Fiona Cullinan (founding member) is a writer, artist and editor who has been performing/documenting walks through various political lenses such as safety, surveillance, gentrification and gender+age. She is also a member of the Birmingham Collage Collective. Her walking bio is here.
Andy Howlett (founding member) is a Birmingham-based artist and filmmaker interested in collective walking, urban exploration, community cinema, guerrilla heritage and skateboarding. His first feature film Paradise Lost is a psychogeographic investigation of Birmingham Central Library and the death of Modernism.
Megan Henebury is an artist from Birmingham, developing West Midlands Time Travel and Forward-thinking witchcraft through walking practices.
- A Figure Walks – walking in Birmingham's River Rea.
- Megan's Walkspace posts
Robson likes to walk the streets, lanes and hills of the West Midlands and beyond. He writes the periodic Robson on… columns.
…kruse is a neurodivergent, experimental artist and writer, whose practice includes drawing, writing, storytelling and phenomenological research. …kruse undertakes long distance walks or pilgrimages, gathering data generated through walking to explore the relationship between her ageing human body and the climate damaged body of Earth. She is interested in the connections between landscape, mythmaking, magic and story.
Daniella Turbin is an artist and walker from Wolverhampton. She has a Masters in Fine Art Practice from The Glasgow School of Art and her specialist field is drawing. She spent six months living in Cumbria during which she took to long distance walking out of necessity, there being only ten buses a week from the village. In 2019 she returned to the West Midlands and since this time she has been on a mission to walk every square of the Ordnance Survey Maps of the United Kingdom.
Andrew Howe is an interdisciplinary artist and project manager, based in Shrewsbury, working solo and in collaboration with other practitioners and community groups. He uses walking and mapping to explore how people interact with places, revealing hidden narratives and drawing attention to the more-than-human. He produces work in painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, books, and digital media, often working closely with the landscape using foraged or found materials.
James Kennedy is a writer/artist working in Birmingham. He became interested in walking and writing when studying at Birmingham City University; exploring practices of radical street performance, street art and Situationism. He discovered his interests mirrored the practice of psychogeography, and began documenting his walks and thoughts on the ever-changing urban environment.
James lives in Selly Oak and where he is documenting thoughts on suburbia, place and nostalgia. He is an autistic adult (diagnosed 2017) and is currently re-thinking his creative processes.
Kate Green is a short lady with dark hair.
Helen Nodding is a Birmingham-based artist with a passion for: walking; drawing; urban nature and celebrating the forgotten and overlooked aspects of our everyday surrounds.
Kate Thompson is a songwriter, drag artist and your lanky legged lolloper from la-la land.
Rachel Henaghan is an artist and writer based in Birmingham and Llanberis. Rachel is currently writing a reflection on a year of isolation, illness, and recovery. Rachel is a fellow at BOM interested in immersive sound installation and virtual reality.
Adele Mary Reed was born in 1988 in Warwickshire, UK, and is now based in Coventry in the West Midlands. She has been experimenting with and exploring photographic imagery, written word, collage and video through diaristic practices from a very young age. She graduated with a First Class BA [Hons] in Photography from Coventry University in 2016 and has exhibited widely across the UK. She facilitates Mothers Who Make in Coventry.
She carefully documents observations of the places she finds herself in and in doing so seeks to playfully highlight, maintain, introduce or restore the inconspicuous beauty within moments occurring during day-to-day life. She is interested in analogue methodology and the materiality of film and video tape, cataloguing personal archives, taking unplanned walks, plant-life, elusive moods of stillness and balance, topographical and urban themes.
Jacob Williams is a walker and conservationist based in Birmingham working to try and connect people with the often overlooked nature on their doorstep. Through his work at the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham & the Black Country as well as at the Digbeth Community Garden he leads walks and workshops exploring wildlife and spaces in the region. He's currently on a mission to collect interesting footage and evidence of wildlife around Birmingham.
Beth Hopkins is a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer and community musician from and based in Birmingham. She performs with avant-pop band The Nature Centre and solo as Bethany Kay.
Beth has a particular interest in the Birmingham and Black Country canal system. Her Bethany Kay project Of Tunnels and Towpath is a musical mapping of the Dudley canal system from Stourton to Lapal. She lends her canal practise to projects such as Wander Water, collaborating with a female collective to create a wayfinding trail along the canal in Perry Bar.
Beth is involved with a number of projects/organisations including Cloud Cuckoo Land Theatre Company, The Play House, Little Angel Theatre, Collective Encounters/Women In Action and Friction Arts/Natalie Mason.
Chloë Lund is a community-based creative practitioner living in Birmingham.
Chloë has worked as an organiser and facilitator with walking-wildcamping project Land In Curiosity.
She is inspired by a mixture of animist, taoist, anti-capitalist and mystical principles. Her creative practice involves illustration and public engagement, often taking the view that the process is at least as important as the outcome.
Pam Smith is a south Birmingham-based horticulturist and botanical heritage explorer seeking out the hidden gardens, random plantings and local history that engage urban communities. She is former Director of Winterbourne, the University of Birmingham Botanic Garden, and current Senior National Consultant for Gardens and Parklands with the National Trust.
Pam has written on the botanical history of Birmingham and the West Midlands, and has produced botanical walking guidebooks and community walks, and school resource packs based on local history and the natural environment.
Current research interests include the public park movement, urban ethnobotany, history of the garden walk and plant collection interpretation. She is particularly interested in the history of gardens designed for walking such as Georgian Pleasure Ground circuits. At a local level she has been mapping and illustrating a Monkey Puzzle Tree Trail as a short walk.
Katy Hawkins is a place and community orientated creative producer, artist, evaluator, project lead interested in developing work that uncovers, grows and reimagines peoples relationships to here they live. Currently based in Birmingham and working all over.
Simon Jefferies (aka the badnotechoir) is a reluctant dog walker, musician, photographer and filmmaker based in Birmingham and North Wales. He has a fondness for the grittier parts of the city and uses photography to highlight contrast in the developing cityscape. In his previous life as a fireman, Simon had privileged urban access through subterranean walkways, storm drains and rooftops, he now works to share his unique perspective with a wider audience.
Paul Moseley is a an ethnoecologist and traditional knowledge teacher. He encountered psychogeography whilst studying a Masters degree and is interested in the varied and temporary assemblages influence our perception. He is a natural pigment artist and uses this to work with communities to explore their sense of place.
Jonathan Webster is an artist who has recently moved to Birmingham. He's recently been working mostly in sound but have also used fabrics, found objects, words, installations, and performances.
He uses walking in many different ways within his practice: a place to think and observe to help with coming up with ideas, found objects, field recordings, filming/photography.
Emma Plover's work is a portal. Through their practice, Emma explores their relationship to the spaces and landscapes they call home.
Emma's interested in the ways they share these spaces with those around them, especially those who aren’t often seen and seeks to explore how their ADHD and connection to the natural world influences their practice as an artist.
Josh Allen is a writer, journalist, contemporary historian and occasional curator based in South Birmingham. He produces the Walk Midlands website sharing a new walk, doable without a car, somewhere in the English Midlands every week. He also acts as a consultant, advisor and producer to a wide array of organisations on devising walking routes, as well as having a long established career in public engagement with academic research, working with several universities across the Midlands regions.
Roo Hocking is a fiction writer who also makes text-adventure games online. Roo is interested in how surreal nature can seem when it permeates sensible urban spaces with its wildness and silliness.
Dan Gutteridge is a writer and researcher. Scribbling down words of poetry, spoken word and the occasional short story. Dan uses walking to inform his writing when looking at the nature / urban binary, throwing all of this into an existential blender and before seeing what is poured out.
Currently studying for an Ma in Cumbria Dan looks to use city walking to also help his research as he works on his major research project.
Charlie Best is an artist, illustrator, graphic designer and photographer. Her work is mostly inspired by scenes seen while walking. Charlie’s illustrations pay attention to the textures of urban and rural landscapes. Her photography looks at the world from the perspective of water and features reflected images from rivers, lakes, puddles, ponds, moats, fountains and, of course, canals.
Sophie Urbano is a walker who draws and writes monthly postcards, incorporating found objects, tracing and other representations of what she sees [or may not see] and finds on her travels. She writes about urbanism, philosophy or whatever her walks inspire her to write about. She has been based in Birmingham for a very long time, although her walks are often further afield.
She never sends the postcards. Sometimes she leaves them behind.
Clive Judd is an award-winning writer, theatre director, and co-owner of the Birmingham-based independent bookshop, Voce Books. His writing is predominately concerned with place memory, auto-geography, and contemporary-temporal understandings of the ghost. His walks, predominately in the city of Worcester, are an exploration of that which remains, physically and psychically, in the places that have formed us. As such, walking has directly influenced both his playwriting projects and narrative drift works, both of which obscure autobiography by fiction.
Jay Mason-Burns is a street photographer, urban wanderer and tree hugger from Selly Oak, Birmingham. Jay's creative practice involves a lot mooching off the beaten track, particularly in derelict places and forgotten routes now lost or abandoned by people.
His first book, Corridors of Uncertainty, chronicles the decline of Birmingham's pedestrian subways. He's now working on a second based on Icknield Street, Birmingham's partially lost Roman Road.
Jay's PhotoBlog, Words and Pictures also contains a mix of his photography and unstructured essays.
Andrew Smethwick wields a variety of microphones and sometimes captures sound on tape. He finds tape an ideal format for (re)re_cording time, space, movement and memory. He also plays with light. And dark. Refraction. And Reflection.
R. M. Francis is a lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at the University of Wolverhampton. His novels, Bella and The Wrenna were published with Wild Pressed Books and his poetry collection, Subsidence, came out with Smokestack Books. His book of poems, essays and fieldnotes, The Chain Coral Chorus, is out with Play Dead Press in March 2023 and tracks his time as Poet in Residence for the Black Country Geological Society.
His academic work has appeared in journals and edited collections, including his co-edited book, Smell, Memory and Literature in the Black Country (Palgrave Macmillan). He is reviews editor for the Journal of Class and Culture. Poe Girl Publishing published his collection of horror stories, Ameles / Currents of Unmindfulness in 2023.
Jen Dixon is a Birmingham and Black Country based artist and writer. Her interest is the unique aesthetics of these places based on shifts in industry and infrastructure. Her walking often follows historic lines or narratives through modern landscapes and she interprets this predominantly in print: through the re-combined print of collage, through artist books, and through written and visual journeys published in zine format.
Instagram: @jennifdixon