Category: Walk Reports

One small consolation for walkers in lockdown is that it’s no longer necessary to travel to Manchester to join the Loiterers Resistance Movement for one of their First Sunday strolls. For the past three months the Loiterers have been conducting their group walks remotely meaning that anyone can join in from anywhere in the world. You can read my report of April’s walk lead by Blake Morris here.

The theme of this month’s walk was “reading and writing space”. Loiterer in Chief, Morag Rose writes:

Lets read the streets (or our rooms or gardens or ginnels or wherever). This month I invite you wherever, and whenever you are to find scraps of texts. Writing on walls, fragments of rubbish, slogans on t-shirts or placards or billboards, shop fronts and flyers…. Whatever you can find. Take a picture or make a note and if you feel like doing so call it poetry. Its a way to begin to rewrite the city by taking what it says to us and rearranging in new ways. Detournement of trash and textual treasures.

I enjoyed this walk, it took me back to the time I became fascinated with the manifold typographical layerings of Digbeth while making this film with Ben Waddington:

Getting back into that mindset I headed straight for Stirchley high street, camera in hand, and was immediately bombarded by text from all directions: “Elite apple”, “Pandora’s Box”, “Wine Wanker?”, “No free newspapers”. My favourite discovery however was this vintage notice on the side of a postbox. I can’t even comprehend what’s being communicated here. The past is a foreign country and its mystifying artefacts hide in plain sight:

I left the high street, headed down some residential roads and made my way to the canal. The bombardment subsided and I actually had to start paying attention. The textual treasures were still plentiful however:

It was nice to walk without a route or destination pre-planned and instead just allow myself to be guided by the poetry of the streets. I ended up in a deserted industrial estate and passed back into the civilisation of Kings Norton through an avenue of lime trees before returning home.

When back I uploaded my photos and had a go some detournement of my own. It was fun.

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Once again thanks to Morag for this opportunity to walk together, alone. Until actual group walks become a thing again this is a valuable substitute.

Today at 2pm I “joined” Blake Morris and The Loiterers Resistance Movement for a remote but synchronised Sunday stroll. Every first Sunday of the month the Manchester based LRM, lead by Morag Rose get together to walk creatively and engage critically with the city. Their walks are open to everyone but in light of the lockdown they’re having to be even more creative: can collective walking be compatible with social distancing? Yes.

This month’s solution was to team up with Northampton based walking artist Blake Morris whose 52 Scores project fits the brief perfectly:

Every day I am picking a piece of scrap paper to add to a weekly walking collage. After 7 additions the collage will form a walking score, i.e. instructions for walking. Each score will be finished on Friday, made public Saturday, and walked on Sunday.

At 2pm BST Sunday 5th April Morag Rose will be at home in Manchester and will begin a walk guided by the score from her home, while I do the same in Northampton. We invite you to join us wherever you are.

I took up this invitation from my home in Birmingham and got myself a copy of the score from Blake’s website:

At the agreed time I stepped outside and gave myself an hour to complete a circuit of my chosen block. I stayed much closer to my house than on my usual state-sanctioned daily strolls and I walked at a much slower pace meaning I was able to really tune in to my immediate environment while contemplating the cryptic lines of Blake’s score.

I set myself the challenge of taking a photo for each line of the score and here are the results:

Thanks to Morag Rose and Blake Morris for this opportunity to walk together alone. I’m sure there will be more to come.

On the day the Government ordered total lockdown I went for a stroll in the leafy parks of South Birmingham looking for signs of the Apocalypse.

An astounding 22 people came to last Sunday’s Full Moon Walking night walk around the Stirchley / Lifford waterways. It was a walk that featured joint creative input from all Walkspace members and included instructions to ‘think like a parrot’, a talk under ‘the tree of shoes’ and a 28-day spell-casting using the lunar-charged moon water. Photos of the event by Pete are here.

Fiona has posted some reflections on the walk, which is part of a series of Stirchley walks she is running this year, on her blog. She speculates on how to ‘capture the moon’ by creating a post-walk artifact:

These walk artifacts are what I aspire to but I’ve yet to figure out what I can create from a walk that will be of lasting value. Last year, when I expressed an interest in art, my mentor Kate Spence said to use this time for exploration and play. Be interested and interesting. So I guess you can expect more random walk experiments in the months to come.

Read the whole post here.

If you have seen some interesting examples of art walking outputs, please share them in the comments on her post.

Our second Walkspace walk was another night walk, but happening a fortnight after New Moon Walking it was significantly brighter as the moon was now so bright it was casting shadows.

We had 22 people on the walk, which was way more than we anticipated so there’s certainly an appetite for this sort of thing. Yay!

This walk riffed off Fiona’s original ideas and brought in Andy and our first associate member Robson who brought some local history and mythology to the proceedings.

We started on Fordhouse Lane at the River Rea bridge then made our way through the Worthings tunnel to the Lifford Woodland which leads to the Reservoir. Passing the various trees, strewn with offerings of bikes and shoes, and the mineral factory we joined the canal and wended our way back to Stirchley.

A full report will follow soon, with details of the third and final (for now!) night-time walk on March 22nd, but for now here are Pete’s grainy photos to prove it actually did happen.

Thanks everyone!

Fiona has written up her thoughts about Sunday’s Dark Moon Walking night walk through the parks and along the canal in Bournville. She’s structured it as a series of questions.

4. Why a night walk?

Because walking at night is otherworldly and comes with a sense of the forbidden. Green spaces, such as parks, canals and cut-throughs, feel off-limits and taboo at night. The absence of people in them makes you feel safer at night but it is simultaneously strange to see these popular spaces deserted. 

7. Were you scared at any point?

Briefly – by a solitary figure standing at the edge of the woods in Cotteridge Park. It turned out to be a small conifer. This is where night vision can be deceiving and amplify your fears. The reflections in the pond also warped my depth perception of where the water line was.

Read the rest here.

Thanks to everyone who came, and who expressed an interest even if they couldn’t make it. The next Walkspace walk will be announced very soon!

The inaugural Walkspace walk took place on Sunday night and we were very pleased with how it went. Eight of us were led by Fiona Cullinan through a recreation ground, a park and along the canal under the clear black skies of a new moon.

We were walking through areas that held no fear during the day but at night were forbidden territory. What would we find and how would we feel to leave the street lights and enter the dark?

We met at Bournville Station and quickly made our way to the Cadbury Women’s Recreation Ground, a beautiful hidden gem in the day but a bit spooky by night. After spreading out to contemplate the darkness in silence for five minutes we moved on to Cotteridge Park, pausing for a chat at the glacial boulders.

After the relative quiet and dark of the parks it was back to the shock of the lit main streets before joining the canal for the walk back to Bournville station. The walk completed we adjourned to the British Oak for refreshments and the planning of future adventures.

Fiona will be processing the walk soon – the third in her Stirchley walk series – but for now here are some photos Pete took at a deliberately high ISO and barely in focus.

I went on one of Pete’s quarterly walks under the M6 Gravelly Hill Interchange and wrote a report of it on my blog.

I organised a dawn group walk on the Winter Solstice starting at the mysterious Bordesley Henge and finishing at Witton Cemetery. I was joined by Jonny, Kerry, Kevin, Phil and Shane.

Land in Curiosity invited me to post a photo essay account on their blog.