-one seems to manufacture anything,

Just store stuff, move stuff or exchange stuff,

And then choose a café for a coffee and a croissant:

The British economy.

But a century ago, courtesy

Of the Great Western Railway,

Severn Beach was reinventing itself,

As a holiday resort of sorts,

A Pleasure-land of the floodplains

With their isolated farms and cottages,

And then a railway station opened there in 1923

(The circular Avonmouth line had opened

Earlier at the turn of the century).

Its inter-war hey-day saw excursions,

Cyclists, promenaders, hikers,

Chalets, sheds, a structure built from bits of an old bus,

A boating lake, cafes, tea shops,

And the Blue Lagoon Swimming Pool,

With diving boards, see=saws, a slide and fountains,

At ‘The Blackpool of the West’.

And what else might you see in the summer-time

Along its mile-long ‘shingle beach’?

Look hard and ignore the bridge across the river,

For there they all are, forgetful of war,

Picnicking, paddling and dipping in the Severn,

When that fearsome turbid tide recedes,

And there are the twopenny deckchairs,

And there, the bicycle-stalls and donkey rides,

The paddling pool and the Water Carnivals,

The Bathing Beauty contests, the Seaside Revues,

And the celebrated Dance Competitions,

Are they doing the Lambeth Walk along the shingle sands?

But look.

There’s still more to see at Severn Beach:

Rollercoasters, swing-boats, and roundabouts,

The Ghost Train, dodgems, crazy golf,

And the boating lake:
(There were two islands at the boating lake

with an ice-cream parlour and decorative ‘willow pattern’ bridges) …

If the weather disappointed, then there was

The ‘Galvanised Gaumont’ showing the latest flicks,

Or the Severn Beach Hotel (aka the Severn Salmon),

With its litany of public bars, lounge bar, skittle alley,

Snooker room and ball room.

And if the weather is fine (it usually is at Severn Beach!),

Then you can watch the bicycle side-cars

As they traverse that shingle beach,

Bringing supplies to the refreshment stalls.

But wait.

Here’s the ghost of Ozymandias

Stalking the shingle beach:

‘Nothing now remains except the ornaments

at the base of the steps leading up to the pool.

These can still be seen complete with traces of the old familiar blue paint.’

 

Ozymandias is the motif that accompanies us on this walk,

As do the cliches of psychogeography

(But as someone once said, cliches are cliches

Because they do the job and that’s why they’re used a lot):

Liminality and palimpsests are two a penny here,

But these choices from the lexicon are not

The sole reason why I think this amble

On a red-hot July Sunday afternoon

Elevate this meander into an

Open air pop-up museum of sorts:

‘a temporary exhibition carefully curated, but with changing displays created by visitors with a widening circle of participants: a sort of curated happening but with serendipitous happenstance: an inclusive community show and tell with artefacts and memories and texts and photos and artwork.’

 

We did have a widening circle of participants:

A party of Japanese tourists

Grateful for our pointing out the location

Of the Blue Lagoon and also its absence

On their guides and phones;

We tripped through time with aid of information boards,

Plaques, posts and the memory

And recitation of the opening lines

Of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

As we passed the occasional old farm,

As afternoon turned towards evening:

‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.’

What next?

Hay bales in rolling fields beyond barbed wire –

Discussion on the symbolism and history of barbed wire;

Discussion on texts such as The Book of Trespass,

And the deceptive iconography in Constable’s The Hay Wain;

The personal importance of William Cobbett’s Rural Rides:

How I’ve shared this text with friends and in history talks,

Asking audience members to raise their hand if they have read it,

I do so again on this walk;

I buy another two copies when I get home,

Probably the fifth time that I have bought this book –

I leave one, not forgotten on my shelves,

But on the table in the dark back room,

The cover upturned to act as an exhibit of sorts;

The other, a present for a companion.

But back to the walk – what next?

A glimpse of medieval ridge and furrow:

“Was there really more land under the plough on the eve of the Black Death?”

The word ‘warth’ on an information board leads to further discourse

About land reclaimed from the river and also memories

Of a performative walk upstream around Slimbridge,

In search of the possible 1649 Digger settlement there.

(https://radicalstroud.co.uk/the-diggers-at-slimbridge/)

 

 

Next up were teazles springing up on the footpath,

A reminder themselves of pre-industrial working

(The ‘domestic system’ as it was termed in my schooldays),

A reminder of handloom weavers and raising the nap,

And we raised the nap too with our own stories

On the Severn Beach Heritage Trail and the Severn Way:

‘The Trail starts on the sea-wall, almost underneath the Second Severn Crossing. It continues north from the trail described in the Severn Beach leaflets. Unlike Severn Beach, many of the sites still exist and can be seen by following this trail.’

And this is beguiling.

You reach New Passage,

 Where ‘a ferry had plied the river for centuries’,

Updated by the Bristol & South Wales Union Railway

(1863, broad gauge),

With a train that ran up a wooden jetty,

Some third of a mile long jutting out in the river

And ‘An imposing hotel was built to accommodate passengers’,

Who were often forced to wait by inclement weather,

And the second highest tidal range in the world.

The opening of the Severn Tunnel in 1886

Changed everything, of course:

Not just for passengers but freight too,

Particularly South Wales coal –

The life-blood of the Great Western Railway.

And so concludes our trip through Severn space and time.

Did we create an Open-air Exhibition of sorts?

Did we meet our definition of a Pop-up Museum?

Yes, we did in a pedestrian manner of speaking:

‘A temporary exhibition carefully curated, but with changing displays created by visitors with a widening circle of participants: a sort of curated happening but with serendipitous happenstance: an inclusive community show and tell with artefacts and memories and texts and photos and artwork.’

 

A walk.

A happening.

An open-air pop-up museum.

Created by slow walking, reading, conversing, writing and recording.

This truly was “walking as a situated practice”

at “the intersection of embodiment, site and heritage”,

as I/we “write from within the grounds” we “move through”.

‘

Why No Hoboes Over Here?

I’m writing this after rereading Kenneth Alsopp’s classic Hard Travellin’ after a gap of some nearly fifty years. It is, needless, to say, a book of its time but what a poetic piece of extensive research it is. It’s a piece of Americana but the book also opens up the question in the title above.

I suppose ‘riding the rails’ has happened in an almost obscure and virtually unrecorded way in this country with children and trainspotters. Steve McQueen’s film The Blitz features children and evacuees sort of stowing away and my mate has written down his memories of ‘riding the rails’ in his A Film Called Happiness    by Jon Seagrave / Jonny Fluffypunk

‘You are fifteen years old. It is 6 in the morning and it is February; it is pitch dark and freezing cold, and you are huddled foetal, shivering in a thin sleeping bag on the seat in a compartment of an ancient railway carriage parked up for the night in the deserted, unlit platform at Thurso station. The end of the line, the far north of Scotland, the most northerly point of the British railway network. And don’t you know it- the sky is blacker than black, the windows of the carriage rimed with ice, inside and out.

There are four of you. You broke into this train at midnight; four fifteen-year-olds, full of chips and glowing from under-age beer drunk in a pub that couldn’t care less, in possession of a purloined carriage key. You came up here yesterday, across the vast and empty moorland on this train, and you will head back south on this train at daybreak, and now you are sleeping on this train, or trying to sleep in the bitter chill. For the past four days trains have been your home; they will be your home for the next three, too. 650 miles away, on the outskirts of London, your mother is wondering where the hell you are and what you are doing.

And what you are doing is bashing, which your mother finds difficult to understand. This is your life. You are a Basher, and you are in the (self-appointed) top tier of railway cranks. To the outside world- the normals- you are just another ‘trainspotter’, but you are not a trainspotter. Merely seeing trains and noting their numbers is not enough. You are a basher, and you are all about haulage, about riding behind a locomotive, about racking up the mileage; the beast has to work for you to earn it’s red-pen underline in the hallowed BR Motive Power Pocket Book. And it doesn’t stop at that underline, oh no: clear that loco for 100 miles, for 500, for a thousand… there is no end to this chase, no end to life on the bash.

And here in Thurso, at the head of the short rake of carriages, silhouetted against the starlight, sits your silent, slumbering quarry: 102 tons of English Electric Class 37 diesel-electric locomotive. Nicknamed ‘Tractors’ for their throaty, throbbing engine sound and their suitability for any job, from express passenger to Welsh valleys coal train. Twenty-two-year-old filthy blue-and-yellow beasts like this are your passion. You travel the length and breadth of the country in pursuit of them. It is class 37s that for now bring the thrills, the joy, the let-downs and the heartbreak that soon enough will be brought by girls and bands and politics, but not yet. You don’t know it, of course, but you have 10 months left to go before this all becomes your slightly embarrassing past.

In half an hour the Thurso traincrew will arrive; they will nod you a gruff hello. They know you’re not meant to be here, but in 1985 railway cranks are part of the everyday of railworkers’ lives; you’re eccentric but harmless- dossing on locked-up frozen trains is just the sort of thing you do, and for the most part no-one gives a toss, and you’re just left to get on with it. And soon enough daylight will grow in the east, and the engine will splutter and cough into life, and the steam-heat will drift up from under the seat to slowly warm your frozen body, and then passengers- the normals– will invade your little world and then- with a horn-blast and a roar of engine-thrash- you’re away, with you hanging out the front window, filling your hair with diesel-smoke. And four hours later you will be pulling into Inverness, and you will have racked up another 150 miles behind a class 37, and it will all have been worth it.

Your passion is relentless. Day after day, train after train. You make desperate leaps between split-second connections, endure rancid ‘festers’ in cold waiting rooms, all in pursuit of more Tractor mileage in the book. You get word-of-mouth info from other cranks. You make calls from remote phone boxes to contacts in BR Control. You are ever- hungry for the golden prize of insider knowledge- the ‘Gen’. And when you’ve got the gen, then it’s out with your ‘Bible’ (the two-inch-thick British Rail 1985 All-Line Timetable, 4-point font on rizla-thin paper). Then the frantic working out of ‘moves’, whole working timetables etched into your memory. Then scrambling at a moment’s notice from Exeter up to Edinburgh, from Bridge of Orchy down to Bristol, all because some monstrously ‘big’ freight-only 37 has wound up diagrammed on a summer cross-country relief. And when that thrashing, growling monster pulls into the platform there will be dozens and dozens of you who have made it there from all corners of the country to greet it, all alerted through some magic of pre-digital bush telegraph, all succumbing to the irresistible pull of its black-hole gravity.

In 1985, there are thousands of people like you. Tens of thousands, even. They are not all old men in anoraks, like the few cranks you still see occasionally in 2025- the last dying remnants of railway enthusiasm, gamely clinging to what-once-was against the backdrop of a ravaged and decimated privatised rail system. In 1985 you are for the most part young and you can be anyone- there are cranks who are punks, cranks who are skinhead bootboys, cranks who are soul-boys, mods, or footie casuals, cranks who are metal-heads or goths. There are black cranks and Asian cranks and female cranks, though admittedly they are few. But even amongst the vastly-predominant Young White Males, all the outside-world rivalries- all the divisions of music and class and race and sexual orientation, of north vs south, all are put aside in pursuit of trains. Gen, moves, carriage compartments and waiting rooms are all shared freely, regardless of haircut or accent or tightness of trouser.

Inside-world rivalries, of course, abound: train spotters are the pits, you’re all agreed on that, all you who have turned your back on the static passivity of the platform end in favour of the Great Hunt, the intoxicating chase of bashing. But then what to Bash? You, you’ve self-identified as an English Electric man, through and through, committing to the pursuit of locomotives built by that stalwart Newton-le-Willows manufacturer, with their distinctive engine sounds and classic stylings not just class 37s, but also class 20s, 40s, 50s, and that refinement straightaway puts you way above the bash-anything-that-moves ghettoes of the NED (‘New Engine Desperado’) and the Insect (all day back and forth the same few miles between Birmingham’s New St and International, or Edinburgh’s Waverley and Haymarket), slaves both to the red pen underline, to quantity over quality.  And- in your mind at least- it puts you way above the ‘Peak’ bashers, the ‘Rat’ bashers, and all others dedicated to what you-correctly- perceive as lesser breeds of motive power. And above all of you, at the top of the tree, the ‘main men’, the ones who’ve been at it for years, for decades even, men who started on steam; the 24/7 train-tramps, perpetually on the move, with wild hair and unidentifiable income-streams and airs of rightful superiority, the ones who’ll talk to no-one with less than a quarter-million miles on the clock, the Kings of the Rails.

And you dream of being a Main Man one day, with a beard and an eccentric overcoat and your life in a battered Gladstone bag, but for now you’re still one of the aspiring rabble, one of the thousands, with your Adidas bag graffitied with the numbers of your fave machines and stuffed with your Bible, your moves books, a jumper or two and a pair of pants. Day after day of strip-washes in swaying train bogs, snatched sleep hunched in seats under strip-lights, 3am ‘bailing’ at some freezing junction followed by a hellish ‘fester’ on a windswept platform; this is how you live. Hanging from carriage door droplight windows, drunk on the roar of engine-thrash, flailing arms, bellowing whoops in salute to the thundering machine up front.

You’ve had 37’s to Skegness. 37’s to Aberystwyth, 37’s to Blackpool and Yarmouth and the Devon coast. You’ve had 37’s to Mallaig and Thurso and Wick, to Oban and Ayr. In 1985 as a 15-year-old boy you rack up 35,000 miles on the rails. Every school holiday is a week’s All-line Rover here, a Freedom of Scotland ticket there (sixteen quid for the latter; unlimited travel for seven days); every weekend you’re off and away. Rail travel’s cheap in ‘85, but for you it’s even cheaper: the basher is a black-belt at ‘effing it’, a dab hand at the art of dubious validity, and you are no exception, deftly doctoring date-stamps with brake-fluid and milk. On a crowded summer Saturday express, with an overworked guard and every vestibule chocka with window-hanging bashers, then a quick flash of an out-of-date North Wales Rover will get you all the way to Newcastle.

Well, most times it will. But just as every cartoon hero must have their nemesis, so yours are the TTI’s, the Travelling Ticket Inspectors, all big black overcoats and hawk-eyes, the gestapo of British Rail. Like you, perpetually on the move. Like you, wedded to the rails. These are hardened men, veterans who give no quarter; grim-faced, vengeful men, primed to spot your fudged date-stamp at 100 yards … They hate you, all of you, and they want you off their trains. All have nicknames: Loose- Irons. The Purple Mask. Granville of the London Midland, who’d once spot-fined his own mother, and once went rogue in a Welsh market town, storming out into the street, demanding valid tickets from a chip-shop queue. You fear the TTI’s. You all do. You have had a TTI rip your dodgy Scottish Rover to bits in front of you, then throw you out in the rain at Falkirk High, a teenage boy, ticketless and skint and hundreds of miles from home.

But does it put you off? Not for a minute. It’s all part of the great railway adventure, and you wouldn’t swap it for anything. None of it- not the TTIs, the freezing nights, the dossing in your clothes, the filthy hair stinking of diesel fumes; not the diet of chips and Travellers-Fare sarnies, not the fitful sleeps, not the ‘leaps’ for connections at three in the morning. It’s all worth it, all of it, every glorious moment. For you don’t know it yet but you will come to think of these days as some of the best days of your life, your most favourite days, your carefree days, the days before girls, the days when joy and despair were in the hands of simple lumps of metal, and you rattled through the summers with the windows down, your head sticking out, you drinking in the distant engine-thrash, the engine-thrash that could be the soundtrack to a film you could make of all of this, a film you’d call, simply, Happiness.

Now, this is fascinating social history and well-worth recording but it is, let’s admit, very small beer compared to

‘I been ridin’ them fast rattlers I thought ya knowed

I been ridin’ them flat wheelers way down the road,

I been ridin’ these dead enders, kickin’ up cinders,

I been hittin’ some hard travellin’, Lord.’

Or

‘They were hikin’ through the tunnels,

Holdin’ on the funnels,

Ridin’ on the gunnels

On the way to Montreal.’

Or

‘I see a train coming down the railroad track,

Love to hear the bark of that old smokestack.

I hate to hear that freight train blow boo-hoo!

Cos every time I hear it, feel like riding too.’

Or

‘The long steel rails that have no end

Have caused me to roam.’

Or

‘An overland limited

Chalks a streak of gold

Across the blackboard of night …

Prosperity lounges in pullman coaches …

While American jobless

Ride the decks, the rods of coaches …’

Or

‘Caboose-like they go ruminating through

Ohio, Indiana – blind baggage –

To Cheyenne tagging …

Maybe Kalamazoo.’

Or

‘Rail-squatters ranged in nomad raillery

The ancient men – wifeless or runaway

Hobo-trekkers that forever reach

An empire wilderness of freight and rails.’

But back to the navvies building our railway lines in the 19th century: why didn’t they hitch a ride? Why did they tramp from job to job? Why didn’t they ride the rails? Why didn’t we have hoboes over here?

Kenneth Alsopp looked at this question via Terry Coleman’s The Railway Navvies A History of the Men who made the Railways: Coleman described the 200,000 navvies in Britain as ‘nomads … to ordinary people they were practically unknown and this increased the fear and the legend’ – Alsopp comments that ‘This is strikingly similar to that which was happening to the navvy’s counterpart across the Atlantic where the hobo ganger was both romanticized and outlawed.’ He then goes on to say, ‘On the other hand the British navvy seems never to have freeloaded on the trains he made way for, as did his American opposite number. Instead of riding the rods or snagging a boxcar he either walked it or bought a third-class ticket … An American migrant worker would never, on principle, have parted with money to the railroad companies.’

Let’s now ruminate on some of the possible reasons why there was no recorded riding of the rails in the 19th and early 20th centuries on our side of the Atlantic Ocean. Well, the obvious answer, I hear you all say, is to do with SIZE, geography, topography and urbanisation: you might ‘rest for the night’ and be ‘only twenty-four hours from Tulsa’ but God knows where you’d be if you were twenty-four hours from Taunton and you wouldn’t say ‘only’, would you?

As regards urbanisation, Alsopp mentioned Eric Hobsbawm’s aphorism, ‘the tram replaced the tramp’: by 1851, England’s population-distribution was an outlier, with an urban population comprising half of the total for the country. No other country in the world was so densely urbanised and industrialised. This steam-based economy was also a national economy; the days of contrasting local patterns of economic boom and slump were over; it was now pointless to tramp the country via your trade and artisans’ inns (the Masons Arms, for example) in search of work. But if it’s pointless to tramp in search of work then it’s also pointless (no pun intended) to ride the rails too.

A densely packed urbanized population also meant that marshalling yards, goods yards and sidings were more easily checked compared with the wide-open spaces of the United States and also harder to trespass upon. And if you did jump a train, you’d be more easily spotted and apprehended once the train was on its way. There were no long-distance American-style freight trains trundling through a seemingly endless wild landscape; an English hobo would have been spotted quite easily. The rolling stock compounded the problem: there were no long, open-doored boxcars or grain hoppers. British wagons were smaller and shorter, affording less protection.

But even though England was densely populated and urbanised by the mid-nineteenth century, British agriculture enjoyed a boom from the abolition of the corn laws in 1846 until the 1870s. And even after that decade, there were still patterns of seasonal migration for crop-picking etc. But nothing, of course, like the hobo migrations riding the railroad in the United States. George Orwell travelled with hop-pickers from the East End into Kent in the 1930s; third-class rather than jumping a train and just a short journey too. But the mechanisation of British agriculture also reduced the need for seasonal migration of labour too. Thomas Hardy provides a vivid picture of a steam-powered threshing machine in Tess of the d’Urbevilles: it is the machine that is itinerant, not the labourers: ‘He travelled with his engine from farm to farm, from county to county, for as yet the steam threshing machine was itinerant in this part of Wessex.’ In addition, there was a large pool of agricultural labourers, some unemployed, waiting for work (and keeping it local, I can recall biking out as a schoolboy in the 1960s to do potato picking).

In addition, referring back to Eric Hobsbawm’s succinct summary that ‘the tram replaced the tramp’, the late nineteenth-century saw a growth in the service economy, shops, office work etc within an increasingly suburbanised England: that, too, of course, contributed to a growth in job opportunities close to doorsteps. In addition, Education Acts began to alter working-class horizons to some degree while the growth of Empire and emigration also reduced unemployment.

Now to the history of transatlantic chattel slavery. Enslavement was abolished in the British Empire in 1834 but, of course, chattel slavery was only ended in the United States with the end of the Civil War. And although there was a Black and Asian presence in the United Kingdom in the 19th century, it bears no comparison to the United States: nearly 4 million chattel slaves in 1860 and around half a million free citizens. This leads to the question of what impact did American structural racism (Dixie! The Lost Cause!) have upon riding the rails from around 1865-1941.

There was no English Robert Johnson:

‘Goin’ to Detroit, get myself a real god job,

Tired of stayin’ round here with the starvation mob.’

Or Blind Lemon Jefferson:

‘Chicago and Detroit folks, have you heard the news?

Old Dixieland is jumping – I’ve got the Southern blues.’

Kenneth Alsopp summarised thus: ‘Yet for everyone who came back a hundred more went North.’

Now on to the IWW, the International Workers of the World, ‘the Wobblies’ and Syndicalism, and a simple British contextualisation. Syndicalism: the idea of fusing trade unions into one unified union to bring about mass strikes and break capitalism, had an arguably quick life in Britain in the 1830s and an impact of sorts on the wave of strikes in Britain between 1910 and 1914. But, in the main, the growth of individual unions for both craft and unskilled workers, allied to the growth of the Labour Party and the ‘parliamentary road to socialism’ all meant that syndicalism was a marginal force in Britain. That marginality was emphasised even when this country experienced the 1926 General Strike.

But what of the USA?

Let’s start with Kenneth Alsopp’s interview with Fred Thompson.

Fred was arrested in 1923 and spent four years in jail (mostly St Quentin), having been charged with possession of IWW material and of ‘criminal syndicalism’ (along with 100 others). ‘I just moved around, soapboxing and organizing, living on next to nothing, a can of beans and a loaf of bread … At that time it would have been thought eccentric for a construction worker to pay a fare to get anywhere. For me the freights were just a practical way of getting to jobs or union assignments.

‘You remember Odysseus telling the sailors in the storm at sea that these things will be pleasanter remembered at a future time? Some things which were very unenjoyable at the time make good memories. I like to get a cup of coffee and look out of the window when there’s a severe storm – we look out of a window at the past.

That doesn’t mean there weren’t simple joys. I once went from Duluth to Chicago in a gondola loaded with spruce and pine bought for decoration. It was nice, warm summertime. The colour of that balsam as the sun hit them! The boughs had a spring action. No sultan or emperor ever travelled in greater luxury than I did on that train.

But there were some bitterly cold rides. There were times when I damaged the blood vessels in my feet from pounding them to keep the circulation going. And I’ve gone ravenously hungry. I travelled from Chicago to Spokane on 25 cents and lived on beans and some bananas I picked up in a boxcar. There were some hens there, I watched these hens until one laid an egg.’

Now to the railway workers.

‘I was a shovel and pick man. This is the kind of work you take up as a last, I mean last resort. At first it hits you so hard that you’re too bushed to eat. It takes you ten days to break in …

Pretty soon I became a gandy dancer. You use a spike-maul, that’s a ten-pond hammer with a foot-long narrow head, and you really have to roll that spike, which is an inch-and-a-half diameter, with a twirling action. Two of you work on each spike, hitting it in turn, whirling that hammer to keep it whipping. In just one second – zap!- that spike’s right in. You’re not allowed too many misses. They don’t like you hitting the rail. If you show yourself not to be much of a marksman you don’t last. Finally, I became a gauge spiker, leading a section.

You have to line up the new rail with the old rail, put an iron gauge on the old and the new, and keep them in position while you drive in the gauge spike as a guide for the gandy dancers behind you. This has to be done with speed and precision. You’re setting the pace. With a gang of sixty men you’d lay or re-lay three miles of track, one length of single line, in a day …’

Well, that’s the end of the line now, so to speak.

Unless Jon Seagrave/Jonny Fluffypunk can come up with a song to silence the American hard travellin’ hoboes …

Come on, Jon.

You know you want to …

A Walk can be an Open Air Museum

A BS3 Museum Walk (Others Are Available)

Join me on one of my regular walks from my home to Ashton Gate, the home of Bristol City. I am highlighting the exhibits I connect with. If you were to undertake the walk you would, undoubtedly, see different things.
Exhibit 1 – Perrett Park
I enter Perrett Park through its main entrance at the top end and move slightly to the right. In front of me, on the skyline, I see, to my left, Dundry Parish Church. To my right I see Clifton Parish Church (Christchurch). Over the course of 12 months I am able to watch the sunsets as they move between the two churches, Dundry in the winter and Clifton in the summer. The variety of views seem infinite as do the range of colours and skyscapes to absorb. As one descends the steep concave slope which makes up the park, near the bottom entrance you encounter two anchor points. They are left over from World War. Barrage balloons were tethered there in attempts to deter the Luftwaffe bombing Bristol Docks and the goods marshalling yards at Temple Meads railway station. It’s difficult to imagine anyone bombing the harbourside in Bristol today. Or is it? I forgot to mention that, from the top of the park, you can see the Suspension Bridge.
Exhibit 2 – A Victorian Post Box
After leaving Perrett Park one quickly reaches St John’s Lane a long road that winds through Bedminster. At the junction with Paultow Road a Victorian pillar box is encountered. I have a thing about post boxes because they are a good way to mark the evolution of a particular location. In a place like Bristol that usually means the development of an urban setting. The pillar box on St John’s Lane gives me a clue as to when some of the adjacent housing was built. Further along I am likely to find post boxes but with markings of later monarchs. Towns and cities tend to spread out from a central point. Have a look at www.postboxmap.co.uk .
Exhibit 3 – Broad Plain RFC Ground
A couple of hundred yards along St John’s Lane is The Brunel pub. Behind it lie several rugby pitches, the home of Broad Plain RFC. But, long before the oval ball moved in, from 1894 until 1904 it was the home of Bristol South End FC which came Bristol City FC after the club amalgamated with Bedminster FC in 1897. Apart from my emotional connection to City through a lifetime’s support, it fascinates me that the site once had crowds of up to 14,000 to see some of the best teams of the day.
Exhibits 4 and 5 Albert Inn and McDonalds
As my journey continues onwards I reach the corner of Sheene Road and West Street, Bedminster. The former pub on the corner, currently known as the Departure Lounge, was once the Albert Inn and a pre-eminent venue for jazz music in Bristol. The thing is, I always meant to go there but never did. And then it closed about 20 years ago and has lurched along as a pub and bar ever since. The reason for it closing down, as I recall, was that the site was going to be redeveloped. Across the road on the opposite corner is a branch of McDonalds. It wasn’t always like that. For many years it was derelict. It had been the site of the Bedminster Tram Depot until a bomb hit in 1941. That, along with other bombs elsewhere in the city, meant the end of trams in Bristol although they were already on their way out before Germany’s intervention. My paternal grandfather worked at the tram depot.
Exhibit 6 – South Street
As I walk past South Street School I think of a friend who had been a pupil there. She could remember being taken to The Downs in 1897 when Queen Victoria visited the city in celebration of her Diamond Jubilee. Knowing somebody who had been alive at the end of the 19 th Century at the end of the 20 th Century gave me a real connection with the past.
Exhibit 7 – Tobacco Factory
Towards the end of North Street is the bar and arts venue, the Tobacco Factory. It is the one remaining reminder of Bristol’s tobacco industry. Once, In Bedminster and Ashton, there were what seemed like numerous red brick buildings all involved in producing tobacco products. As someone who has never smoked, even as a child, I was curious as to how so many people were employed producing such a deadly thing. And then it was gone, removed first to Hartcliffe then out of the city completely.
Should I be nostalgic at the sight of the one remaining testimony to such an
industry?
Exhibit 8 – Football Murals
In keeping with the street art reputation in the Ashton/Bedminster parts of BS3 recent years have seen a number of murals appear on the walls of buildings approaching Ashton Gate. They are all dedicated to ex-players living and dead who left their mark with the fans of Bristol City. I may sound a little middle class here but I do appreciate the crossover of a sport with a working class history and a modern form of art that fits the location.
My walk is at an end. I have reached the football ground. That’s another set of exhibits.

Trevor Simpson

Dudbridge Railway Station

 

I often walk the cycle track below Rodborough Hill,
The old Midland Railway spur from Dudbridge,
And I often cycle the track on to Nailsworth,
Musing on the springs and watercourses, the ancient holloways,
The Roman villa, medieval ridge and furrow, the woollen mills,
The occasional mill chimney, still rising high into the Stroudwater sky.

But, today, I stand at the blue brick retaining wall

At the old Dudbridge railway station,

Watching the cars career around the roundabout,

Drivers mostly oblivious of the history of Dudbridge;

But when I ignore the roar of the traffic,

And I find my mind’s historical eye,

I can see a medieval pilgrim crossing the bridge,

A packhorse with Cotswold wool a mile behind.

For here I stand by the confluence of two rivers.

But also, at the junction of two railway lines:

The interface of water power and steam power,

The inexorable march of the industrial revolution:

Foundries and forges and furnaces

And cranes and pulleys and chains and smoke:

A century-old pandemonium at Dudbridge,

Where once there was an orchard and there is still a Meadow Lane.

Carefully cross the road and study the information plaques

On the wall at Sainsburys; the clothier’s 1646 doorway too;

The inscription at REDLERS from 1910;

The information board at Kimmins Mill,

Then retrace your steps carefully back to the blue brick wall,

And recite these words from T.S. Eliot to yourself:
“And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

Psychogeography and Cyclo-geography

 

I’m a great fan of psychogeographical wandering: I love the whole chronotope thing of getting lost in a landscape and drifting through timescapes; I love the whole Hazlittian and Solnitian walking and thinking at 2.5 miles an hour trope. I love walking, thinking, imagining and composing on my own.

But sometimes, the bicycle calls. The traditions of the Clarion Club beckon: a collective socialist exploration of landscape, history and conversation. That too has it place: a good old-fashioned bike ride. Or perhaps a bit of Mr. Polly; Mr. Kipps; Lucia and Georgino; or working-class hero; or green locomotion.

Cyclo-geography, however,  is a new phenomenon: it needs an e-bike around these parts. The freedom to pedal with comfort up any Stroudwater hill; the satisfaction of knowing that you can explore as many valleys as you wish; the exploration of all those precipitous dead ends that you would never contemplate on your old steed; doing in two hours what used to take four; in short, extending your pedestrian practice of psychogeography, through the praxis of cyclo-geography.

And collective cycling has a rich heritage. Here is one strand:

Cyclists of the World Unite You have Nothing to lose but your Chains

The 1890s saw the development

Of the bicycle as we now know it,

Overtaking the posh boys’ plaything,

The cumbrous high-seated penny-farthing;

Here was a bike the workers could afford:

Second-hand, about twice a weekly wage;

New, about ten times that but with a deposit,

You could pay by tolerable instalments.

This was an end of century revolution:

The sun might not set on the British Empire,

But it also shone on working-class

Women and men cycling to work,

Or cycling for leisure along the lanes,

Roads and thoroughfares of this country.

There was a political change too:

The Independent Labour Party was formed in 1893;

Unskilled workers began to unionise

After the Bryant and May women’s strike of 1888 –

But no women had the vote, of course,

And only 60% of men over 21

In this so-called British democracy.

And so, socialism and cycling went hand in glove,

With the determined men and women

Of the Clarion Club Scouts,

Carrying the message of collectivism,

And the nascent liberation of women.

And this was a form of recreation too,

That working-class women could pursue,

Unlike tennis and badminton and croquet –

And bloomin’ ‘eck!

Women cycling in their knickers and bloomers,

Liberated from corsets and heavy skirts.

So, remember this history,

And remember this too:

Cyclists of the World Unite!

You have Nothing to lose but your Chains.

Here is the Clarion Club hymn – it would be great if anyone fancies updating the gendered language from a century ago and more.

The Clarion Club

Oh! Who rides by day and night, roundabout,

Tinkling their bicycle bell?

Hark how they near us with cheering shouts,

Hurrah! Hurrah! It’s the Clarion Scouts!

List to the story they tell.

What tho’ the weather be cold as an icicle,

Bravely they cling to their Clarion bicycle

Scattering leaflets, sticking up labels,

Filling a breach at old hostelry tables,

Such are the beings I’ll sing you about.

Three hearty cheers for the Clarion Scouts!

(Chorus):

Hurrah for the Clarion Scouts!

Hail them with strenuous shouts!

As bold as Lysander

To push propaganda,

Hurrah for the Clarion Scouts!

Down to the haunts of the parson and squire,

Putting opponents to rout;

Bestriding their steeds with pneumatic tyre,

Through village and hamlet, thro’ mud and thro’ mire

Rideth the Clarion Scouts.

Nailing down lies and disposing of fables,

Improving the landscape by sticking up labels:

What do they care for the wind and the weather?

If they’re alone or a hundred together,

They’re always eager to join in a bout.

Then give three cheers for the Clarion Scout.

What do these labels mysterious teach?

What is the message they bring?

Something that comes within everyone’s reach:

A gospel of unity – that’s what they preach.

In praise of that gospel I sing.

Here’s Bob Blenkinsop:

Cycling out: Sunday rides with the fellowship

 An occasional listener to Desert Island Discs, I tuned in to listen the other day to Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim. He did not want to take the Bible for reading material; he chose: several copies of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Several copies? Oh yes. for Norman desired to give copies of the life of Hasting’s painters and decorators to those who would visit him whilst on his Island Odyssey. The DJ felt that this was the best fictional account of Socialism in action, and this was his vision for the island.

Hearing this reminded me of that scene in the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists when the Sunday cyclists came to town: “One Sunday morning towards the end of July about 25 men and women on bicycles invaded the town”

They distributed leaflets on socialism. Their presence was greeted with some derision and some cheers. The distributed leaflet read:

 

What is Socialism?

At present the workers with

Hand and brain produce

Continually food, clothing and all

Useful and beautiful things in great abundance

BUT THEY LABOUR IN VAIN

This standard-bearing cyclist vanguard of the Clarion Club, founded in 1895, is still in existence today, with a Cotswold Clarion Cycling Club and other U.K. branches and one clubhouse (only open on a Sunday) on the West Yorkshire/Lancashire border.

On my Bike, along the canal I imagine: Stuart, Dennis, Andy B, Norman, Angi, Jenny and I, our baskets filled with leaflets, and, saddles set with optimism. We heed the Clarion Call to defeat the scourge of Reform and its fag face phoney leader, for that is the pertinent call.

The Cyclists visited Mugsborough at the end of July. Let us one and all cycle out with copies of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, leaflets to give; be brave comrades, we are many they are few.

 

LOOK OUT FOR THE SOCIALIST VAN

Walking: Art-act and Artefact

 

We finished the previous chapter thus: Macfarlane argues that Thomas prefigures the Situationists, ‘Pioneering the walk as an art-act, as artefact.’ Well, that sort of sounds like walking as a pop-up museum in a way, doesn’t it?

I asked my sister, Fliss, and brother-in-law, Rod, if they would send me a few lines about their memories of walking the Downs in Wiltshire when they sometimes recited lines from Edward Thomas to each other.

4 July 2026

Now that our days of long rambles on the Downs

are beyond us, we have wonderful memories of the

sweeping views we had from places like

Wansdyke and Ridgeway, from where at one

spot towards Hackpen, five hill forts are in

view with:

Uffington, Liddington, Barbury, Oldbury and

Martinsell all clearly visible.

Often the words of Alfred Williams and

Richard Jefferies came to mind –

‘Still to find and still to follow

Joy in every hill and hollow

Company in solitude’(A.W.)

‘It is eternity now

I am in the midst of it

It is about me in the sunshine’ (R.J.)

Ridgeway walks always brought

Andrew Young’s ‘On the Ridgeway’ to mind

and we often recite these lines to each other.

65 years wed and it seems as though they

were penned especially for us.

‘Thinking of those who walked here long ago

On this greenway in summer and in snow

She said, “This is the oldest road we tread,

The oldest in the world?”

“Yes, Love,” I said.’

With these happy days only memories

our short strolls are now devoted

to botanising and it’s astonishing

the joy to be had when keeping

eyes down when ambling along.

On a rail track walk we recently

Found five varieties of cranesbill.

Then came the canal, bringing

Edward Thomas to mind with –

Willows, willow herb and meadowsweet

Plus

High cloudlets in the sky

While

Nearby a blackbird sang.

In early spring, our search for ‘Each year’s

First violets, white and lonely’

are usually found in the most unlikely

places – roadside verges where they struggle

to emerge through litter and fallen leaves,

yet they somehow survive.

We are always dipping into Edward Thomas and

have come to love ‘The Huxter’ for the image

it gives of a poor but happy pair chuckling

as they ‘bump down the lane’

Pure Magic

Rod Smith and Felicity Smith

The Huxter

He has a hump like an ape on his back;
He has of money a plentiful lack;
And but for a gay coat of double his girth
There is not a plainer thing on the earth
This fine May morning.

But the huxter has a bottle of beer;
He drives a cart and his wife sits near
Who does not heed his lack or his hump;
And they laugh as down the lane they bump
This fine May morning.

I keep the letters sent to me by my sister and brother-in-law, but not neatly tied together in a bundle or secreted in a box. I leave them in odd places on book shelves hither and thither and forget where I have put them. And then have unexpected surprises and pop-up memories around the house.

 

https://radicalstroud.co.uk/wiltshire-walking-with-edward-thomas/

 

 

 

Railway Navvies and I.K. Brunel

Everyone knows the name:

Isambard Kingdom Brunel!

And everyone knows that photograph:

The top hat, the waistcoat, the cigar,

The chain-link in the background for emphasis;

The self-assured pride of the Victorian engineer,

The man of the moment and momentum,

Proud of his steamships on the oceans,

And proud of his Great Western Railway:

The dignified certainty of genius,

Knowing that his one hundred-and-twenty mile long line

Would run all the long level permanent way,

From Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads,

With a mean gradient of just 1 in 1,380.

Just as his drawing board had intended.

But where are the men who built it?

And where are the women who followed

The ever-expanding permanent way?

Where are the Fox Talbot portraits of the navvies,

With their picks and shovels and gunpowder,

Their slide rule discipline and one hundred deaths,

Taking the line through Box Tunnel,

So that the sun shone clean right through

On Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s birthday?

Where is the tribute to their anonymity?

A working-class hero is something to be.

Walking and Cycling and Pop-up Museums

To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an Hour.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, Blake’s lines have become something of a Radical Stroud motif for a number of reasons.

But this is the fundamental reason:

I started writing A Guide to the Radical History of Stroud and the Five Valleys around 2011, with a narrative history occasionally touched by a comedic Mark Steele/ Mark Thomas style of analysis. A visit to the Writing Britain exhibition at the British Library completely changed my approach: no more the lonely writer in the garret burning the midnight oil trope. Instead, collaborative writing on the hoof: ‘Footprints and Footpaths not Footnotes.’

And, also, collaborative texts revealing the extraordinary within the ordinary, in an EP Thompson quest (The Making of the English Working Class): rescuing ‘the poor and anonymous from the enormous condescension of posterity.’ A Blakean optic not just upon the landscape but on social history too.

And that approach led me to a free verse style of writing up my/our walks and the recording of my historical research and consequent blogging: it enabled quick scribbling and composing but with a touch of figurative style. (I include a guide for this approach in a link at the end of this piece.)

I read around psychogeography, the Paris Situationists (‘Underneath the pavement, the beach!’ another of our motifs), Rebecca Solnit, William Hazlitt, Richard Jefferies, Edward Thomas, Phil Smith, et al so as to contextualise my walking through landscape and history: ‘slipping through wormholes of time.’

But now, all roads lead to Edward Thomas.

And Richard Jefferies.

Edward Thomas on Walking and Cycling
Richard Jefferies on Walking

Bike or boots?

Bikes or boots? A difficult question sometimes, and an obvious one at others. I suppose, it’s a question of what you fancy, or a matter of where you want to travel, or how far, or how much time you have: whether you want to wander across fields, or pursue a path along lanes, or up a succession of hills, and down the consequent dales. Or what you did yesterday.

This is how Edward Thomas compared the two pursuits in 1913 In Pursuit of Spring:

‘It was a still morning … But not until I went out could I tell that it was softly and coldly raining. Everything more than two or three fields away was hidden.
Cycling is inferior in this weather, because in cycling chiefly ample views are to be seen, and the mist conceals them. You travel too quickly to notice many small things. But walking I saw every small thing one by one.’

‘Under elms near Semington the threshing machine boomed, it’s unchanging note mingled with a hiss of the addition of each sheaf. Otherwise, the earth was the rooks’, heaven was the larks’; and I rode easily on along the good road somewhere between the two.
Motion was extraordinarily easy that afternoon, and I had no doubts that I did well to bicycle instead of walking. It was as easy as riding in a cart, and more satisfying to the restless … At the same time, I was a great deal nearer to being a disembodied spirit than I can often be. No people or thoughts embarrassed me. I fed through the senses directly … through the eyes chiefly, and was happier than is explicable … a foretaste of a sort of imprisonment in the viewless winds.’

Robert Macfarlane writes in the introduction to The South Country that ‘Edward Thomas was a compulsive walker’, and mentions Helen Thomas’ assertion that “His greatest pleasure … was to walk and be alone”, spurning roads, often walking in a circle for a whole day, without a map, “guided by the hills or the sun”. Macfarlane argues that Thomas prefigures the Situationists, ‘pioneering the walk as an art-act, as artefact.’

 Helen Thomas wrote in the preface to the 1932 edition of The South Country (first published 1909): “for him the most satisfying days were when he wandered far afield alone, rereading forgotten footpaths and hidden lanes, stopping at remote and primitive inns where strangers were rare … to Edward Thomas walking was not merely exercise … Nor was he … only the nature lover intent on observing … Nor was he only the aesthete … the beauty of the contours of the hills, the symmetry of the trees, and the grouping of the villages. Nor was he only the wayfarer meeting fellow travellers … talking … listening… Nor was he only the artist transmuting all this into words. He was all these and much more.”

This is Edward Thomas near the start of the book: ‘I have used a good many maps in my time, largely to avoid the towns; but I confess that I prefer to do without them and to go, if I have some days before me, guided by the hills or the sun or a stream – or, if I have one day only, in a rough circle, trusting, by taking a series of turnings to the left or a series to the right … and to return at last to my starting-point … The signboards thus often astonish me … There is a wealth of poetry in them …’

Another Wiltshire walker is of interest here: Richard Jefferies in his book The Amateur Poacher:

‘Those only know a country who are acquainted with its footpaths. By the roads, indeed, the outside may be seen, but the footpaths go through the heart of the land. There are routes by which mile after mile may be travelled without leaving the sward … village to village, now crossing green meads, now cornfields, over brooks, past woods, through farmyards…’

Macfarlane argues that Thomas prefigures the Situationists,

 ‘Pioneering the walk as an art-act, as artefact.’

 Well, that sort of sounds like walking as a pop-up museum in a way, doesn’t it?

More to follow on Edward Thomas later.

https://radicalstroud.co.uk/creative-writing-guide/

 

 

 

 

A People’s History Chapter Ten

A MISCELLANY OF HISTORY

A TEXTUAL WEAVING OF A CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

A TEXTUAL SAMPLER

Chapter Ten

Riots remembered:

Hello Stuart

Good to see you on Wednesday. I promised to send you something about the wonderfully named ‘ Mid-Gloucestershire Historical Pageant of Progress’ acted out at Fromehall Park in the late summer of 1911. My mother (ringed on the attached photo page) was almost nine years old and, as you can see, was pretending to be a corn and machinery rioter! The personnel for episode V111 were drawn from the Nailsworth area. The performance text was entirely in rhyming couplets and lasted two and a half hours – surely the largest event numerically produced in the Stroud area since its cast numbered 1100!

Hope this is of interest.

Best wishes

Howard

 

Episode VIII. Corn Law Riots, AD 1846

Enter a crowd of unemployed and starving weavers and workpeople complaining of the dearness of bread and the cruelty of the Corn Laws. A band of rioters come up singing. They attack a baker’s cart and seize the bread. They are then setting out for the mills to destroy the new machines but are stopped by a mill-owner, who explains that it is the Corn Laws and not the new machines that cause unemployment. A messenger brings news of the repeal of the Corn Laws. General rejoicing.

Epilogue

The Spirit of Progress returns and thanks the audience for all being ‘friends of progress’. She declares that, in the two thousand years of the pageant from Romans to the present, ‘we’ve grown to be a mighty nation, civilized and free’, with Cotswold making its own contribution to the good of England. She then proposes that the good work should continue, and that crime, disease, want, war, and misery should be banished in favour of virtue, peace, and happiness.

https://www.stroudlocalhistorysociety.org.uk/research/pageant/#:~:text=Staged%20during%20the%20late%20summer,a%20huge%20cast%20of%201100.

I helped out early doors at the Stroud Show today (July 2026) putting up Stroud Local History Society’s exhibition of Howard’s presentation about the above. We are so lucky to have the Stroud Local History Society and its members and leading lights.

Walking a Pop-up Museum

I’ve been giving a question some thought: Can a walk (be it themed and purposeful or just ad hoc recreational) not only create a pop-up museum, in consequence, when back at home (individually and/or collectively), but also create a mobile pop-up museum itself whilst in the very act of walking?

Sometimes, of course, this happens automatically, serendipitously and solipsistically, when you’re out and about: that Penny Lane feeling: “And though she feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway”, and that Truman Show illusion you get sometimes when staring at the world.

In short, when you’re Feeling Groovy, life seems to be a sort of pop-up museum … “Hello lamp-post, what you knowin’, I’ve come to watch your flowers growin’…” And you can get that flight of individual imagination whilst out walking in a group, too, of course, as well as on a solitary ramble …

I tend to drift in and out of company while out on a group-walk; in the main, I like to let my thoughts roam free and unconstrained, making unusual connections and correspondences; but, obviously, and on the other hand, we learn a lot from conversation too: ‘Every day’s a school day’ – surely, it’s only the arrogant fool who believe they know absolutely everything …

William Hazlitt, however,  wrote a wonderful essay on the joys of solitary rambling back in the early 19th century. It’s food for thought.

Where do you stand on walking and talking?
On rambling and ranting?
On orating and hiking?
I’m more of a Hazlitt strider myself:

‘One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room, but out of doors, Nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone … I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time … “Let me have a companion of my way,” says Sterne, “were it but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines.” It is beautifully said: but, in my opinion, this continual comparing of notes interferes with the involuntary impression of things upon the mind, and hurts the sentiment … ‘

I know what Hazlitt means:
Wordsworthian pantheism,
Or William Blake flights of fancy,
Or psycho-geographical musing,
Or Zen-style footfall mindfulness,
Are often inhibited by the clang of voices,
And the din of conversation;
But on other occasions, it’s true
That the knowledge of a companion
Can act as a stimulus to a new understanding,
Or a novel re-creation of a landscape;
And, sometimes, of course, we need to catch up
On ‘news’ with friends or family –
It is all, I suppose, a matter of balance:
A dynamic harmony of opposites
Help make for an enriching walk in company –
Sometimes alone, and sometimes alive
To conviviality and congeniality,
And sometimes finding empathy,
Shared meanings and understanding
When exploring the land in shared silence –
Followed by a post-ramble sharing
Of individual and collective experience
In mutual discourse on how we read our walk,
A deconstruction and re-creation
Of how we made sense of it all;
For as William Hazlitt put it:

‘I am for the synthetical method on a journey in preference to the analytical. I am content to lay in a stock of ideas then, and to examine and anatomise them afterwards. I want to see my vague notions float like the down of the thistle before the breeze, and not to have them entangled in the briars and thorns …’

Well said, William.

But it’s time now to return to pop-up museums. Let’s remind ourselves of what a pop-up museum is so that we can properly assess whether a walk fits the bill. What exactly is a pop-up museum? This is the definition we work with at Radical Stroud: a temporary exhibition carefully curated, but with changing displays created by visitors with a widening circle of participants: a sort of curated happening but with serendipitous happenstance: an inclusive community show and tell with artefacts and memories and texts and photos and artwork.

 

Well, a walk is certainly temporary; exhibits can include maps, photographs of the route from the past, documents, texts, artefacts carried in rucksacks etc.; the display obviously changes as the walk unfolds, and conversation adds to the mix; then talking with strangers and people you meet along the way widens the circle of participants; there might be information boards and plaques along the way, and we sometimes have a bit of performance on a walk – so it certainly can be ‘a sort of curated happening but with serendipitous happenstance: an inclusive community show and tell with artefacts and memories and texts and photos and artwork.’

 

We can all learn, of course, from the walking practices of different people and groups. When I accompanied Walking the Land, their practice often involved silent walking with occasional breaks for sketching, photography, writing, recording, video and so on. I often take photos not for social media but as an aide memoire for writing up later – I deliberately avoid making notes so as to strengthen my powers of recall. I write long hand at home first of all: I feel that my mind is more creative and lateral when not circumscribed by the linear A-Z keyboard of my computer.

When on seaside walks with my family, I collect driftwood, and pen lines about the day. Some we leave around the house or in the garden as surprise ‘theatres of memory’ while there is also the joy of seeing pieces in my daughters’ homes celebrating the birth of their children. Stroud railway station has an information board that echoes those acts of creation: NATURE WEAVING

When you next go out on a walk make a collection of natural items that you find interesting. These could be twigs, bark and leaves and fallen feathers. If you have some additional items such as wool at home use these too.

When you are at home make yourself an easy weaving board out of thick cardboard and carefully cut some matching slots at the top and the bottom of the card (about A5 size).

Next, take a long length of wool or string and wrap it around the slots … Once you have completed wrapping the wool around the cardboard start adding your finds from your walk and any additional materials you may have at home.

Attach the items by putting them under and over alternate threads on the board … do the same with pieces of wool or anything else you would like to add.

Charlotte Rooney is a colleague who is also worth following when out on a walk:

“I have always been a bit of a magpie when out and about, unable to resist picking up anything that catches my eye – leaves, feathers, sticks, stones, bits of rusty metal. Sometimes these things form the basis of simple creations or photos or ‘organisings’ that I make when I get home.

It’s hard to deconstruct what feels like such an instinctive, organic act – I hesitate even to call it a practice, it’s just what I do.  If pushed, I would say that there’s something in the act of walking – as many artists and writers will attest to – that allows for untethered thought, a state of mind that enables loose connections to be made, for the subconscious to churn away doing its thing. Maybe this informs what I collect. Certainly, if I am walking with a theme or intent in mind, it shapes what catches my eye, what commands my attention, though just as often the connections are only apparent when I get home, sift through my haul, let my hands and mind wander over the objects I unearth from pockets and bag.

In this way, at the end of a walk I’ve often assembled a miniature, ephemeral, temporary cabinet of curiosities – items that are assembled randomly for the love of the things themselves and their intrinsic, aesthetic beauty – but for all that, sometimes a coherent story can arise from the collection even if was not the collector’s intent.”

And now some words from another colleague: KATIE MCCUE:

‘A corner of a path turned, a brow of a hill reached, a sweeping vista revealed, a secret glade beckoning.

Whether experiencing the joys of a flaneur or being guided by those who now more than I will ever know, (of history, geology, politics or nature) … I see in my own way.

Now seeing is different to looking and my way of seeing is full of shape, colour, movement, light & dark whether macroscopic or microscopic.

Seeing is a feeling thing and an act of creation in itself, it’s an inspiration that often fills me with a need to write or paint or draw.

A guided walk triggers my imagination to people the landscape with folk from the past. I see the men and women of pre-history before our valleys were formed by se and glaciers. I see the medieval farmers in ancient fields, I see the workers and weavers, I see laughing Victorian children paddling in streams, I see the tired eyes of children working in the mills.

These same images can come to mind when I wander as a flaneur with no particular plan in mind. However, it is these walks that truly make my soul sing & my eyes drink in the sight of an insect, the pattern of grasses in the wind, the way the light filters through trees when I stand so small beneath the canopy looking up.

I see in my own way. It feeds my creativity.’

That mention of creativity by Katie reminds me of the notion of writing your own heritage trails – old railway lines offer such scope for industrial archaeology, oral history/memory collection, Shelleyesque Ozymandian reflection, and also William Blake’s doors of perception.

I begin with industrial archaeology at the site of the old Dudbridge railway station in Stroud. These are my words for the nascent heritage trail on the branch line to Nailsworth:

Dudbridge Railway Station

I often walk the cycle track below Rodborough Hill,
The old Midland Railway spur from Dudbridge,
And I often cycle the track on to Nailsworth,
Musing on the springs and watercourses, the ancient holloways,
The Roman villa, medieval ridge and furrow, the woollen mills,
The occasional mill chimney, still rising high into the Stroudwater sky.

But, today, I stand at the blue brick retaining wall

At the old Dudbridge railway station,

Watching the cars career around the roundabout,

Drivers mostly oblivious of the history of Dudbridge;

But when I ignore the roar of the traffic,

And I find my mind’s historical eye,

I can see a medieval pilgrim crossing the bridge,

A packhorse with Cotswold wool a mile behind.

For here I stand by the confluence of two rivers.

But also, at the junction of two railway lines:

The interface of water power and steam power,

The inexorable march of the industrial revolution:

Foundries and forges and furnaces

And cranes and pulleys and chains and smoke:

A century-old pandemonium at Dudbridge,

Where once there was an orchard and there is still a Meadow Lane.

Carefully cross the road and study the information plaques

On the wall at Sainsburys; the clothier’s 1646 doorway too;

The inscription at REDLERS from 1910;

The information board at Kimmins Mill,

Then retrace your steps carefully back to the blue brick wall,

And recite these words from T.S. Eliot to yourself:
“And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

Now for Ozymandias (and the industrial relics on the cycle track spur of the Nailsworth line running from Stroud through Rodborough to Dudbridge):

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

 

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

It’s a motif that runs through much of my rambling.

But it’s getting to the point where I need to conclude this opening chapter. This essay is turning (indeliberately) into a self-referential piece of writing: the piece is almost turning into a performative pop-up museum itself. Time to stop before I get carried away with myself. I’ll finish with a nod to William Blake which will add as a bridge to the next post on this subject.

‘To see a World in Grain of Sand,

And Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour.’

It’s another motif.