As an Australophile, I enjoyed watching Beau Miles video, ‘The Commute: Walking 90km to work‘, in which he ditched his car and walked to Monash University in Melbourne to deliver a lecture about adventuring. Fresh from the adventure, so to speak. Or not so fresh given the nature of the commute.
It was recommended to me so I’ll recommend it on to Walkspacers.
Beau Miles (bit of nominative determinism there) is a modern-day explorer who is trying to resurrect that feeling of adventure without having to fly half way around the world to do it. “I walked 90km to work a bunch of years ago to see if a stripped-back adventure could give me the kind of buzz that far away, exotic, heavily planned expeditions have given me over the years. It did.”
For the walk he appears something of a jolly swagman, setting off with no food, water or shelter, and living off the stuff that people throw away or inadvertently lose to the roadside. Part of the fascination is seeing what he will find and what he will stoop to eat… it is sometimes horrifying to watch him eat old food or half-empty plastic bottles of pop. He must have a stomach of iron or a carefully honed sense of smell for decay.
But he is not a hobo, not poor and not an itinerant in need of work – and therein lies a different distaste for some. It’s not that he sets out to be a swagman – and yet it clearly forms part of the rules of the walk in order to generate adventure.
It created a lot of discussion and debate in our household around the privileged nature of the walk and the filming vs the insights gained, issues highlighted and human challenge overcome.
Personally I was interested to see what thoughts that walking for two days with no funds, fuel or food would bring. About walking and humanity and philosophy and plastic littering and the basics of survival. There are things you get to thinking about when you push yourself this way that wouldn’t occur to you otherwise.
A few quotes that struck me:
“If there is one thing that is rhythmical it is walking. You know. It is so repetitious … You really just become a metronome.”
The paradox of being anti-littering but living off the litter that he hates: “First sit down. Quite serendipitous when someone throws away a couch. Bastards.”
Why do this at all? “It’s about putting value on such a thing, much like baking your own bread or taking karate lessons. I think that experiences like this are the essence of being human, which to me is our ability to question everything we do.”
But also there is the personal development: “Everything changes you. You cannot take away what just took place. That is now with me, it is part of me, it part of the fabric of Beau, it it my world view, it’s how I teach, it’s how I see the world, it’s how I see that road from that point on, and yes a lot of it will filter away as I get further from the walk, but it’s still there.”
Check out Beau Miles’ YouTube channel: He does a lot of crazy stuff from sleeping 30ft up a 100-year-old gum tree to seeing if he can build a cabin for his wife during the pandemic without her knowing.
This short tour runs the length of Stirchley high street and combines local landmarks, art, architecture, innovation, history and curiosities. It starts at a high point and descends to a flat bit. This is the first of some Stirchley taster walks, perfect for everyone who wants something every time.
We start on Bridge 75 of the Worcester & Birmingham Canal, at the junction of Pershore Road and Lifford Lane. Pause to take in the double aspect view, first of the canal through the gateway and then, as you meander down the Pershore Road, of the Birmingham city skyline.
Cross over the treacherous junction at Fordhouse Lane and hug the pavement past residential houses to a set of shops, passing Stirchley’s only charity shop serving the neuro-divergent community, and our main brothel, Kitty’s Massage Parlour. Look for heart-shaped shutter decorations and windowless frontage.
A few doors along, a lawnmower is glued to the external wall. This is Tomlinson’s tool hire shop. Peer into the window to spot homemade Stirchley droids such as R2D2, a robot Minion and more.
From the future to the past – get your ancient Rome on by imagining you’re on the old Roman road of Icknield Street running from Gloucestershire to South Yorkshire, because you are, albeit in its distant future.
An example of Stirchley waymarking can be found on the next block, past Mayfield Rd, in the form of a single name etched into a paving stone: ‘Ricky’. It’s hard to know when this piece was made but it is thought that the author might be a child as it’s not joined-up writing.
A few steps further is a gap in the buildings. Reminiscent of precision bombing, this is in fact the old entrance to Whitmarley Engineering factory, a former MG Rover supplier, that was briefly turned into a free school and guerrilla exhibition and performance space in 2011 before being razed to make way for a housing estate. [Correction: Stirchley historians say this gap was not a factory entrance but housed Stirchley’s second fire station. From around 1960s it was a yacht builder and chandlery. The mystery deepens.]
On the same block look up to see an etched grey doorway named Ann Place. Pause to consider the potential romance betwixt Ann and Ricky.
Past Ivy Road, there is a red stork perched above Artefact Café. This is one of Gavin Rogers’ flock of migrant red stork sculptures that landed across Birmingham in 2018/9. All Brummie families were immigrants at some point so raise your hat to your fellow importee.
Cross over the school pedestrian crossing to a small cluster of miniature must-sees. First is the postbox, which displays the baffling notice: ‘Await delivery of stamp before inserting a further coin.’ Do you understand what this means? If you do, revel in your smugness.
Walk to the first building on your right and examine the unusual design feature of interlaced corner bricks. Now look up to see a carved wooden tiger, fangs bared, staring down at you from inside the window.
Staying on the left side of the high street, pause at the surprisingly imposing building at 1429 Pershore Rd. Formerly a Lloyds Bank, it became the Belgian and Netherlands Consulate after a bank employee called David Cooper became the honorary consul for Belgium and suggested his former work premises as a suitable location. Until recently hopeful visa applicants would travel on the 45 bus to queue here.
Look across the road to see the Stirchley Gorilla perched above the carpet shop. The polycarbonate primate has become a Stirchley landmark, possibly erected in homage to Birmingham’s famous King Kong statue. It cost £7,500, was made in the Philippines and shop owner Mr Khan bought it because: “We have a flat roof and I thought King Kong would look good sitting on it.”
While under the Gorilla’s gaze, ponder the street protest of 2018 where tenants of the flats behind unionised and gathered to draw attention to their poor housing conditions, and the generally inadequate state of affordable housing in Stirchley.
Cross for a closer look and continue walking towards town. A few shops along is an EF Cash & Sons doorstep sign. This former business was best known for Cash’s embroidered name tags, sewn into generations of school clothes. Bird watchers may spot a pigeon or 20 living in the hoardings above the shop. Don’t forget, bird poop on the head brings good luck.
Walk past the derelict graffitied building and pigeon roost to the fork in the road. At the ghost of a cobbled pavement in front of the British Oak public house, take the right fork. This stretch has many temporary artworks in its ever-changing streetgallery: from paste-up artist Foka Wolf’s Arnold Schwarzenegger chomping on Seven Capital hoardings to ‘No fly-tipping installation art pieces’ on Hazelwell Lane.
As you emerge from the gyratory road system, past Skinnys Ink tattoo parlour, cast your eyes to the skies to see a Top Cat figurine sitting on a satellite dish above TopSat Digital. Everyone loves a visual pun.
Cross at the pedestrian crossing and enter the alleyway at the side of the Balti Bazaar for a freaky fairground side show. Here you will find not one but two hall-of-mirrors doors in the restaurant car park. Take a warped photo of yourself as a memento of your visit to Stirchley.
Finish by retreating to The Bournbrook Inn next door for sustenance and a lively discussion about how the Bourn might be a brook but the Bournbrook runs through Selly Oak, this one is just the Bourn and how it’s a fair mistake but that the pub should be renamed the Bourn Inn really.
Map pins
This walk has been curated from pins on the Survey of Stirchley map. Visit Walkspace’s Mapping Stirchley project for many more local curiosities.
Birmingham skyline view
Robots of Stirchley
Stirchley Street – part of the old roman road of Icknield Street
Every journey starts with a single step. In 2016 mine was finally getting around to sorting out my crappy online passwords. I took a short cybersecurity course and decided to pay it forward by offering help sessions in a local café. This grew into The Interrogang – a monthly reading group for data issues. In 2017 I became an ‘Ingenius’ at The Glass Room London, an interactive exhibition into data privacy visited by 20,000 people. I wanted to bring this home to Birmingham so I started a newsletter called Observed City which ran for a year. Together with Open Rights Group Birmingham, we set up a mini version of the Glass Room exhibition at my local library.
Now this series of steps has moved from activism to art in the form of a walk commission by The Dazzle Club – a research collaboration which explores surveillance in public space. For the Birmingham Dazzle Walk, I proposed using age-related camouflage as counter-surveillance measures to walk silently and invisibly across the city.
In the style of a surveillance report, here is the walk log.
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Birmingham city centre, 18 March 2021
6.15pm the Electric Cinema, Station St
I meet my walk guest – the neurodivergent, experimental artist and writer, Kruse – to lead her through a city that was once the UK’s CCTV capital, with an estimated 100,000 CCTV security cameras in 2020. I am only allowed one walk invitation due to lockdown restrictions. The city is empty. I find this perturbing, threatening; Kruse finds it bliss.
In my bag is make-up to help erase the shadows and features that demark my face. Kruse applies a white foundation. We look like blank ghosts. As women over 50, we are already invisible in society. We enhance that with low-contrast clothing – a beige mac, a light hat, jumper, skirt and gloves.
We take a single photo of our beigeness, blending against the station wall, and turn off our phones so we won’t be digitally tracked by the data emitted from our devices.
We are now silent.
We start to walk.
6.30pm Birmingham Media Eye 1, Grand Central / New St Station
The walk begins in twilight under one of three huge ‘Media Eyes’ staring out from Grand Central shopping centre above Birmingham’s main New Street train station. Each eye targets and scans humans for demographic and emotions-based data in order to serve ads. These Orwellian Big Brother eye-shaped screens look down on public space, profiling us for its own commercial profit. The largest screen is 28.80m wide x 5.28m high. Somehow they have passed the city’s planning process. My references for these are not benign or benevolent: they represent dystopia, control and a removal of freedoms.
How is it ok that they face out from the shopping centre into public space? How is it ok to profile the public for profit without public consent?
6.30pm New St Station
We walk through the station, which drips dome-shaped cameras from the ceiling. They blend in surreptitiously, looking like lights that aren’t on. Last summer I took a photo of them – it seemed a fair exchange as they took images of me. An official challenged me and said she’d have to report me. Apparently I needed a permit to take their photos but they don’t need a permit to take footage of me. I explained what I was doing to two police officers, who were unconcerned. This is where being a white woman over 50 offers privilege.
6.35pm Birmingham Media Eye 2, Stephenson St
We emerge under the largest ‘eye’, which is off or just not displaying ads. A soft-lit emptiness lets us see behind the black screen. There is a single green light – it is on. We watch the watchers for a short time then we remove our masks and head into the city’s main shopping streets.
6.40pm New St to Corporation St
It is eerily quiet except for the occasional screaming of the trams and some gulls far overhead. A man further ahead claps a beat to fill the silence. The auditory soundtrack of an empty city is intense. We blend into the walls and pavements but in the darker areas feel exposed and vulnerable in our beigeness.
I lead but we walk side by side. This is the ‘grey man’ theory of invisibility – don’t act unusually, blend in with the crowd. The ability to remain unseen can be a powerful protection, particularly to women walking at night. The case of Sarah Everard has raised the hackles of every woman. I am glad to be walking with Kruse in the empty streets. The last time I came to town in November I was followed briefly – on a Saturday at 5.30pm in Brindleyplace, a highly surveilled and patrolled area. Cameras do not protect and they are not always a deterrent.
6.45pm Great Western Arcade
At night the cameras are less visible but they are still there in trees, on buildings, integrated into street furniture, behind digital billboard screens, on strategic street corners. It’s harder to spot the cameras as the walk progresses but I am becoming attuned.
In the Great Western Arcade, the tech is there at the start and end of the 545m-long Victorian walkway. It is deserted. I can hear our soft heels tapping on the tiles and our ghostly images reflect in the closed shop windows.
6.50pm Colmore Circus Queensway to Priory Queensway
The Gaumont Cinema used to be here. I saw The Sound of Music there as a child, six times, and remember standing in the long queues. It was full of life and people. Now it is empty office blocks and paved walkways. I spy a Victorian-style lamppost but with domes where there should be lights. Like us, are the cameras trying to remain unseen?
Town used to be a place to come to escape and enjoy the pleasures on offer. Now we are watched and recorded and followed everywhere we go. How does this change how we act and how we feel about coming here? Does it feel safer or oppressive? What has been lost? What has been gained?
In our youth, my generation had the freedom to walk without relentless surveillance and tracking, and this freedom has been lost – a loss normalised and embraced first with CCTV and now with digitalisation and smart city initiatives. There is no choice in this.
Town used to be about people, now it is all about technology. Is it in service of its citizens or other interests?
6.55pm Corporation St
It is almost fully dark now. As night falls, invisibility brings power in remaining unseen but also powerlessness in having to hide from potential predators. Being a woman, the night often feels shut off, but this walk feels good as we reclaim the space. Often I clock eyes with people when I walk because I am hypervigilant and always on alert. But now we weave unseen like ectoplasm through groups of people at bus stops and outside takeaways who don’t seem to register us at all.
7pm Birmingham Control Centre, Lancaster Circus
The turning point of the walk is the Birmingham Control Centre, one of the leading CCTV control centres in Europe with commercial clients across the city and also direct links to West Midlands Police.
Its Google profile images are straight out of a Hollywood movie. Four watchers (men?) monitor several hundred screens and the scene is bathed in electric blue. Another stylised purple has a single man walking (stalking?), casting an ominous shadow with his footsteps. A third in red has someone typing in a code to enable (disable?) an alarm. In reality, 1 Lancaster Circus is brutalist Birmingham 1970s concrete. On every corner, top and bottom, a camera points.
We cross underneath the Aston Expressway and look up, watching them knowing they are watching us. Then we turn and stand with our backs to it, instead overlooking the subways that subjugate pedestrians to walk below the city.
I imagine myself appearing on their screens, visible but indefinable. I feel subversive, a citizen spy in a beige mac. A female Bourne. Maybe a Hollywood response is how data privacy becomes a more sexy topic to engage with rather than one that is always at the bottom of the to-do list.
Akiko Busch, in ‘How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency’, says: “Invisibility can be corporeal or ethereal. It can be chosen or conferred. it can be power or powerlessness. It can be desired or despised. It can be ambiguous and full of intrigue, or straightforward and even banal.”
This walk also walks this line.
7.05pm Aston University campus
We enter the campus, another highly surveilled area. It is well lit. They are well versed in privacy and offer degrees in cybersecurity. I once came to a cybersecurity conference here. There are countless cameras.
We follow behind three young female black students who are dressed head to toe in black. They are our mirror opposite and seemingly in perfect disguise against the night. But they are more at risk of biases in facial recognition algorithms than any other demographic. Facial recognition systems consistently show the poorest accuracy in subjects who are female, black and 18-30 years old. I want to invite them to walk with me.
As an older women I am becoming increasingly invisible as my value to society declines. I am also discovering age-related biases that manifest digitally and ultimately exclude. Last year, my UK passport application failed the automated check saying ‘we can’t find the outline of your head’. My slowly whitening hair against the white photobooth background had confused the system – not for the first time. At the data privacy exhibition The Glass Room London in 2017, Adam Harvey’s facial recognition exhibit MegaPixels often failed to register my face at all – or, if it did, it produced matches that were only 60% accurate.
A middle-aged white women misidentified in a white space is not a big deal, but…
7.10pm Wattilisk, Birmingham Crown Court, Newton St/Dalton St
This gift of age-related camouflage – greying hair, pale features and low-contrast clothing – offers a natural ability for non-detection against my home city’s well-known prevalence of cameras.
If cameras struggle to find either the outline of a head or facial recognition markers from my blonde facial features then perhaps I am free. I am a human female ‘Wattilisk’ – a city sculpture that abstracts the head of city engineer James Watt until it is becomes unrecognisable as an individual. Or, working in the opposite direction, I can decide to become visible and identifiable once more.
The Wattilisk embodies the simultaneously empowering and disempowering nature of invisibility. As a symbolic totem pole of facial recognition, it also offers an interesting discussion point.
7.15pm Dale End
Dale End is a road valley that dips between the law courts and the main high street shops. It is less well lit and one of Birmingham’s crime spots. It is also the busiest section so far with small groups gathering outside McDonald’s and cycle couriers collecting takeway food. Here is life and a glimpse of the city as it was. For middle-aged women needing to pee, it is also the only place we find that offers a comfort break.
As we enter the high street, the digital advertising infrastructure increases in volume – two tiny cameras on either side of each.
7.20pm Birmingham Media Eye 3, front of New St Station.
The walk ends at the third and final Media Eye. It posts government Covid-19 messages about ‘Hands, Face, Space’ then advertises a mattress then goes black. The system is broken. Perhaps we can build back better. Insert your own LOL, according to your opinion on this.
The station plaza has street lamps and tree sculptures with a dozen or so dome-cameras hanging from them. I stand underneath and blend.
Kruse is incredulous: “There are so many cameras.”
…but hardly any people for them to watch.
It is night and it is lockdown but I am filled with the strongest vision that this is our future – a city devoid of citizens – because who wants to go somewhere to be profiled, predicted and exploited? All that remains are orange or turquoise-branded delivery cyclists dropping food supplies at speed to the outskirts where there are fewer cameras endlessly watching and to where Birmingham’s citizens have retreated.
I turn my phone back on and on multiple apps my ID pops up.
I am back in the digital matrix.
I am logged.
Fiona Cullinan is a writer, editor and a co-founder of Walkspace, with an art practice exploring themes of infrastructure, privacy, diaries, memory, feminism and ageing. Further writing can be found at: fionacullinan.com.
The excellent people at SOUNDkitchen have created another immersive journey of audio encounters, this time exploring the green spaces of the B37 postcode in Solihull. This self-directed walk can be undertaken at any time using the SOUNDwalker app.
“Discover the hidden sounds of bats and underwater life, listen to wind and rain on metal structures, learn to identify different trees and forage for food guided by local people passionate about wildlife.”
There is something about walking at night. The experience of it is so different from walking in the daytime. There is pleasant disorientation even in familiar terrain. The known becomes unknown and new. The darkness, and the cold of winter, keep others away bringing a stillness and communion with things that are bigger than the us – the moon, the stars, the far distant horizons.
The ability to blend in with the night is a lure: to become enveloped by the darkness and the security of not being seen. To become the people who lurk in the shadows. There is empowerment in being a woman who walks at night, in rewriting the script of fear that runs alongside the female experience of the city. There is a reclaiming of the night and a mating of two strange bedfellows: exhilaration and peacefulness.
Human night vision slowly unfolds as the minutes pass, honing all the other senses; the process of becoming a nocturnal animal is a powerful one. There is walking at night and then there is walking by the light of a clear full moon. Now is a chance to turn off artificial light from torches – which can draw unwanted attention – and really see beyond a small halo of vision.
There is hiking on the hills at the edge of the city, usually busy with people but empty now except for a few silhouetted horned cattle. There is crunching through a carpet of fresh snow, reflecting the moonlight and lighting the way.
There is doing all this with other women. The conversations and experiences are different somehow. A snowman with carefully moulded male genitals brings a fun opportunity to smash the patriarchy – or at least crack a few jokes about it. It is a bonding experience.
It’s important to stop and listen, too. Too much talking and the experience is lessened. Stop and a meltwater path can be heard softly bubbling down the hill. The squelch of deep mud. The scrunch of snow. The M5’s distant hum. The fizz of an electricity pylon.
I long for a silent walk but I also don’t want to walk alone at night. Besides walking together and sharing the experience is important. How do you find others to walk with? A few weeks ago I met Laura Babb for the first time. We went for a walk around our home neighbourhood of Stirchley and discussed doing a night walk. Last week we merged our female friends who walk into a Whatsapp group called ‘Wild Women Walking’ and it feels like something exponentially bigger and connective has been born from that first walk. We may not know each other yet but we are all fish of the same stripe. There will be more walks. Because, for sunrises and night walks, winter is our time.
Nyla Naseer is an author and walker based in King’s Heath, Birmingham. During lockdown she wrote a book to celebrate walking. ‘At Walking Pace‘ was published last month, is easy to read, well researched and has one of the most pleasing book covers of all the walking books!
Nyla’s book is all about how walking can be used in different ways – for wellbeing, enjoyment, thinking and resilience.
Obviously we got in touch straight away to suggest going for a walk and to chat about walking in the process (because we are nothing if not meta here at Walkspace).
We also cheekily asked if we could republish an extract from the book. So thank you Nyla for the opportunity to support a local author. Here is the chapter on art and creativity that first lured us into buying the book.
Please do scroll to the end for links to buy At Walking Pace, to be a part of the accompanying podcast and to find out more about Nyla’s work.
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There is no universal definition of creativity, but a common definition outlines a creative idea as being novel or original as well as useful, adaptive, or functional. It is the first criteria that applies to the ‘arts’ and the second criteria that applies more to problem-solving and work (more of which later). Taken together, the two dimensions of creativity play an enormous part in shaping personal and societal development.
Earlier in this book I described how writers and philosophers though the ages have used walking to generate their ideas. For example, Aristotle, used to give lectures while walking around his school in Athens, followed by his pupils who became known as ‘peripatetics’ (meaning moving around). Charles Dickens was an avid daily walker who regularly walked twenty to thirty miles a day! Other groups of creatives, including musicians and visual artists have turned to walking to inspire them. Beethoven, for example, relied on daily walking forays for inspiration; during his walks he would continue to write music, scribbled on sheets of music paper that he carried with him.
Visual artists have long been inspired by the landscapes they walked within. Think of any painting by a landscape artist such as Turner and you will instantly feel aware of the walk that they took, ending up at the point that they decided to capture for us. Not only have artists used walking as a way of replenishing their energy and wellbeing, they have actively incorporated the walk as a way to record the world around them, stamping the identity of other walkers within their work. This, to me, is homage to walking itself.
Walking as an integral element of art has a long history. As walkers, artists gain the experience of more fully immersing themselves in their subject matter, or of considering elements such as the political, social or environmental relevance of their work. Walking is now present in art in many different ways: from collective art groups who go on walks, to the long history of political or protest walks that incorporate art forms such as music and banners. Walking and art are intertwined. Indeed walking is a legitimate form of expression in itself. Walking is an ‘attitude’.
Members of the Dada art movement in 1920s Paris organised a series of excursions to ‘places that have no reason to exist.’ Although only one of their nihilistic walks eventually took place, it sounds quite an event: the walk was accompanied by poetry recitals and was performed as a parody of a tour guide, making the walk a piece of performance art itself. A few decades later, artist and philosopher Guy Debord created walking maps highlighting ‘psychogeographic contours’ through the city, drawing attention to the ‘ambience’ elicited by different surroundings. His notion of ‘derive’ saw the city as a living organism, where a walk became a creative experience that generated feelings that could be put to use in any number of ways: from the political to the artistic (Hermon Bashiron Mendolicchio 2020). Thus, walking has long been part of a daringly avant-garde and counter-culture scene.
Some contemporary artists centre their work on walking. They make art where walking is the subject matter: Richard Long’s ‘A Line made by Walking’ photograph, showing a straight line of trampled grass receding towards tall bushes or trees at the far side of what appears to be a field, is a good example. Another is ‘walking artist” Hamish Fulton. Since 1973 Fulton has only made works based on the practice of walking, dispensing with what he feels are the materialistic shackles we live with and concentrating on the freedom that walking gives us to think and create. The walk as a symbol of simplicity and an escape from conformity is a well used artistic trope.
Another popular example of ‘walking as art’ is ‘The Lovers’, Artists’ Marina Abramović and Ulay’s 1988 performance, in which they stood 5,995 kilometres apart on the ruins of the Great Wall of China and began walking towards each other. They started from opposite ends: Abramović began from the mountainous provinces of The Yellow Sea while Ulay walked from the Gobi desert. The walk was intended as a metaphor for their love and longing, however it turned into something very different (especially since Ulay had an affair with his translator during the journey) but nevertheless interesting, dramatic and thought-provoking.
This association of walking and journeys with discovery and drama is very well exemplified in books and films, indeed there are too many to mention but I’ll pick out a couple. The classic ‘Wizard of Oz’ tells the allegorical story of Dorothy going through Oz ‘following the yellow brick road’ on a walk with her companions, whilst Cormack McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ offers a disturbing tale of a walk by a father and son though a dystopian post-nuclear destruction America. These two very different stories tap into our deep-seated identification with journeying on foot. The idea of a walk as a means of discovery is deeply embedded within written and visual culture.
Walking then is not a stranger to creative people. Historically, it has been appreciated as a thought and idea-provoking mechanism; walking therefore seems inextricably linked with the creative process. Does research reveal any rationale for walking promoting ideas creation? If indeed walking is a creative force then this opens the door for walking to become a tool, not just for artists but for work that needs people to think of ideas. So, does walking really have a positive effect on creative thinking and, if it does, what could be its greater impact at work?
[To find the answers, you’ll have to read the book! – Ed.]
At Walking Pace is available through the various book retailers, including Amazon and Waterstones. There is also an At Walking Pace podcast – details below.
About Nyla
Nyla Naseer lives in Kings Heath. She is a writer, podcaster and vlogger. Her tough and totally un-stereotypical background brings alternative perspectives to her work.
She has a lifelong interest in people and ways of life, building a repertoire of knowledge for her writing and work on resilience, wellbeing and behaviour in general.
The outdoors, and walking in particular, has been central to her life and is a thread through her research and writing.
Nyla has two masters degrees and a BSc but describes herself as a ‘street-hustler type’ and ‘an interesting person with potential’.
Podcast opportunity
Nyla is interested in interviewing fellow walkers for the At Walking Pace podcast, which broadcasts on Spotify, Apple, Google and more.
In it, she talks to guests about walking, taking them on random walks and sharing views and ideas about living in a more human-paced way. The podcast encourages walking, lo-fi living, and taking things a bit less seriously.
If you’re interested, please get in touch via her website: At Walking Pace. You can also listen to the latest podcast and read more about Nyla’s work there, too.
We last wrote about Birmingham-based artist Kruse in February – Wayfaring with Kruse – and then something must have happened that got in the way of all that beautiful creativity…
Happily she is now back after a nine-month hiatus, writing on her walk blog and taking cues from climate change and autonomous things and women walking. Here she invites us to walk as part of nature rather than as a disconnected spectator in You are wild too:
“Do you see the wild birches growing in the disused city lot? The free birds that nest in them? The feral grass growing in the cracks of the pavement? The unruly mosses that make little gardens along the walls? Do you hear the wild foxes and rats that trash the bins and range across the dark city streets?
“You are not separate from these wild things. Your body is host to billions of bacteria, everything you eat connects you to everything else. You are home, you belong here, you are nature, you have not been cast out.
“I invite you to take a walk with the mentality that you are a part of nature, not separate from it.”
Are you up for a vicarious walk across Japan starting tonight?
Craig Mod – writer of Roden and Ridgeline newsletters – is inviting people to join him on his durational walk 500km from Tokyo to Kyoto. It starts when he turns 40 at midnight tonight and he will walk daily until the end of November.
He is asking people to sign up and respond to daily walk newsletters with some kind of action that will be turned into a book of the walk.
To explain:
Each day I’ll send out one photograph and a 200-words-or-fewer missive. It’s meant to be visual, short and punchy. A Low Impact™ email. Something you’ll be happy to peek at.
It’s going to be weird! We’ll meet strange folks! Eat pizza toast! Walk along highways! Play some pachinko! Smoke disconcertingly cheap, unfiltered cigarettes! (OK, maybe not that last one.)
Roden 047
Craig Mod has form doing this so it should be enjoyable and an interesting journey to a part of the world that I’d love to visit.
We wanted to do an informal rule-of-six compliant Halloween walk, so Fiona grabbed a scary looking skull of the internet and laid it on top of a map of Stirchley to see how it might fit.
We’ll be following the red outline as best we can on Saturday and then retiring to our garden for skyclad dancing a beer or two by the fire.
Following a shape randomly drawn on a map is an old flaneur trick, forcing you to follow routes and paths you wouldn’t normally consider. Andy and I used this for our Cross City Walks project, drawing straight lines and trying to stick to them. Bill Drummond famously scralled BILL on an A-Z map of London and tried to walk it.
The thing with this is not to try and do it religiously. Not only does this often lead to barbed wire and trespass, it missed the point of the exercise which is to get off your beaten tracks and start associating areas you might be familiar with in new ways.
For example, despite living here for over a decade I’ve never walked that specific route down the right-hand side of the skull, from Cartland Road, down a cut-through to Newlands, then across the park to Millhaven Ave and down Hazelwell Crescent to the river. Always nice to have a first.
Of course, not everyone lives in Stirchley, so we’ve prepared a transparent PNG for you to overlay on your own map.
Enjoy your spooky walk!
Update:
We did the walk and had a lovely time. Fiona recorded a GPS trace so here’s the skull-as-walked!
Last month we “went” to the 4th World Congress of Psychogeography. We’ve already posted about our own contribution to this virtual gathering but here we want to give a mention to some of the other West Midlanders we came across while “there”.
Helen Garbett and Bill Laybourne
One of the highlights of the Friday film night was Helen Garbett and Bill Laybourne’s psychedelic Black Country amble Albion: Care Don’t Care.
After three months of lockdown Helen and Bill returned to Albion Street in Brierley Hill. At first they noticed, with a heightened sensibility a street full of caring organisations such as a local food bank and Samaritans incongruously set within an environment that is utterly uncared for and decaying. Subsequent visits revealed unexpected associations and a melancholic beauty.
Helen, a visual artist and Bill, a sound artist co-founded Workshop 24 in 2018 where they work collaboratively as social art and walking practitioners. More about their projects and recent work can be found here. And here’s their panel discussion at the Congress.
Emily Inglis and Rachel Owens
The mighty Gravelly Hill Interchange, AKA Spaghetti Junction has long been a favourite haunt of ours here at Walkspace so we were delighted to find a pair of artists who share our love of this concrete colossus.
Emily Inglis and Rachel Owens go on walks and make art; their creative collaboration is based on a thirty year friendship and the interplay of tensions and class differences contained within it.
They both grew up in the Midlands: Leamington Spa and Nottingham. Now they live 400 miles apart and walking trips are the thing. The Spaghetti Junction walk was a way back into art for them. Travelling up from Sussex and down from Edinburgh they chose to explore the footpaths, tunnels, underpasses, towpaths and the ‘no-man’s land’ parts of the junction; signposting this an English landmark to be celebrated.
This is part of a wider project investigating overlooked sites that say something different about England. They visited the Junction in all seasons finding recurring themes that drew them back: the strange, the scary, the funny, the getting lost, the countless arguments and the unexpected glorious hidden sanctuaries. They came across an apple tree at the heart of the Spaghetti Junction laden with fruit. Was this discarded by a fractious kid stuck in a traffic jam sometime in the 70s?
Emily and Rachel are currently working on a film born out of their explorations of the Junction. We eagerly await it and shall share it here when complete.
We hope to return to 4WCOP next year, ideally in person this time!
Walkspace 
