Remapping High Wycombe

Walking With Attitude

2011-12-20T13:06:00.002Z

John Rogers was interviewed about Remapping High Wycombe on a Radio 3 documentary about psychogeography, Walking With Attitude, presented by travel writer Ian Marchant.
You can listen to the programme here

The show was originally broadcast on 4th December which was the 7th anniversary of the first Nodules of Energy walk. Here is a Super 8 document of the walk

Nodules of Energy Walk pt.3

2011-06-11T13:08:00.004+01:00

Journeys Beyond the Western Sector booklet

2010-12-23T23:14:00.002Z

Open publication - Free publishing

The Eden Effect

2010-02-03T12:38:00.002Z

This blog on the Bucks Free Press site seems to confirm the fears that Eden would have a negative knock-on effect on the rest of the town - something we raised during the project - that partly inspired it in the first place

Ventures and Adventures in Topography

2009-12-29T12:16:00.006Z

John Rogers from the Remapping High Wycombe project recently produced and co-presented a series of podcasts with Nick Papadimitriou for Resonance 104.4fm, Ventures and Adventures in Topography.
This is a show that looks at the rich tradition of early 20th century topographical walking guides to London and the South East and explores what use they might be to us today. Each episode takes a trip through the pages of a different book as if we are embarking on a wayward topographical ramble, and includes contemporary field reports from walks in the areas described in these classic texts. You can download the podcasts here

Psychogeography in the Newstatesman

2009-05-28T00:21:00.001+01:00

Remapping High Wycombe gets a mention in Joe Moran's wonderful piece on psychogeography in the Newstatesman. You can read the article here

Scorpion Records - victim of redevelopment

2008-10-18T10:44:00.003+01:00

This vid was made in 2005 when Eden was still a drawing on a piece of paper. This legendary record shop - the psychogeographical epicentre of my Wycombe - has been swept away by an extension built onto the front of Sainsbury's supermarket.

In Search of the Western Sector - Eden Shopping Centre reviewed

2008-09-20T14:43:00.005+01:00

Returning to Newlands was a peculiar experience. I always thought it would be – maybe that’s why I delayed it so long. I attempted to adopt an air of professional detachment which was only partially successful as the project was always a personal journey – as Cathy had printed on the large scale Significant Sites map ‘This is no project – this is my life’.

Eden they have somehow branded this red brick consumerist behemoth, a moloch that will devour our children. A retail concentration camp, shoppers with bar codes burnt into their retinas, the whole scene directed by George A. Romero or John Carpenter – the no-comedy, spoof-free remake.

The development process that we documented in our project was one of ultra-artful deception from start to finish – a slick PR-savvy campaign by arch corporate colonists, like the alien invaders in the 80’s sci-fi earth invasion ‘V’ who adopt the guise of friendly attractive humans in order to seduce the human race and offer us amazing visions of the future they will bring us – then once we have given ourselves over to them, lowered our defences they remove their masks revealing their reptilian form and their true intention to farm us for food to feed their insatiable appetite. David Icke would probably close the circle and claim that the head honchos at Multiplex and the quisling Council Leaders who sold out the town are in fact lizard-like shape-shifters, a genetic throwback to a master race who aim to enslave us poor innocent homo-sapiens.
I don’t agree with Icke about the lizard thing for the record. I met many of the people responsible for the ‘Horror of Newlands’ and they just looked like perfectly pleasant corporate suits, in much the same way that British colonial viceroys were often urbane, cultured souls. This didn’t prevent the brutality of imperialism – merely meant that it was administered by men who could relate it to the relevant precedent in the classical world. The mark of the colonist was to change the names of local landmarks, towns and villages. And so the Octagon has gone, that dark noxious place full of wonder – a piss-reeking reminder that shopping malls are places to be avoided at all costs. There was no deception with the old Octagon – it spelt it out for you ‘Shopping is Shit’. Where the Octagon still stands now the name reads ‘House of Fraser Eden’. The Octagon is erased from the collective memory – now there is only Eden. Shopping as Soma.

(a recreation of the tour of the site that I did with Cathy in 2004)

And so the Eden Shopping Centre was rationalised in terms of jobs and economic benefits. The havoc it would wreck on the psyche of the town, the scar it would gouge into its flesh was a concept they were unable to engage with. I presented this idea to both the architect of the scheme and the fella at Mulitplex – they simply didn’t have a vocabulary for the experiential qualities of space and place. That a building, especially a large lump of buildings could effect the way you feel, could influence your psychology. They had sophisticated models showing how to drive footfall through the mall, of how to enhance the shopping experience to maximise the consumer spend. But when confronted with the idea that a person might have an emotional response to such a place they were at a loss.

The evidence is there now – the gormless zombies listlessly perambulating from one chain-store to the next. The minimum wage jobs barely paying enough to cover the price of a double-caramel frappucino at BigBucks. The traffic on traction gliding from home to parking-space located conveniently close to the anchor store. The bus delivering you to your retail heaven. This other Eden that looks a lot like Hell to me.

eden shopping centre

Lunchtime Derive Video

2008-03-12T23:49:00.003Z

This is a video that we shot back in 2004 recording the experience of the Lunchtime Derive. The algorithm that you see in the video (and the idea of algorithmic psychogeography) was developed by Social Fiction.

The aim of the LunchTime Dérive was to study how, by following a simple instruction, a group of workers could re-experience the town during their Lunch Break. The daily hunt for a prawn sandwich or Chicken Tikka Marsala Ready Meal will be replaced with a drift motivated by following a basic algorithm provided Dutch psychogeographers Social Fiction.

In an email to Cathy I sketch out the theoretical background to the exercise and how we might go about organizing it:
According to geographer David Pinder (1996) part of the purpose of the dérive was to allow "participants to drift from their usual activities and to become more aware of their surroundings while simultaneously seeking out ways of changing them."
Our intervention is in part in reference to Chombart de Lauwe's study of the movement's made in a year by a Paris student. Guy Debord referred to the data produced by this study as 'a modern poetry capable of provoking sharp emotional reactions.' By asking the office workers to map their usual lunchtime routines we may find that this precious hour of free time is also similarly limited.
Debord describes the dérive as a period when one or more persons "drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there." We will be asking people to drop their usual lunch-time routine of the trip to M&S for a sarnie or surfing the net a their desk and to follow an algorithm wherever it may take them and experience the town as they find it.
We will employ an algorithm to jolt people from their routines and drive the drift most likely taking them into areas they wouldn't normally consider going to at lunch-time. Debord suggests that the dérivers may discover new 'psychogeographical attractions' to which they may be drawn back, in this way our intervention may have deeply subversive consequences in changing the lunch-time habits of a group of office workers, the hunt for grub between 12 and 2 being one of the town's primary motors. By mapping this dynamic then by interfering with it we can start to truly understand and interact with the 'psychogeographical articulations' of the town.

Process:
1. Organize an initial meeting with the workers 1 week or so before the derive. Ask them to map their usual lunchtime movements.
2. On the day of the derive meet the volunteers outside their workplace. Issue them with: notepad, disposable camera, piece of paper containing the algorithm.
3. Make sure that everybody understands the instructions and send the groups of 2-3 people off in different directions.
4. We will accompany the groups to record the event but not intervene. The groups record their route, observations etc. on the notepads.
5. The derive finishes after 30 minutes and we reassemble for lunch and debrief.
6. We collect in notepads and cameras and process the results creating maps of the routes followed.
(we could give them a small amount of money to collect food along the way for the lunch at the end)

Rules for a Dérive
1. One or more persons may dérive
2. The most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several groups of two or three people.
3. It is preferable for the composition of these groups to change from one dérive to another.
4. Drop your usual motives for movement and action, relations, work and leisure activities.
5. The average duration of a dérive is a day, considered as the time between two periods of sleep.
6. The times of beginning and ending have no necessary relation to the solar day.
7. The last hours of the night are generally unsuitable for dérives.
8. A dérive seldom occurs in its pure form.
9. The spatial field of the dérive may be precisely delimited or vague.
10. The spatial field depends first of all on the point of departure.
11. The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs.
12. The minimum area can be limited to a small self-contained ambiance (the extreme case being the static-dérive of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station).
Extrapolated from Guy Debord’s 1958 Theory of the Dérive

Drift #1 Video

2007-12-06T00:17:00.001Z

This is the video we shot on our first tour of the site that is now the Eden Shopping Complex back in 2004. Much of what you see in the video has now been demolished - before you celebrate that fact consider what has been lost in terms of collective memory replaced by a bland homogenised closely control corporate consumer monolith.
You can read the report of the Drift here

Inside Deep Library

2007-11-22T01:07:00.000Z

Here's a video I made featuring Desborough Hundred Psychogeographical Society member Nick Papadimitriou talking about his practice of 'Deep Topography'

Reframing Maidstone - a kino derive

2007-06-22T16:50:00.000+01:00

We've developed the work we did with Significant Sites to produce an event in Maidstone for Architecture Week - 'Reframing Maidstone'.

It's an event where archive film clips of the town are transfered to people's mobile phones, they then hunt down the locations of the clips using clues we give them, shoot their own response to the footage and the location, then bring their own clips back the installation at Maidstone Town Hall where they are loaded onto a video map displayed on large plasma screens.

We did it last Saturday and it worked really well, and it will run again tomorrow. If you'd like to participate but can't make it along you can send us a clip of whereever you are and we'll send you a clip of Maidstone in return. (email: reframingmaidstone@googlemail.com)

I've written an outline of the idea of the Kino Derive:

Self-authorship of the landscape: from the Phantom Ride to the Mobile Phone

"The modern avenue served as laboratory for the flâneur, while the contemporary street finds the neo- flâneur manipulating the mediating filters of technology in pursuit of new connections to the landscape." Glenn Bach. Atlas Peripatetic (MFA Project Report).

<1> Film-maker Patrick Keiller has identified that a common feature of the early city films of late 19th and early 20th Century was that they tended to be "one to three minutes long, and consisted of one or very few unedited takes". This format is again becoming popular with the using of online video-sharing, self-broadcasting websites such as YouTube and Google Video. The development of portable devices such as mobile phones presents new opportunities for topographical film-makers as short clips can be shot on the move and sent directly from the location to a website, or another device, where they can be simultaneously viewed and commented upon.

<2> This also has implications for the time-space compression (David Harvey) as people can broadcast to a potentially large audience images of the landscape as they pass through it in real-time and experience moving image bulletins from the past in-situ. Like the early city films these clips or bulletins will necessarily be short and unedited.

<3> Our visions of the landscape can now be filtered through a digital interface. Collectively these visions form a snapshot of the townscape and the personal topographies of the auteurs. The exchange that takes place on a kino dérive between author and instigator/ provocateur transforms the personal into the shared experience of space and place, spanning past and present.
A video map is created, logging the journeys undertaken. This then enables us to explore the changes and tensions, highlight historic symmetries and developments.

<4> By viewing archive film images in situ what historical tensions emerge? When standing in Fremlin Walk looking at Sonny Hanson’s film showing Fremlins Brewery in 1938 it’s difficult not to become aware of the economic and cultural transformation that has occurred as we have moved from distinctive local industries to a homogenised shopping mall culture.

<5> Can this simple act of authoring our own representation of our environment somehow give us a link to collective sense of place beyond that defined by urban planning, the privatisation of public space and received notions of localness and belonging? Somehow enable access to what Nick Papadimitriou calls a kind of "regional memory" locked in the landscape. A route to a sense and spirit of place which is inclusive.

<6> With the traditional psychogeographical dérive or drift we seek to strip the city or town bare, to reveal its secrets, its mechanisms and motors. The motivations for engaging in such an activity vary as much as the outcomes. For the Situationists it was a reconnaisance mission for the revolution of everyday life that they sought to bring about. The fact that they moved on from drinking absinthe in Montmatre to being at the heart of the revolt of May ’68 that brought the French government to the brink of collapse suggests some use came from these "journeys outside the timetable."

<7> With a kino dérive we don’t anticipate a revolution in the traditional sense to occur, although it would be nice. It is an experiencing of place through a simultaneous active engagement with moving image and the landscape.

Book Review on Bodmin Moor Explorer

2007-03-04T15:05:00.000Z

The excellent Bodmin Moor Explorer has given our book 'Remapping High Wycombe: journeys beyond the western sector' a nice little review on their blog - read it here.
I strongly recommend spending a while reading Bodmin's blog, it really personifies the English 'Earth Mysteries' Psychogeographical School (or that should be College in the druidic sense).

The book is also now available to buy from Crockatt & Powell's Booksellers on Lower Marsh, London SE1.

We'll hopefully get some copies into Wycombe bookshops at some point.

2007-02-23T23:43:00.001Z

Wycombe Wanderers vs Kingstonian 1958

footage courtesey of the Wycombe Film Society

Beyond Psychogeography with Nick Papadimitriou

2007-02-05T01:24:00.000Z


Nick describes his methodolgy for tapping into "storage vats of regional memory" on a hike following a water course across North West London.

More development in Wycombe

2007-01-20T20:16:00.000Z

This week the Bucks Free Press announces the Council’s plan for further development throughout the district. As I observed on my Wye Walk a year ago, the development is floating down the stream from the Eden scheme just like the effluent from the open sewers when Newlands was a slum.

"Areas highlighted in the WDF for redevelopment include the Molins Factory in Saunderton for low-key employment, part of Stockwells Timber Yard in Stokenchurch for a care home, the former Bartletts site in Desborough for housing and business, the gas work in Lily's Walk for housing, shops and possibly a hotel, and the Compair site in Hughenden will house a sports centre and could become the new home for Amersham and Wycombe College."

The new wave of de/re-generation is again being driven by economic concerns and Government targets that ignore the things that really make a place, what it means to the people who live there, how we experience it, and how it is woven into our personal and collective narratives.

Interview in the Bucks Free Press

2006-12-23T19:08:00.000Z

Author mourns Wycombe's loss of identity

ONCE known as a potential safe haven for Londoners during times of catastrophe, High Wycombe is today facing a catastrophe of its own as the town's identity gradually erodes away, says author John Rogers.
John, who was born in High Wycombe and raised in Wooburn Green, has just published his book, Remapping High Wycombe: Journeys Beyond The Western Sector, which questions the impact of redevelopment on the town itself. The book, and an accompanying DVD, formed part of an 18-month public art project developed by John's sister, Cathy, and was financially supported with grants from Arts Council England.
The impetus for the project, says John, was the announcement of redevelopment plans in the town centre, a mixed-use retail-driven scheme that was initially called Project Phoenix, but which later changed its name to Project Eden and is expected to finish in 2008.
The 35-year-old, who now lives in East London with his wife, Heidi, and two young sons, is keen to point out that both project names suggest "revival", but he believes the opposite is in fact true.
John says: "High Wycombe once had a distinctive identity. It was called "Chairopolis" because it was the centre of the chair-making industry. But its industrial heritage is now slipping away and High Wycombe is like anywhere else.
"People say High Wycombe survived the Luftwaffe, but not the urban planners of the 1960s.
"Cathy and I looked back at the headlines from the 1960s and saw the doom and gloom newspapers spell for so-called "development".
"But those headlines are little different from the ones we see today. We've learnt absolutely nothing. And why? Because the drive behind the development is always the same - money."
John tells me he feared the town would undergo such radical change that in only a few years, his birthplace would become "unrecognisable".
With the help of his sister, he decided to capture High Wycombe, in words and film, before its transformation is complete, as well as rediscover the town's "forgotten history".
John says he also became increasingly interested in psychogeography, or how a place affects people's emotions and behaviour.
"The basic idea we came up with was to look at the way people connect to an area and how this can be disrupted," says John. "In recent months, High Wycombe has been described as "a leading M40 corridor town", because of the new developments in place.
"How is this something we should be aspiring to and how does that affect the people who live there?
"High Wycombe was once known for better things, such as producing two Prime Ministers, the Earl of Shelburne and Disraeli. How many other towns can lay claim to that?"
John adds in his book that he found many other reasons why the people of Wycombe should be proud of their area.
He writes: "Apparently there is a saying that the river Wye gave the town its mills, the mills produced the market and the market gave birth to the town.
"It's where the early translators of the Bible found support, where Engish Civil War took root, where the Quakers plotted their flight to America, the US Air Force based their Cold War communications; and where RAF Strike Command still rests in the hills."
With these thoughts in mind, John tells me he set out to "rediscover" the historical High Wycombe for himself.
He discarded his maps and instead embarked upon a series of walks or "drives", purposeful drifts around the streets of the town that he believed would help him see the town with fresh eyes.
"It was all about seeing past the surface level," says John. "I've travelled a lot in the past, around India and Australia, and I think it's really helped to heighten my senses.
"I can wander around places with innocent eyes and even the most mundane things are fascinating to me."
With his trusty camera by his side, John took pictures of crumbling engravings, vandalised bus shelters, picnic tables scrawled with graffiti, sharp razor-wire fences and ancient stone bridges.
Each has come from a different time and has a different purpose, but, explains John, they all make up the High Wycombe of today, and as such, deserve to be recorded in his book.
"My investigation threw up all kinds of fascinating things I never knew before. I discovered an ancient footpath in Green Street, which stretches back to before the Romans, possibly 5,000 years, maybe earlier.
"There's so many little footpaths everywhere, and who knows where they lead?
"Some seem like they don't go anywhere, but the important thing is that they once did."
John says he is proud of his book, if only because it offers a "snapshot" of the town, preserving it before it changes for good. He now plans to return to High Wycombe in future years and document the town's changes again.
"The main thing is that we found another Wycombe. We found our own town. We ignored the maps and we discovered a town that still has a very strong spirit of place. That can't be taken away, whatever lies ahead."
Remapping High Wycombe: Journeys Beyond The Western Sector is currently available exclusively at www.lulu.com/cryptotopography. For more information, log onto http://remappinghighwycombe.blogspot.com.
1:13pm Friday 8th December 2006
By Francine Wolfisz

Here's an earlier piece in the BFP

Regime Change in High Wycombe

2006-11-28T09:59:00.001Z

A film recording the ancient ceremony of the Weighing-In of the Mayor, unique to Wycombe. Filmed on Super 8 in 2003 when we were first developing ideas for a film about Wycombe.

Observersations on a journey to H.W.

2006-10-15T17:44:00.000+01:00

I'm going to an open evening/talk/discussion about the public art commission in wycombe - 'Living Wycombe'. It's a journey I make alone this time, John has to work.

Starting point: Marleybone
Entry point into the portal: between Gerrards Cross and High Wycombe

I know this place, its familiar but alien; my body remembers it but my mind is uncertain - a parallel life.

It's like time travel - a tube transporting me back in time - my mind tells me I've done this trip many times, the moving landscape is known but it feels like this is a new experience.

Its a wierd thing - time travel.

I've landed. I step off the train, it's 1985 - wait, no it isn't, there's Spanish Deli on Crendon Street, open at 5.45pm. I am hungrey so I head into town - good old Costa's open as there isn't much else. Ummm. Stand under the Little Market House with the smell of wee and try to feel the buzz of something I know. It's old so the walls must contain the energy of all the yesterdays, a feeling of familarity.

There's a number of pink and yellow Amnestys staked out on all axis of the high street.

Making my way to the university now for the meeting, I scan the pub forecourts cautious of familiar faces - but thinking about it, they're probably all dead or banged up by now. Under the tunnel through to the university. Gold stars in the skip.

The corridors smell like the hospital I can see out of the window - windows big enough to sit in and write this.

Meetings over and I'm waiting outside for my lift. It's dark. A re-enactment society is in the car park, I thought it was a gang duelling for real.

Observing some men coming through the front doors, in blazers, ties and grey hair. It's all quite proper round here. I rememer that feeling from School. Committees after school meets old men in battle uniform.

My lift arrives - my mum - as she whizzes me away from the town I'm transported back to another era.

I need to get home.

Journeys Beyond the Western Sector - book

2006-09-16T12:28:00.000+01:00

We've finally published a book that brings together the project. It features full reports of all the derives and some other research we gathered along the way. There is a Dvd to accompany the book which we'll send out upon request. It's free to download or you can purchase a bound copy on lovely creamy paper from Lulu.

Psychogeography and the High Wycombe terror suspects

2006-08-17T13:09:00.001+01:00

We're exploring the meaning of the recent arrests in High Wycombe in the context of the town's sense of place and our personal connection to it.

In November 2004 we did a derive workshop with a group of local school children which at one stage took us through Kings Wood where the police are now searching for evidence of bomb making equipment. 18 months ago the associations of this wood, through the eyes and minds of young teenagers was one of adventure, exploration and discovery of wildlife and flora and debris from an old burnt out car. We met dog walkers who were happy to stand and chat and the children were happy and familiar leading the party around an environment which was obviously a regular playground. How quickly the perceptions of place change.

One question we're asking is to what extent is the presence of religious extremism in the town (supposing the allegations are correct) somehow in keeping with its heritage of religious dissent. Wycombe was a Lollard and Quaker stronghold for many years (Quakers still meet in Wycombe) and in their day they were viewed by the State in almost the same way that Islamic militants are today. This is not drawing a direct comparison in terms of beliefs or methods, or drawing a direct parallel between dissenters and what we now call extremists, it's searching for historic symmetries between current events and echoes from the past.
Click here to read some further thoughts on psychogeography, autotopography and the terror suspects. We'd be keen to know what you think and we'll continue to add updates as we get them.

tags: Terror plot

Wycombe Stones

2006-08-17T12:41:00.000+01:00

These photos of stones on Tom Burt's Hill were sent to us by David Payne. He wondered whether they had anything to do with the ley line that runs from West Wycombe Hill across Tom Burt's. According to Alfred Watkins' 'The Old Straight Track', mark stones were placed on the line of the tracks so that people knew that they were still on the line. David also found a reference to pudding stones that would explain the concrete-like appearance. If you line them up with Castle Hill Mount on the other side of the valley, the line also continues along the pre-historic path of Coffin Way and cut right through the Dog Stone outside the Guildhall and the Parish Church.

The idea of a mark stone may also explain the curiuos rock next the bus stop on Wooburn Green which is on the ancient way of Green Street that connects the Ridgeway at Bledlow with the Thames at Hedsor Wharf.

museum talk 21st June

2006-06-22T11:44:00.000+01:00

Yesterday's talk at the museum went well. Healthy turn-out of about 12 enthusiastic souls on a Wednesday lunchtime. We kept the proceedings informal and chatty and consequently got quite a lot of input from the floor. We gave the usual background to the project - the Art Plus Award, psychogeography, Project Eden - but then rather than focussing too much on the process we talked more about how the work can help reconnect people to place and provide a different slant on the consultation process when redevelopment takes place. Our message that a public loo in Desborough can have the same heritage value as the Henry Keene designed Grade II listed Guildhall also seemed to have a resonance.
We had a brief mapping exercise at the end where people posted their thoughts and comments on post-it notes and put them on the map. It brought up things we hadn't come across or had forgotten such as - Piggy Wood as the name of the wood at the end of Benjamin's footpath, the existence of caves under the museum, two or three comments about the contribution to the town's culture made by the Pakistani and West Indian community, a note about the Bus Shelter that the St Vincentians slept in their first night in Wycombe, the long dunfunct biscuit factory near the bus station (United Biscuits denied all knowledge of it when I rang them about it), one lady told us how as a girl she and her friends used to wait outside the Mitford house to catch a glimpse of the glamorous sisters.
One audience member recounted how she had heckled the acrchitect of the Eden scheme when he said that Wycombe had no distinctive architecture. And there was much surprise when I read out Anan Dickson's description of the ancient way of Green Street that connected the Midland Plain to the Thames. Green Street lives on as a short stretch of terraced housing at the centre of Wycombe's Asian community, famous for its Howard Jones association, and a much unheralded part of town - till yesterday.
It was great to see such enthusiasm for the work and a zest for rediscovering the town.
Thanks to Maddy and the museum staff for setting up the event.

Mapping Exercise at the Wycombe Museum Talk

2006-06-21T21:48:00.000+01:00

At the end of the our talk at the Wycombe Museum, the audience were invited to add their comments to an OS map of High Wycombe. Scale 1:25000.

Camp at Flackwell Health. Mitford's Facists, then carribbean arrivals in 1950s!! Would like to see the stream opened up in the new development - is an integral part of wycombe. Chocolate Factory Rice Crispy Cakes. Mac's Cafe opposite Railway Station. 'Piggy' wood at top of Green Hill. Caves under the Museum. Facsination history of Green Street and its connection to the Icknield Way - would like to see more of a feature of this. In 1950s the first vincentians arrived and spent their first night in a bus shelter where is it? Desborough Road? Inclusion of Caribbean and Pakistani population in the 60's - their influence and 'feel' of High Wycombe. Tom Burts Hill.

Museum Talk - "an archaeology of the present"

2006-06-11T13:01:00.000+01:00

We're doing a talk at Wycombe Museum on 21st June at 1pm.
We'll be tracing our steps through the course of the project, talking about the processes we used and things we discovered. We'll also be screening a couple of the films we made and previewing some work in progress.
There'll also be a short mapping workshop at the end to see what we can produce collectively on the day.

Head East - along the Wyke

2006-02-05T12:47:00.000Z

There was unfinished business. Writing up the derive reports, looking at them as a textural map there was a gaping great hole. We hadn't gone east. Early on, subconsciously, we'd drawn a line at the eastern edge of the Rye and never ventured beyond it, almost like vampires repelled from a gauntlet of garlic. During the Significant Sites event John Langley had told us of fresh water springs in Bowden Lane. By the parameters we'd set down we were obliged to checked it out, report back to the hub by videophone. But the descent from Keep Hill Wood was our 13th mile that day of Mediterranean heat and even Nick with his passion for water courses couldn't be tempted away from the finish line.

The opportunity finally presented itself. We were invited to speak to the Fine Art and Spatial Design students at BCUC about the project. We had a good turn out, the buzz in the studios overlooking the Newlands carve up was positive as we covered our steps from Debord and Keiller through to the mobile phone authored perambulation of the town's nodules of energy.

I quickly photographed the Dog Stone outside the Guild Hall. "You're taking a picture of that? You're sick man." Two spikey-haired Asian lads give me their views on importance of neolithic monuments. I then found its sister stone on the north wall of the parish church, the last remnants of what was most likely a stone circle built at the confluence of two sacred tracts of water.

The route would take in other points thus far uncharted in the project. The first was the house where Ivor Gurney had lodged whilst organist at Christ Church. We'd paid due homage to the home of the Chapman family in the Greenway that has a plaque to commemorate Gurney's presence there at the family piano, but what about the house where'd he'd actually boarded in the town in the years 1919-20.

I turn into Queens Road from London Road, past the Shrublands Community Mental Heath Hospital; too late for Gurney who was committed to an asylum in his native Gloucestershire in 1922 and died in the City of London Mental Hospital in 1937. No.51 Queens Road is far less distinguished from the Chapman house. A bog standard turn of the century semi, newly painted white, double-glazed and long garden running down to the railway lines. The street is largely taken up with car workshops and the Gurney lodgings abut a busy tyre and exhaust centre. The street in general is a place in need of a lift, some of the gardens haven't been touched since Gurney's day but when he set out for his frequent walks in the hills cottages such as Nettle Villas 1901 would have been house-proud new. Through the houses opposite no.51 I catch the view that Gurney must have been thinking of when he wrote of the "Macbeth-like wood" beyond Keep Hill that he would use as his inspiration for a piece of music. The manscript for his Preludes in D Flat is dated "High Wycombe 1919", the music of Keep Hill.

My next reference point is just around the corner in distance and about 25 years in the histography of the town. Writer and poet BS Johnson spent some of his formative years in Wycombe as an evacuee, something he wrote extensively about in his novel Trawl.

Crossing the London Road at the cricket ground is a heart-in-the-mouth experience, the traffic constant, the noise deafening and mind-scrambling. Once into Bassetsbury Lane tranquillity descends. It has a charm and gentility at odds with the proletarian cottages of the other side of the London Road. At the end is the Old Mill Cottage, the country seat of the Mitfords. This is another of John Langley’s tips, it hadn’t cropped up in any of the conventional histories. This is where the family retreated to bring up the famous sisters when they fell on hard times. It was from here that Diana went off to marry Oswald Mosely, and from where Unity joined the British Union of Fascists and flirted with Hitler. Diana and Unity were such dedicated Nazis that they used to sneak up to the Black Shirt Camp at Winchbottom Farm and try to recruit the townsfolk to the Fascist cause. The stream runs through the cottage grounds oblivious, peaceful and it’s here that I pick it up resolved to follow it back to Wooburn.

John Langley’s other tip was a spring somewhere near the sewage works which I’d vaguely marked in my Red Book. I turn into Bowden Lane and three geese in the field on the corner honk wildly. There at the end is the spring near a disused railway bridge bubbling up from the river bed spreading ripples out across the pond. It’s a minor oasis, a firm rebut to the image of Wycombe as a "depressing shit-hole", that some people have tagged it.

The footpath leads under the ivy-covered railway bridge and directly under the sewage pipe that emerges from a mud bank and continues supported through the air. It’s a scene that would make the heart of Deep Topographer Nick Papadimitriou miss a beat, a man dedicated to the art of tracing underground water courses, the overland revelation would be a Tutankhamun of discovery. During the 'significant sites' walk Nick pondered upon an manhole cover and delivered his theory on the importance of studying sewage systems.:

"I believe that sewers are like the civic correspondence to the unconscious. It's that which we deny which runs under the everyday surface. We shop in places like Top Shop but in fact we're terribly dependent on systems that deal with that which comes out of our body after we consume, which we deny, which we don't want to engage with".

The foliage clears and the London Road comes into view. A huge new Currys superstore is dumped on the roadside like a garrison fort; the eastern outpost of the mixed-use retail driven scheme taking shape in the town centre. The cleared land takes on an ominous look of future development.
Mallards splash in the water. For how long?

The chainlink fence is decorated with variations on DANGER, KEEP OUT, NO UNAUTHORISED PERSONNEL. It' a deluge of negativity. The signage comes in different sizes, fonts, colours, layouts, a not insignificant feat of design. It's as if there is mysterious workshop somewhere staffed by semiologists dreaming up new ways of expressing the idea of prohibition.

Mistletoe grows in great dark clumps in the tree-tops. Mistletoe was revered by pagans for its healing and aphrodisiac qualities. A scared plant growing on the banks of what Druid, Chris C Parks, calls The Sacred Wye.

Dead trees, overgrown gardens, rusting corrugated iron workshops with smashed windows. This section is apocalyptic.

I’m pushed away from the river as the fencing closes in around me. I find myself channelled through a portacabin encampment, enemy barracks. I eventually emerge into a dusty road, fortress-like newbuild flats and retail. Blue and silver neon lights of Fitness First and Comet. Workers in fluro jackets on hydraulic platforms, plant machinery buzzing past. The flags of St James Homes fly like a victorious conquering army.

Thames Water are diversifying from the sewage business into the world of the "retail warehouse development." In league with St James Homes they’re cashing in on the Project Phoenix/ Eden scheme, a wave of redevelopment carried downstream as once the effluent flowed down from the privies of the Newlands slums.

A statement by St. James claims that "Project Phoenix will put High Wycombe on the map as one of the leading M40 corridor towns." These are guys that think the status of "dormitory suburb" is something to aspire to.

Wycombe was once heralded as the centre of the world's chair industry, "Chairopolis', they called it. It's the town that helped give the world the English translation of the bible; suckled the English Civil War; started the first Sunday School; Baron Wycombe, as Prime Minister, made peace with the newly independent American colonies; it produced the Windsor chair and the first flatpacks; sent puritans off on the Mayflower; and let us not forget the delicious synth-pop of Howard Jones.

But the new Barons of the town boast that once they've finished with it, it'll be one of the best places this side of Reading to buy a Laptop and go out for a pizza.

The sewage works will be reborn as a "village oasis" located in "a town on the rise with huge retail and leisure advancements commencing in the near future". It's a further denial of Nick's hypothesis, the sewers moved to create more space to consume.
The bleak weather is perfect for this glimpse of the End.

I escape across a patch of wasteland where an electricity sub-station buzzes and there are more warnings of impending death. I end up lost in some allotments, disorientated by angled rows of runner-bean canes. Somebody has used a road sign for the A404 to Amersham to prop up the side of their compost heap.

Our neighbour in Wye Road used to cycle up to these allotments to tend his patch, as did my Nan's last husband Sid. He'd ended up in Wycombe when he was looking for work, cycled up in the morning from Gloucester, got himself a job in one of the numerous factories, and was back home in Gloucester in time for tea. He'd have been a contemporary of Gurney, but Gurney used to make the journey from Gloucester to Wycombe on foot.

It's through a block of old people's flats that I come out onto Kingsmead and from where I'll be able to follow the river pretty much all the way on the homeward stretch. The Mead is a vast bleak muddy patch of football and rugger pitches. The view along the river bank is backs of houses and gardens. Crumbling sheds, new conservatories, half-built extensions, lawn mowers, brightly-lit lounges. A slideshow of a kind of Englishness.It's freezing. There's just me and the dog walkers. Stud marks in the mud. The sound of the turbo trains on the Marylebone line. Sirens.

I pass the football pitch of Loudwater school where I scored a classic goal playing for the Meadows 23 years ago in an after school match on a day like today.

Mum used to clean houses along here. I'd go with her and fall asleep on the sofa.

It's dusk as I pass Loudwater Church, where Mum and Dad got married and where just a few months ago we bade farewell to Aunty Carrol and I saw her smiling from the alter as the priest tried to summarise her life without alluding to her sexuality.

The river cuts under the road and through a Council estate. Dad tells me that at this point the river divided the pitches of Loudwater football and cricket clubs. Soon it disappears again and so I'm forced out onto Boundary Road. The smell of Bakerlite is still here emanating from Railko plastic works. A smell I'll always associate with walking this way with Mum to the doctor's surgery.

Ford's blotting paper Mill is gone. Mum worked nights in the lab at one point. The old mill house is all that remains, now occupied by a firm of accountants and a communications company. I nose around the grounds looking for the path of the river, aware of a vague sense of transgression which triggers a memory of rafting the small weir here on rubber tyres with Whiffy Smith and the gang and being chased away by security.

Now I'm enveloped by the majesty of the M40 viaduct. A giant cathedral to the automobile. The river runs beneath. I hop a metal fence to walk the bank. Cars clatter on the motorway overhead. We climbed inside the structure one summer, the noise was immense. We gave up on the adventure when we became convinced that the tunnels were populated by ghosts of the sad souls who'd thrown themselves to their deaths from the road.

The river unravels your personal narrative, a walk along it's banks inevitably tells your story. My next step will take into the Knaves Beech Industrial Estate where I worked in the Texas homestore. Then it runs behind Uncle Stan's house, me and my cousins Rob and Dave would jump their back fence to gain access to the water. Then it'll go through the garden of one of my very first school friends, around the park where I spent glorious summers watching and playing cricket, and on. Memories triggered off at every turn along its course from all points in my life. My destination this evening. The house where I grew up, in WYE Road.

I can't resist a visit to the old Texas Store, now transformed into Homebase. The carpark is huge. Police warnings. Secure zone. You are on CCTV. The warmth and muzak of Homebase are instantly soothing. I've been walking for three hours in the freezing cold, immersed in cold air and roadside noise. This is like a warm bath. Like Huxley's SOMA. "We've great deals to help you transform your home", drifts over the PA in an enthusiastic tone.

It seems so exotic to me now. They don’t have places like this in London. If I lived here now this is where I'd come for relaxation. You can get wood cut to size, buy a digital camera, an espresso machine, toilet seats, storage boxes, hammers, sofas, paint. I feel like an ethnographer studying an alien tribe. Like Dominic Hide in one of my favourite BBC TV plays, who is sent back from the future to study life in 1980.

I turn into Clapton Approach with the river running behind its gardens, my childhood route back to Wye Road rather than along the main road. Past the house where Aunt Mag and Uncle Pete lived. Pete was flayed from the waste up by one of the machines at Glory Mill a little further along the river. They pulled him out, wrapped him in a sheet and sent him home to his Mum to die. It was the Woodbines that actually finished him off, about 50 years later, although I remember noticing that his chest and throat were a deep shade of purple.

I dash round past the garages, down the overgrown alley that we raced up on our bikes. I'm excited and emotional. The lights are on in No.14. White pick-up in the drive. Movement inside the house. A light on in my old bedroom, the walls are blue now. Is it a boy's room? Does he lie on his bed dreaming? Does he look at the crest of the hill wondering what's on the other side?

mytho-historical map of high wycombe

2006-01-27T15:18:00.000Z

mediablog

2006-01-27T14:43:00.000Z

We've posted the significant sites movie on our mediablog.
It's composed of the 10 second video clips that were sent by mobile phone to the installation in the Little Market House as we walked the 14 mile circuit between the town's significant sites.
http://mediablog.mail2web.com/fugueur

Shaping Places

2005-10-28T10:01:00.000+01:00

We're presenting our work and the school project we did as part of Remapping High Wycombe, at the Shaping Places Seminar on Wednesday 16th November 2.oopm to 5.00pm at the Main hall, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, High Wycombe.

Shaping Places is a collaboration in education: innovative approaches to teaching and learning using the built environment and is aimed at Teachers (KS2 and 3, art, design, geography and citizenship) Artists and Built Environment Practitioners. The event is free of charge and can be booked via the organisers, Kent Architecture Centre, contact: sarah.brown@kentarchitecture.co.uk

Extract from Significant Sites Walk

2005-10-27T19:50:00.001+01:00

This is an extract from the signficant sites video, filmed on June 18th using a mobile phone video camera. A significant walk on a significant day linking significant sites around high wycombe, constrained by 11 sec video capture.

Click here to view an extract of signifcant sites. This is work in progress.

2005-06-25T17:23:00.000+01:00

Significant Sites Walk
18.06.05

Standing in the Little Market House with Dad and Nick, Cathy setting up the installation, I decide to change the start point and miss out the Dial House. It feels more natural to head up past the church and along Castle Place. Nick strikes up conversation with a woman who is feeding squirrels in a copper beech in the churchyard.
We climb Castle Place in the warm sun and I tell the fellas that we are scaling Castle Hill Mount, supposedly the burial mound of a Saxon or Danish commander.
Nick admires the railway cutting as we cross the bridge.
We rendezvous with Jerry and Mike in the museum grounds. They’ve come down on the 10.10 from Paddington and have been round the museum checking out the Windsor chairs. I send back my first report on the mobile phone standing on the lawn looking at the grassed over castle ramparts. There is a discussion about the avenue of yews down the drive, apparently lime trees were more commonly used, but I say, “This is Wycombe”.
Up the Greenway and we listen to Gurney’s Prelude No.2 in D Flat Major outside the Strawberry Patch. I file another video report.
At the end of the street we look back at the view and I read the stanzas about “What must High Wycombe hills look like now…” from one of Gurney’s letters to the Chapman family. Somebody asks me whether Wycombe has any rock connections and I mention Howard Jones, king of synth pop.
On Benjamin’s Footpath the walkers get their first good look at Wycombe. Apart from Dad they know next to nothing about the town but this vista sparks a few ideas with the rusting industrial strip along the Hughenden Road being overlooked by the manor, the hills, the 80’s lego houses of Bellefield. Jerry points out the grave of Polly Rogers.
Through the cemetery and along Benjamin Road past a school fete, along the Hughenden Road missing the green man above the door of no.148 that Johnny Langley had told us about. We stand outside the derelict Comp Air and Mike tells me how already he can see Wycombe is quite apart from other commuter towns of the region with its own industrial tradition.
Down the alley by the Hughenden Stream, tall swaying grass, corrugated iron, Nick identifies Water Crowsfoot. The factories are still, crumbling, Wycombe’s decaying industrial heart.
Out onto Coates Lane and there is a roadside floral tribute to a young girl, her photo hung on a tree, petals still fresh, the 4th anniversary of her death just past.
We stop at the Disraeli monument to munch some sandwiches and drink in the view. Cathy sends a text asking for more video. Town feels a long way away.
Dad picks some cherries in Tinkers Wood. Paths go off in all directions. This is the one small section I hadn’t mapped out. We’re guessing. We emerge amongst some unfamiliar 80’s box houses where some boys are playing football and two others buzz past on motor scooters. It’s the full heat of midday. I capture the tall mobile phone mast rising amongst the houses.
We soon realise that we are actually heading back towards town. I consult my Red Book for the first time of the day. We go past the Disraeli school and along the backs of houses and soon onto the path that I had originally intended to take on this leg back in March – a narrow green track between back gardens, through the bottom of Branch Wood and onto Cookshall Lane.
West Wycombe House has its gates open, Polo today, enter at own risk. Hoorays playing by the lake watched by blond birds with healthy bones. Dragonflies skim over the water to the Temple of Music. Jerry says it stinks of money, the air is full of the stench of horse-shit. Dad fixes his foot next to the lake.
The fellas buy Lemon Sherbets and Sugared Almonds in the village sweet shop. We’ve missed the food in the George and Dragon again and settle for pints and get pasties from the butcher’s. Jerry and Nick go into the caves. At the top of the hill outside the Church of St. Lawrence Nick says “We all live in Dread.”
There is no mobile phone signal here. Cathy is disturbed by the video silence. Things have gone quiet back at the Market House.
The climb up Toweridge Lane is tough. It’s 4pm but the heat seems to have intensified.
We are passed by a musician in a suit on a motorbike heading to a house with a marquee on the lawn near the Druid’s Hut.
On the other side of Sands Wood Jerry photos the sign for Oaksey Dene.
There is a beautiful scent in the air which Nick thinks is pine resin. He tells me about the dodgy opinions of the Woodcraft Folk.
On Baronsmead Road there are fantastic views of the town between the houses, the church spire appears as a marker for our base camp. The phone now feels like a natural extension of my visual sense which I swing across my gaze fluently, the 8 frames per second seems to reflect what appears on the back of my retina.
By Tom Burt’s Hill Mike and Jerry are done in, seriously querying my measuring of the walk at 10 miles. Dad points out the difference between hill and street walking. We watch the 11 second clip of the Wanderer’s match from 1958 next to where the gates to Loakes Park were, craning our heads round to view the tiny image on the phone, beguiled by this bulletin from the past.
Driven by the quest, I continue up Marlow Hill with Nick. It’s cool now and we feel the pressure is off. The guard at RAF Daws Hill gives us a suspicious look; the phone probably looks dodgier than a camera in a way. A police car tracks us round on a road inside the base beyond the razor wire for a short section. Nick spots Doolittle Village and makes the link with the US air commander of that name who planned the bombing of Tokyo.
We emerge through the evening sun on Warren Wood Drive. Nick stands in the road identifying sewer tracks and a bulldog-like bloke in shorts gives him a dirty look. We briefly debate going in search of the springs on Bowden Lane that Johnny Langley told us about and we’d also be able to take in the home of the Mitford’s that he mentioned too. But the extra mile there and back is a bit too far at this stage.
Kids feed the ducks and swans on the Dyke along the Rye, people splash around in boats. We’re hot and tired. A bride and groom swish past us in the underpass. PUNK NOT DEAD. We nod towards the Dial House paying Dr Lluelyn due homage.
Back in the market house we see the relayed images plotted on the screen. Each small cube captures a stage of the walk, distilled there on the monitor and a click of the mouse brings it back to life.
I feel a different person once I’ve recovered, the whole world let alone the town looks different. The Brazilian prayer group are in the next room celebrating their god, our little gathering that includes Dave’s family and Johnny Langley and his son feels like a religious gathering of another sort.

John Rogers
21.06.05
/div>.

Significant Sites - a Summer Solstice Derive - an invitation to participate

2005-05-05T19:22:00.000+01:00

Significant Sites
Originally uploaded by Fugueur.

DATE: June 18th 2005, TIME: 10.30am to 9pm(ish) PLACE: High Wycombe Town Centre. YOU will be able to interact with the walker and feed him with information about the sites, your own thoughts and stories about the places he passes through and suggest alternative routes.

To participate, register your interest, post your comments now, email wycombederive@yahoo.co.uk or txt: 07986 357156 on the day. Check out his progress on this blog.

Statement of Intent

2005-05-05T18:13:00.000+01:00

Inspired by the Sitautionist practice of dérive, we set out to chart the layers of place that make up High Wycombe as it undergoes a period of transition and redevelopment.

After conducting and initial period of investigation through a series of dérives and interventions we intend to stage a grand psychogeographical event during the Summer Solstice.

A Walker will embark on a ritualistic perambulation to link up the significant sites, or Nodules of Energy that surround the town. He will use the town's matrix of ancient footpaths to achieve this circuit.

Using a videophone he will send moving images to a base station in a prominent position in the town centre where they will be projected onto a screen where spectators will be able to watch the walk as it happens. The relayed image of the walker is presented alongside a montage of archive film and present day photographs of the town together with a simulated image of the town. In addition to the video clips the walker will send reports from his location via voice and text messages.

Spectators will be able to interact with the walker giving him directions to places they consider to be significant sites and furnish him with information and folklore about the areas he walks through.

People will be encouraged to set out on their own dérives and send back images and text to the base station for projection and relay to the audience.

John Rogers/ Cathy Rogers
wycombederive@yahoo.co.uk
07986 357156
V3 25/4/05

Nodules Part II

2005-04-24T20:17:00.001+01:00

6.4.05
Originally uploaded by Fugueur.

3 generations weaving through the undergrowth connecting with our ancient past.

Site Visit 06.04.05

2005-04-08T19:09:00.000+01:00

A rummage in Wycombe Reference Library turned up some interesting stuff.
An article in 'Architect's Journal' December 8th 1960, 'Central Redevelopment at High Wycombe'. Has various plans that show the Abbey Way Flyover and a pedestrian precinct that appears to have an open roof with the tower of the parish church looming above. " The basis of the scheme is the complete separation of pedestrians from vehicles…The River Wye, which crosses the central area, has its banks lined and planted as a town centre amenity…The new scheme, properly designed and incorporating the river, can be brought into harmony with the character of the town."

'Architect's Journal 20th October 1965, 'High Wycombe Central Redevelopment'. On the notion of the inner relief road: "…such a solution as has been proposed, with an elevated motor road through the heart of the old town, makes me seriously ask to whom or what it is intended to bring 'relief': true the motorist may pass through more quickly, but for the citizens the cure seems worse than the disease." Goes on to suggest that a complete inner rind road is the obvious alternative and: " A new scheme is clearly required , based on the Buchanan principles of placing environmental considerations before the convenience of through traffic."

'Architect's Journal' 3rd November 1965 has a response form F.B. Pooley, chief architect for the scheme. The flyover is justified on the basis that: "Not only will it solve the traffic problem but it will visually enhance the townscape…" The Council have recently announced plans to pull down the Abbey Way Flyover.

I discovered a stack of old maps and plans on top of the filing cabinets at the back of the room. One if which was 'The Wycombe By-Pass Special Roads Scheme 196_'. This covered West Wycombe to Bourne End. In appearance it seemed to be much older. Between Toweridge Common and Sands Wood it has a spot marked 'Druid's Hut'. This is on the 'Nodules of Energy' route. It also shows the old chalk pits in West Wycombe Park.

Stumbled upon Henry Kingston's 'History of Wycombe' from 1848. Has a description of the town by Will Camden written in the History and Antiquities of Britain, 1610: "This towne for largenesse and faire building, is equal to the greatest townes in this shire..." Also gives a tour of the town and has a chapter entitles 'A Wycombe Perambulation' which was a title I was contemplating for something only the day before.

After this did a lap of the Rye with the Simply Walk group who meet every Wednesday. They found the notion of the algorithmic derive intriguing, although it wouldn’t work on the wide expanse of the Rye.

Finished the day with a bottle of Wychert Ale, bearing the Swan motif on its label, from the Bucks Vale Brewery.

Face on the Wall

2005-04-07T14:17:00.000+01:00

Bassetsbury Manor, High Wycombe
Originally uploaded by spbmais.

2005-04-07T13:42:00.000+01:00

"The study of our National Antiquities has called forth the talents of the most eminent scholars; and it is generally admitted, that writings on this subject, combining Historical remark with Topographical illustration, are calculated to convey a knowledge of our domestic concerns in a way the most entertaining and instructive."
J Nelson 1811

Nodules Part II - West Wycombe to Hughenden

2005-03-29T13:12:00.001+01:00

The whole tribe set off through West Wycombe village towards Cookshall Lane; Mum, Dad, Cathy, Diane, Heidi and Ollie. The village is anything but a tranquil idyll, more like Le Mans on race day, the pavement just wide enough for a pram with zooming high performance automobiles inches away.

A Texaco garage marks the start of our ascent on the corner of Cookshall Lane and Bradenham Road, a junction known as The Pedestal with Daphne's Temple over the wall in West Wycombe Park.

Yards along the lane and quietness descends. Dad spots a Blackie's nest (Blackbird) from last year in the hedgerow and Ollie points at a bee visiting flowers. Chirping birds drown out the distant cars. Under the railway bridge and the turbo charged Chiltern Line whooshes overhead. A large graffitied policeman toking on a Camberwell Carrot spray-painted on the wall. We emerge into a wide vista of tilled earth, horizon almost broad enough to gladden Heidi's Australian heart.

We find the path up to Branch Wood through a gate where someone has left a set of keys marked 'spare shed and garage keys' dangling on the barbed wire fence. From underneath Branch Wood there are clear views back across the grounds of West Wycombe House and its palladian columns; a scene like the one Catherine The Great had decorating her Wedgewood dinner service.

White arrows painted on trees guide the way through the wood. It was our intention to cut across through houses to the bottom of Great Tinker's Wood but the path is pushing us up towards Downley. We ask directions, people seem to think that Hughenden is too far to walk, a jogger finally puts us straight and gives clear directions to the Monument although it involves going up to Downley Common. The maps mean nothing to them, confirming the suspicion that representations of planned space bare little relation to our personal topographies.

By now it's just me and the old chap, the others have returned to West Wycombe for tea. He points to a 'stand of Beech', tall dark masts against the backdrop of hills. Again it calls to mind a foreign, epic landscape this time something Russian, Turgenyev's 'A Month in the Country'.

Past a modern-looking school and round a path with electric fencing along one side and alarmingly over the top of the stile and we are in Downley High Street. This consists of the Bricklayers Arms, where the voice of John Motson commentating on the England v Northern Ireland match escapes through the drawn curtains, the Starlight Stores, and the village hall where a sign gives a potted history the highlight of which is when a relative of Wild Bill Hickock, Colonel Cody, landed his plane on the Common in 1912.

A homemade sign on a lamp-post says "MOBILE PHONE MAST - SAY NO!". There's a rusting brazier for burning beacons and heretics on the common and Dad notices Narrow Lane, which we later discover would have taken us down to the Disraeli Monument.
On Coates Lane we are serenaded by nattering Magpies and Dad is surprised to find a gooseberry bush in a roadside hedge.

Turning up towards Hughenden Manor under a noisy rookery we meet an architect and his family. He tells us about the designs he did for a theatre on the Bridge Street site whilst a student at Oxford Poly in the late sixties; and of meeting Colonel Watson who produced a Masterplan for Wycombe back in the 1930's that included pedestrianisation way ahead of its time. His mother informs us about the medieval bridge that was recently excavated when they were building Morrisons.

In our final stretch a woman with two dogs talks about Roald Dahl who lived not far away and we can see the Compair factory site where they have just filmed 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'.

All that's left is the plotting of the final stretch following Coffin Walk back to Castle Hill House.

Crypto-Topography

2005-03-23T15:14:00.000Z

we're working on this as a new term of reference for our work and welcome any comments psychogeographers, artists, writers, architects, urban planners, anarchists, ramblers, buskers, dog walkers, buffoons etc. may have about it.

Crypto Topography more accurately describes what some people call psychogeography or ‘neo-psychogeography’. It’s a study of our environment in all its forms physical and ambient. A peeling back of the hidden layers of meaning. It takes in mere musings on how place makes us feel to more detailed studies of the evolution of communities and street patterns. Marginal studies of graffiti, subverts, ley lines, fairy paths, prostitutes beats. The secret and invisible markers that guide us through space. The cryto topographer does not necessarily aim to change the built environment, although the work may have a use in urban planning and community action, but reveal the hidden city beneath the architect’s creations and the pulse beating beneath the surface of daily grind. People weave their own magic throughout place, an invisible matrix of associations, experiences and stories. It’s our job as evocateurs of space to reveal and present this underlying existence.

Crypto Topography often exists in the spaces between buildings, towns, cities standardised modes of business and routine; in the fringes, the provincial towns, built over plague pits, suburban streets, arterial curb-sides, satellite communities. The next great battle is not over the built realm, but the mental realm, the street plans and markers we create in our minds, the city we experience rather than the one imposed.

NIP & TUCK

2005-03-08T20:05:00.000Z

nip & tuck
Originally uploaded by Fugueur.

OBSERVATIONS ON TCR: 4/3/05
Markings have appeared on the pavements
- are these the markings of the cosmetic surgeon mapping out the areas for the nip & tuck - those alterations necessary to beautify the patient?

TCR

2005-03-08T20:01:00.000Z

TCR PAGE
Originally uploaded by Fugueur.

Tour of the TCR site 09.02.05

2005-03-02T00:54:00.000Z

I’m drawn down the alley near Scorpion Records, next to Labour Party HQ which is based above The Big Sandwich – "HANDS OFF OUR HOSPITAL" poster in the window. The funeral directors regrets that it is closed, announced with a small fading framed sign leant against the window. Running down one side of the alleyway is a sloping tiled roof of a redbrick outbuilding. It looks as though it may have had an agricultural use in the days that this area held the cattle market. A dirty industrial unit offers car valeting services and looks busy. A predatory Sainsbury’s lurks behind ready to move 20 yards forward and wipe out everything in front in the name of getting that prime A40 location.
98 Oxford Road is a ghost building complete with weeds in the doorway and peeling poster for Cottles Circus long since left town. They’re digging up the old gas mains and laying new pipes over the road. I lean on the barrier and chat to the workman; "Concrete’s rotten" he says. "Turned up anything interesting?" I ask. "Just some old bottles", and he goes back to the business of scratching his head at the quality of the earth he’s turning.
The Dole Office on Desborough Road is boarded up, rubbish scattered all around. A dedicated archaeologist of the present would study these deposits in the way that prehistoric middens are dissected for clues about the past. But all I can see is an assortment of super-strength lager cans, fag packets, fried chicken boxes and orangey polystyrene take-away containers. Down one side towards the demolition of the gas works there is a little variation with the addition of a computer monitor, two shopping trolleys and a traffic cone, but the collective significance of this is beyond me at this stage of my study. A demographic survey of the various brands of super-strength lager that is consumed across the area could produce some interesting results.
From Iceland to the Rose and Crown has been wiped out. Fried Food Strip has been consigned to a note on this blog. Scary teenager scavengers haunt the road behind.
I’m filming the demolition work at the old gas works and two workmen shout at me from across the road. I stand my ground but they stomp across to confront me. They’re fed up they say with being photographed. I manage to reassure them by saying that the developer is aware of my study and they calm down. "As long as it’s official I don’t care," one says and they go back to their work.
Later I speak to someone who grew up in Newlands in the thirties, Myrtle Church. Her grandparents were the caretakers of the Zion Baptist Chapel on the corner of Bridge Street where a multiplex cinema is to be built. She never went to the cinema as a child, "It was the devil’s work, you see," her husband David tells me. She says all of the old Newlands is gone except for the gas works. "They knocked it down today" I tell her.
Around the bus station and the Octagon a slight air of paranoia and suspicion hangs in the air. A man in a white shirt speaks into a walky-talky, two coppers in padded fluro jackets stand outside the opticians.
I regroup in The Baker’s Oven in the High Street with tea and doughnut. The tables are inhabited by solitary smoking women. There’s an atmosphere of tranquil despair. The hum of the fridge is comforting. Its feels like a different town to what is happening over at Newlands. Maybe the last stand of the old Wycombe will be here at the Baker’s Oven.

Nodules of Energy Walk

2005-02-19T13:39:00.001Z

nodules-of-energy
Originally uploaded by Fugueur.

The aim of the walk was to find our own boundary of
Wycombe, to go beyond the pre-defined significant
sites of the TCR and also the historic borough
boundary. The inspiration in the end came from Iain
Sinclair, who we heard in conversation at St Luke's
Church in Clerkenwell, London. Sinclair talked about
all the local points of interest near the church such
as the house where Daniel Defoe died and the Hawksmoor
obelisque and described them as 'nodules of energy';
they were his markers in the area.
A quick look at the psychogeography of Wycombe
immediately throws up 'nodules of energy' and they
tend to be situated around the edge of town. You could
imagine them radiating their energy into the urbanised
sprawl inside their vortex. There is the Hill at West
Wycombe topped by the golden ball of St Lawrence's and
marking the spot of the Dashwood Mausoleum, the
Hellfire Caves and more importantly, the site of a
Bronze Age fort. Then there's the earthwork of
Desborough Castle, Tom Burt's Hill, Wycombe Abbey, The
Rye and the Hospital of St John. The outer tip of the
loop is marked by Hughenden with its church, dragon
myth and monument to Benjamin Disraeli.
Our walk was an attempt to join them up, to see how
the town would look from the outside, to somehow
rediscover the origins that led to it being here in
the first place. A walk back to the beginnings of High
Wycombe.

The start point was the home of Dr Martin Lluelyn,
poet and doctor to Charles I & II. I read a verse from
one of his eulogies to Charles II. It was a busy
Saturday. I stood outside Don Miguel's Men's
Hairstylists and people walked past me without batting
an eyelid as if it was a normal event. I hoped to stir
Lluelyn's slumbering spirit.

I rendezvous with Dad at the site of the ruins of the
Hospital of St John. He attended the site behind when
it was the Tech.

Onto the Rye, we'll only touch this side as a symbolic
gesture but in the short stretch of path that leads to
Wycombe Abbey. In the upper boughs of a tall oak
mistletoe grows in great dark clusters, "an invader"
the old chap says. I note the pagan connotations of
oak and mistletoe entangled, as there was a pagan spot
of well worship on the other side of the Rye.

It's depressing to see that the old Wanderers ground
of Loakes Park is now just a car park. What heroism
took place under that concrete; Bodger Horseman's 60
goals in the 1965-66 season (Dad's cousin via his Mum,
Florence Horseman), and the 0-0 draw with Jack
Charlton's First Division Middlesborough in the FA
Cup.

Tom Burt's Hill takes its name from the fella who
reputedly found a crock of gold there when grubbing
around in the undergrowth. It marks a nodule of energy
as it sits on a ley line that we'll now more or less
follow to West Wycombe. Dad finds the lone beech tree
people used to watch the football from, walk from
Flackwell Heath, watch the game then walk home without
spending a penny.

We stop at the corner to admire Desborough Castle. It
stands out unmistakably from the council estate
opposite. The trenches of the castle are littered with
beer cans and take-away containers. There's a melted
wheelie bin in the centre continuing the theme of
burnt objects along the ley-line.

We look out to see West Wycombe Hill still clouded in
mist. It's our next stop. I think of the verses of
poetry by Ivor Gurney that I've written out on a torn
up piece of paper: "What must High Wycombe hills look
like now!/ Great clouds of miraculous green, / green
that looks alive / and gifted with a voice.
It is a delectable land all this, / with changing
soils in the valley / and a happy air of peace over
all".

There was a top secret communications network called
'Backbone' that planned to have a radio mast in these
hills. There were suggestions that the Backbone
stations coincided with ley-lines.

A Wycombe Wanderers supporter complete in club hat and
scarf swigging a can of Stella stomps up the path.
"Will the pubs be open in West Wycombe?" we ask.
"Better pull your finger out", he advises, "Village
pubs remember keep different hours". We can't be more
than two miles from urban Wycombe and the pubs have
different opening hours.

We feel almost euphoric by the end. The walk felt
epic. At several points we told people the purpose of
our walk. In suburban streets Dad explained that we
were retracing the ancient footpaths of Wycombe and
drew slightly bemused expressions. Nearing West
Wycombe people couldn't see how we'd walked through
from the Rye, to here?
The town has built up around these tracks but not
erased them completely. Whilst the traffic chokes and
suffocates the byways the footpaths transport the
walker through ancient beechen groves to sites of
arcane significance.
The walk became an act; an act of remembering how we
came to end up in this verdant valley and the power it
still has to transport us from our quotidian town
lives.

We will re-create this walk, doing the full circuit on the Summer Solstice 2005 taking in the Holy Well on the Rye and extending the route up into the Hughenden Valley. Please email us for more information: wycombederive@yahoo.com

Daniel

2005-01-26T20:15:00.000Z

Daniel
Originally uploaded by Fugueur.

Mark

2005-01-26T20:14:00.000Z

Mark
Originally uploaded by Fugueur.

bex

2005-01-26T20:13:00.000Z

bex
Originally uploaded by Fugueur.

Lunchtime Derive #2

2005-01-25T16:33:00.000Z

On 19th January 2005 we undertook our second lunchtime derive, with 3 students from Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College. Mark, Daniel and Bex were all first year Arts and Media students.
We altered the algorithm slightly to: first right, second left, first left, repeat.
The derive lasted for over two-and-a-half hours with Mark, Daniel and Bex thoroughly surrendering themselves to the spirit of drift.
We followed a hidden footpath behind some derelict factories where some scenes from the new Willy Wonka film were shot (Johnny Depp popping into Sainsbury's for beer). Some steps hoisted us up to high ground with views of two valleys (the Hughenden and the Wye), Desborough Castle and the Golden Ball. The Pastures Service Road was a sublime example of the urban poetry of street names. A mobile library conned us into going inside but was filled with pot-boilers and videos(they've been de-commissioned and are up for grabs from the Council). We finished in Desborough high on the fumes from Stuart Linford's furniture workshops and the thrill of following the Wye stream into CCTV monitored space.
The derivers questioned notions of planned space, were prepared to trespass in the pursuit of the algorithm as bland suburban streets became part of an epic quest.

For more info on generative psychogeography visit the link below to Social Fiction
http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography/newbies.html

Grand Derive

2004-11-30T20:55:00.000Z

grand-dervie-pics
Originally uploaded by Fugueur.

Images from the North, West & East

Grand Derive reports from 20.11.04

2004-11-27T13:55:00.000Z

The following derives were undertaken using an algorithm of 2nd Right, 2nd Right, 1st Left, Repeat. This algorithm was first used in experiments by Social Fiction in 2001. It seemed appropriate for this exercise as it would force us to explore the seemingly mundane corners of Wycombe's small but diverse urban realm.
John
The Mayor of High Wycombe complete with sold gold chain of office sees us off on our way from a rainy Bridge Street carpark. I elected to head east. Maybe it was a spiritual pull towards the Rye. Found a spot roughly in the middle of the carpark so that I’d be able to return to the spot and repeat the exercise in two years when the TCR is finished, it was opposite Leywood House on Denmark Street.....There are steps leading up and we follow the path to its logical conclusion which is the door of no.25. Dead end. But there is a bank and wooden fence then fields. I hit the fellas with the choice - jump over the fence or go back. I ponder for a second and realise that the only way to go is over the fence, it’s a barrier, it says don’t go here an artificial demarcation of space, a provocation. The fields are calling me and also I’m intrigued by how the algorithm will behave in the woods.There is always a defining moment in a derive when it takes off, jumping over the fence was that moment, we are now in the grip of the fugue.
West End Road - We’re drawn to a low slightly knackered panel fence behind is a yard of rubble with a front door dying lying flat in the middle and a couch to one side like a house has exploded. A potent smell of hash is in the air and we joke that an enormous brick of hash caused the house to explode.
Short Street - Anodyne blocks, Diametrics Medical, vintage ford van that I photo then opposite I spy a classic public loo standing alone on the opposite side of the street. The more I look at it the more it appears perfect in its symmetry, a perfect building, dropped from the sky, on either side its square orange lights glow, it looks Soviet, what is it doing here, it exudes a strong smell of public loo. JJ and David are impressed, in Brighton it would be closed down due to ‘misuse’. I reassure them that it’s probably the offices of some of the local prostitutes.
We’re facing and enormous slab building - VERNON BUILDING - that I feel I’ve seen in a dream, reminds me of something I’ve drifted past in Ultimo, Sydney - the printing presses of the Sydney Morning Herald and I remember thinking back then as I first explored those streets of industrial central sydney how it put me in mind of Wycombe, even the pubs were vaguely Wycombesque.
this is an abridged version of the grand derive report, the full text will be published in January 2005

Cathy
Leave bridge street car park with lorna, all hopes of derive dashed as she just wants me to go home with her to see her studio. Anyhow, try to grasp some sense of algorithum. Cross the road by Morissons and meet an old German lad who recognises Lorna – chat about old days. Agree to leave Lorna and see her studio another time.
So head back to re-start derive from bridge street and head north up Bellfield Road. 2nd right into Parker Knoll way – choice – do I take the tarmac’d pedestrian path or the muddy one cutting the corner – take muddy path.
Cross the road as it curves around Morrisons as I feel this will ensure I continue north for my next right turn. The guard on the the gate at Morrisons looks bored and flicks his cigarette out of the window of his portakabin.
This area has changed, it looks all clean and respectable and I can’t remember what was here before.
Follow Chinese couples’ footsteps laden with shopping. Road still hugs Morrisons and about to seize 2nd right and notice its an enticing alleyway – how lucky is that. It looks like it may lead to arcadia! Cross the road, traffic swarming, slight hesitation about being alone and walking up said inviting alley – think about muggings etc. Immediately as I start to walk up the alleyway, the hum of the traffic fades and its quiet and peaceful. The alley is boarded by back gardens and Industrial Estate.
Old derelict, unloved, green, river wye, remenants of the past, quiet. Hooded lad, eyes down, I look over my shoulder. End of Alley.
Out onto Hughenden Avenue. 1st left and up and up into Hughenden Ave.
Repeat
2nd right leads up steps, looks promising again going up and up but no, a dead end but with views of the valley below and sheep grazing in the distance. Turn around and back onto Hughenden Ave. Up, Up Up I can’t keep on going up I’ll never get back to the car park.
Buck the Algorithum
Cross the road and head back down. Residential, Allen roofing van, quiet.
2nd right down alleyway with a sign of a swan on it. Down down, I could be walking the woods in Beaconsfield (quiet, leafy), down down, down back to Industrial estate and Morrison gleaming in front.
2nd right leads straight into doorway of Morrisons.
Tea and cake and first left out into the car park.

Davie
1.30pm leave car park. 5 slow
Edge of dovecot woman in Merc locked the door as I stood there.
13:35 under the whirl. Subway mouth organist, bring back my bonnie to me to me
left under the xmas lights, past mens fashions for immediate hire and then past the shameless façade of Totes bookies. 10 men standing around smoking and staring at screens. Girl shouts oi! From boyfriends lowered red peugot 305.
Right on bell lane, Coral. Younger clientele on fruit machines. One woman. 13:45 first dead end. Cashpoint stop “that’s got no money in it”.
13:48 second dead end. Enter the Octagon, left turn, Allsport, right at Boots and Virgin, right 50, craft market, herbal remedies, lava lamps and celtic towels.
Left by station, right 13:55, back at car park.
Left, Mendy Street, right, reliant parts, right university laundry, left 14:00 avoiding turn by one otherwise it would repeat, the enormous job centre. A little bit of river. Right 14:08 The Pastures, under bridge, zone ends.
Right up alley, thank god that hill was huge, up steps into residential, no. 28
Left up hill, panoramic hills, camera runs out so using mine. That was Wyatt Close. 14:15 Right to Garretts Way, Right Wren Vale leading to Hawksmoor Close, hope its not on the left. It wasn’t but Wren Vale was a dead end too. Take my left at which sparks has signed (collect stencil).
Right turn back onto Garrett and down past Ripley Close. Right down steps, I’ve escaped.
14:29 cheated. Took another right, left would have taken me back into the estate, down alley past tile showroom. Left between Jewsons and Morrisons. Jewsons alarm going off.
14:32 Derive stopped.

Everything must go â where to!

2004-11-25T23:04:00.000Z

Everything must go â where to!
Originally uploaded by Fugueur.

Right back towards Frogmore

2004-11-25T23:02:00.000Z

Right back towards Frogmore
Originally uploaded by Fugueur.

Lunchtime Derive

2004-11-25T23:00:00.000Z

Originally uploaded by Fugueur.

Trying to guess where it will all end up and failing and hoping to end up somewhere I have never been.

Alan's notes from the Lunchtime Derive

2004-11-25T16:41:00.000Z

Turn right out of office to be away from town
Desborough Road – shops changing
Desborough Road Service Road
Trying to guess where it will all end up and failing and hoping to end up somewhere I have never been
Scruffy backs of shops always interesting
Noticed crack in old red brick building across the car park
Backs of new buildings later so boring
Castle like roofs of Family Centre a contrast to squareness
Turn right into Desborough Ave
Houses ahead piled up the Hillside
Good day for a walk
Good reflections in the stream. Perhaps I should bring my camera to work
2nd Right
This was going to be the Oxford Road back into Town and kind of hoped for a road I didn’t know before that but there was none.
Why do cars break down at traffic lights!
Even along a busy road there is beauty in a beech tree in its autumn glory
Shopping trolley goes for a paddle in the stream!
Having the camera made me look around even more than usual
Lovely old houses next to new job centre. Contrasts.
Left up Bellfield Road
Lovely warm sun
Very familiar piece of road but because I seldom walk up here (past the turning to Sainsburys) time to look at the bridge
Love the wild tumble of plants below Focus Do It All. Sense of wildness amongst the regimented streets
Photo of Old Mans Beard – not many people know it’s a Clematis
2nd Right into Parker Knoll Way
· do I stick to the pavement
· do I take a short cut like others across the grass
Who makes these paths
Ahead - lovely old jumble of buildings and roofs. New and old and trees on the skyline.
I like all the trees in HW
Nice "jungle" along the railway embankment. Could hear birds in spite of the roar of the traffic
2nd right a bit contrived at by junction
Right backs towards Frogmore
Past a sad neglected flower bed but even so the roses are still in flower
1st left under bridge into Frogmore
The Clock House has great character. But in some ways you feel it could be happier in a country estate!
You have to be an optimist to put tables outside a pub in HW in November. But there were some takers
More people about now – felt a contrast of my wandering and their purposeful walking.
The sun playing on the fountain gave great light effects but hard to capture with a camera.
Idea/thought of capturing in fixed form the dynamic movement of something i.e. fountain
Imprisoning?
Into Oxford Street
Interpretation of what is a right can give different routes
Right down Queens Square
Right down White Hart Street
Bull Lane
Coming out of Bull Lane into Oxford Street
Turn Right
Left along past M&S
Everything must go – where to!
Up Castle Street
Like the quietness behind the church and the other buildings along north side of Castle Street
Amusing contrast of "scruffy" girls looking at dresses in a bride’s shop.
2nd Right down Corporation Street to High Street.
THE END - time constraint
Alan Petherbridge
http://www.wycombe.gov.uk/transport/maps/nonflashmap.htm

Desborough Hundred Psychogeographical Society

2004-11-13T18:50:00.000Z

We have formed the Desborough Hundred Psychogeographical Society as a result of our project and to further our research into the psychogeography of the area potentially leading to a total transformation of everyday life. Revolutions start humbly.
We have printed our first newsletter and distributed it on Thursday. It includes: Wycombe TCR as Spectacle, the Ley Line that runs from West Wycombe to Burnham and reports of its effects on mundane objects in its area, derive report 2.5, and much more. You can pick up a copy for free from the Central Library, Wycombe Museum, Ruby Moon, BCUC, Tourist Information, The Roundabout, Scorpion Records or you can email us your address and we'll post you one.
We are also keen to receive submissions for the next edition which will come out when we get round to it.
All enquiries to: wycombederive@yahoo.co.uk

Lunchtime Dérive – Report 11.11.04

2004-11-13T18:29:00.000Z

Met Alan at the Guinness Trust Offices in Mendy Street at 12.30pm. He was ready for action. He handed me a piece of paper recording his lunchtime movements over the previous week. I gave him the notepad, disposable camera and choice of two algorithms written on white postcards which he picked blind. He chose:
2nd street right
2nd right
1st left
repeat.
I explained that he should follow the algorithm as closely as possible but if it led to a dead-end to head back to a point where the algorithm could be resumed. I also said that he should allow himself to be diverted from his route if he saw anything particularly interesting and then resume the formula.
At the bottom of the steps he could chose whether to start to the right or left down Mendy Street and he chose to go right towards Desborough Road. I followed filming with the video camera.
He started making notes and taking photos pretty quickly and very soon had his head down and was right into the spirit of the derive as he turned right off Desborough Road into Westbourne Street. The first left took him into the Desborough Road Service Road where we ran along the backs of garages dodging cars and palette trucks as lorries unloaded. You’d never normally go down here. With his head down writing and taking photos then purposefully marching off led by the algorithm it almost seemed that Alan had entered into the state of reverie of the ‘Fugueur’.
The next turning was into Desborough Avenue but at a point so unfamiliar to Alan that he had to go and find a street sign. This was the second new experience for him of the derive so far and led onto a third as we crossed a small open section of the river Wye at a low bridge babbling its way through an industrial estate and close to where it becomes culverted. We were both quite taken with this.
We next hit the heavy traffic of Oxford Road and some semi-derelict buildings. But even here amongst the banality there was beauty in the autumnal leaves by the roadside. From here it was into Bellfield Road and under a tunnel towards Hughenden and Morrisons supermarket. Alan photographed the overgrown railway banks with weeds in flower. We then headed in a loop around Parker Knoll Way, me scampering to keep up, Alan drawn to admire the verdant banks. This is an area of mini-roundabouts, a drive-through zone that Alan, a keen walker, had never explored on foot. We then crossed Temple End and under the railway bridge as a London-bound train clattered by overhead. This felt like a special moment as the deriver in the grip of the algorithm re-entered the life of the town. He stopped to take notes as the town bustled past him, took photos of a group of noisy lads drinking outside a pub. He was apart from this Spectacle, drifting through the lunchtime buzz like an urban explorer, a decipherer of the code of the everyday narrative.
He headed into White Hart Street after stopping to admire the fountain on Frogmoor. Then into Bull Lane where he reported that he thought the algorithm had broken down. As we’d been going for 45 minutes and the original intention had been to walk for 30 minutes I said he could stop here but he wanted to carry on; he thought he knew where it had gone wrong and so headed off along Church Street past M&S then past the Church into Castle Street and finally into Corporation Street. He decided to stop as he hit the High Street. The next left would take him towards Easton Street and the second right would most likely be at the Law Courts.
We discussed what had happened and Alan was enthusiastic about the experience, he keen to be loyal to the algorithm and said it was so often open to interpretation what the next right or left may be. This is part of what makes the process interesting and it was in these choices that much of the psychogeography lays. It confirms the idea that two people with the same algorithm starting from the same point would take a different route – we passed a few alleys and slip roads that other people may have taken. When we do the Grand Derive on Saturday we should ask people to note down these moments of indecision and the reason they take the street they do.

I think we can say that our first experiment in algorithmic psychogeography was a success. Alan certainly seemed to find " the unknown facets of the known, astonishment on the terrain of boredom, innocence in the face of experience", as Greil Marcus identifies as the point of the Derive.

A fuller report of this Lunch-Time Derive along with the photos and map of Alan’s walk will be exhibited in January.

The Grand Derive

2004-11-09T14:20:00.000Z

Come and stroll, drift and dérive around Wycombe to remap and re-imagine the town centre. We will meet at Bridge Street Car Park 1pm Saturday 20th November 2004 – look out for our banner. You will be given instructions and mapping equipment (notepad and pen, disposable camera). We will then walk for one hour charting our route on maps, taking notes and photos. The results will be compiled to make a people’s map of High Wycombe and presented in an exhibition in January 2005.
for more info email: wycombederive@yahoo.co.uk

Reframing High Wycombe: Films from Beyond the Western Sector

2004-11-09T13:17:00.000Z

For one night only archive film and documentary footage from the Remapping High Wycombe project will be screened in the Shelburne Room at the Guildhall in collaboration with the Wycombe Film Society and Wycombe Museum. In addition to the archive film, which we will be hijacking with a soundtrack of stuff from readings of Milton to Bulgarian Throat Singing, we'll be screening our film of the MayorWeighing Ceremony "Regime Change in High Wycombe." We also hope to screen an excerpt from an unbroadcast TV pilot featuring comedian and Big Brother Eforum presenter Russell Brand.
programme length approx 1 hour
Wednesday 17th November 7.30pm
Shelburne Room, Guildhall Hall, High Wycombe, Bucks
Admission is free but places are limited.
for more information email: wycombederive@yahoo.co.uk
tel; 07958 669255

2004-10-30T13:11:00.000+01:00

‘GO-AHEAD’ SOON FOR A NEW WYCOMBE
The ambitious project for rebuilding a big central area of High Wycombe, and for a relief road looping south of the town centre to ease traffic congestion, will be approved shortly by the Minister of Housing and Local Government, the ‘Free Press’ understands.
The plan provides for the building of new stores and shops, a pedestrian only precinct with the River Wye running through it, a hotel, a central bus station, three multi-storey car parks, and blocks of offices.
At the public inquiry into the project, it was said that it would bring a breath of new life to the town, so that it could flourish and give it an architecture and a landscape of excitement and charm.
Bucks Free Press Friday 10 May 1963

TOWN CENTRE REDEVELOPMENT GETS GO-AHEAD
PROJECT Phoenix, the £100 million scheme for the western sector of High Wycombe, has been given the green light.
The development will include a department store, shops, parking, a library, new bus station, flats, eating and drinking places, a cinema and a bowling alley.
It has taken ten years to raise the western sector from eyesore to potential major attraction - and there are still hurdles ahead.
A development agreement should be signed between the council and its partners, Stannifer, in early October, but even after that Stannifer has to get the finance and the right stores signed up.
The department store, House of Fraser, will be the people attraction that encourages other stores such as Gap and Zara to move in. Firms to run the cinema and the bowling centre are identified.
Tesco, whose existing town centre store will be built around in the plan, has drawn up its own proposal for the land and is disappointed at Wednesday's result.
Objectors speaking at Wednesday's meeting were from the High Wycombe Society, Tesco, LxB and Wycombe Lib Dems, and Lorna Cassidy who wanted trees on the site to be saved.
Stannifer said many of the issues would be, or had been already, addressed, while some, like the opening up of the Wye and the removal of Abbey Way were not viable. "We have confidence this will be a high quality scheme that High Wycombe can be proud of," said Shirley Karat, Stannifer's agent.
Bucks Free Press Friday 19th September 2003

stills-from-drift-1-web

2004-10-23T22:11:00.000+01:00

stills-from-drift-1-web
Originally uploaded by Fugueur.

stills from research film to be shown alongside archive footage of High Wycombe, in collaboration with Wycombe Film Society at the Shelburne Room, Guildhall on November 17th, curtain up at 7.45pm. Places are free, but limited.

Robert Burns and Wycombe

2004-10-06T18:38:00.000+01:00

Buckinghamshire has been referred to as a land of 'Politics and Poetics'.
Its poetic power is so great that even a diehard Scot such as Robert Burns (1759-96) was compelled to mention the town in his poem 'Here's A Health To There That's Awa'.

Here's a health to them that's awa!

An here's to them that's awa!

Here's to Maitland and Wycombe!

let wha does na like 'em

Be built in a hole in the wa'!

Wycombe Dialect

2004-09-05T19:51:00.000+01:00

On the Wycombe dialect Mr Jackson Coleman wrote in his Treasury of County Folklore:
“….although there are those who say that Wycombe is peculiar from that prevalent elsewhere in the County, we must admit that it is not so pleasant as the broad Bucks conversation to be heard elsewhere.”
He noted a “Distinctive tone and jumble of syllables” heard on market days in Wycombe. A critic from a West Country newspaper described it as the “foulest and most formless patois” he had ever encountered.
Judge Randolph asked evidence at Wycombe Courts be translated into plain English; “Nobody enunciates words here they just give me a stream of sounds.”
Jackson Coleman identified the distinctive feature of the Wycombe dialect as an inability to pronounce hard sounds like ‘t’s’ and ‘d’s’ and ‘l’s’ which come out as ‘o’s’ so meal becomes ‘meo’, feel becomes ‘feo’
An example given of dropping ‘d’s’ is: “A liul bi of buhher.” For "A little bit of butter".

Other words of Bucks dialect:
Yawnups = a stupid person
Tiggle = move slowly
Goolybugs = ladybirds
Dingle = dawdle
Dibbly = intoxicated
Todge-bellied = pot bellied

Which means that once upon a time in Wycombe you may have heard something like:
“Thao dibbly todge-bellied yawnups was tiggling down Widgington Passage chasing goolybugs.”

From Treasury of County Folklore, Mr S Jackson Coleman (1954-56) No.11 Bucks
Dialect. UCL Special Collections.

2004-08-23T17:36:00.000+01:00

"The ordinary practitioners of the city live 'down below', below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk -- an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it.
The walker, through her/his everyday practices of life, resists the organizing power of both the gaze and the map. The city is produced every day, inscribed with her/his journeys, journeys that create the city but ‘elud[e] legibility’. "
Michel de Certeau, 'The Practice of Everyday Life' (1984)

Bus Station

2004-08-12T17:34:00.000+01:00

Bus Station
Originally uploaded by Fugueur.

walking the perimeter

of the site;

from the bus station

through to Lily's Walk

S.P.B Mais's Advice for Derivers (circa 1930)

2004-08-10T19:54:00.000+01:00

1. Go sufficiently well equipped for all contingencies. Take: heavy overcoat, pair of field glasses, camera, inch to the mile Ordnance map, Highways and Byways guide, notebook, several oranges, whisky-flask, and a volume of Cobbett or some other author who fits in with the open-air mood.
2. Stop at every inviting inn and mingle with the labourers in the ingle-nook of the tap room.
3. The countryman is friendly, communicative, witty and independent.
4. Stop and talk with every tramp.
5. Continually trespass and allow yourself to be diverted from the main path by every cross-track that lures you out of the way.
6. Never pass a church. Enjoy the beauty of the architecture and learn more about our national history.
7. There is a technique of walking - but I have never learnt it.
8. Be out of the house by 9am to avoid having to walk at a higher average rate than 3mph.
9. A walking day seems half the length of other days. It is rare for half the route to be covered before sundown.
10. There are 3 different types of walks: i) along the ridges in order to be alone, commune with the spirits of the air, and look down on humanity ii) along the river bank to trace the history of the (human/english) race iii) take to the green tracks through woods and over hills. Road walking is dead, except for stockbrokers to Brighton on 1st May.
11. The object of walking is to regain contact with the spirit of beauty; to commune with our souls and be still; to exorcise our demons.
12. Write up the day's walk as soon as it is over - for our own sake and that of other walkers.
Abridged from 'It Isn't far from London' by S.P.B Mais p.15-18 pub 1930

Note: Of course S.P.B Mais wasn't writing about the derive or psychogeography but his introduction to a book on walks around London reads like a call to arms to rediscover our humanity through walking and as a means to triumph over the forces of consumerism. He writes: "If we are surrounded by ugliness long enough, we are inclined to accept it as the natural and inevitable concomitant of industrial progress instead of a deterrent to it." And when he wrote: "The cry of the age is for distraction. Now distraction is precisely what we do not want..."
he could have been making the case against gleaming shopping malls, multiplex cinemas and bowling alleys.

Wycombe Drift #1

2004-07-26T14:46:00.000+01:00

We rendezvous at the Wycombe District Council Planning Office. The staff are friendly and helpful and hand over the latest plans for the scheme which apparently is now called The Wycombe Regeneration Project.
Looking at the drawings and plans induces a raging hunger and although the traffic flow diagrams are mildly hypnotic we need food. We head off for Frank’s Caff on Frogmoor only to discover that it’s gone, replaced by some Formica-free takeaway place. We end up in Littlewoods café and leave a calling card on one of the menus.

We start our orbital tour of the site at the side entrance to the bus station on Lily’s Walk which is like a portal into the fume-soaked sunless Hades that is Wycombe Bus Station. I admire the geometric patterns formed by the cris-crossing concrete ramps of the multi-storey carpark. The alley that runs off to the left leads to the old Wanderers pitch of Loakes Park and I have memories of the excitement of being in the pre-match throng as a kid and the fear of being caught up in the ruck after the Slough Town Cup match. Cathy takes photos of the dilapidated gas works in all its rusted elegance. Men in fluro vests pass carrying plans and white spray paint. Traffic. Two women in saris.

I climb the bank next to what is/was the Dole office, step over the wooden fence, stand outside the zone, feel it from the raised level shaded by trees. This spot feels special somehow – a remnant of the old path through to the Rye? It’s wedged in between roads and brick walls. Looking at old maps in the pub later this could be what’s left of Pagan’s Mead.
Post office vans lined up in the car park. "He’s been so pissed off. He got laid off in December…" two dolled-up girls pass by. The Desborough Road section is desperate. Take-aways, boarded up derelict shacks. Fried Food Strip. Best One Foods. Tuckin Takeaway with Pukka Pies. AT&T Video, Pizza and Kebabs. Numerous alleys ripe for night-time vice lead into the carpark – neglected corners of coke cans. Loud Hindi music blaring from suped-up Nissans, close-cropped youths, bleach blonde black-rooted girls, drawn faced guy on crutches, black youths in hooded tops, white boys in Hackett rip-offs.

Cultures meet/collide on the corner of Bridge Street and Desborough Road. Caribbean, Asian, White, mixed race. Hooded top, Sari, Hackett. Second Hand City on the opposite corner looks as though it’ll survive – furnish the new units? The old map shows that the boundary of the Borough cut through here and it has retained that borderland feel.
Dougie’s Snacks Take Away on Bridge Street "Feeding Wycombe since 1989. Food that’s good enough to eat!" Bridge Street gives me nothing leaves me cold except a planning notice and a view of the site from the corner of Denmark Street – the Church spire pokes up above the Octagon. All the interest is on the other side of the road - Le Sandwich boasting Segafredo coffee and the College Halls student colony. The Esso petrol station is boarded up, decommissioned, environmental hazard.

Oxford Road. The Leaning Tower of Pizza has risen nearby Scorpion Records - the gravitational centre of my Wycombe. I can’t resist going over. I chat with Cheryl and Steg and tell them about our project. Steg has been in the shop for 29 years and says there have always been plans for the site. He makes some good suggestions for creating 3D walk through maps with transparent screens. Maybe we’ll stick one in the carpark.
Oxford Road is a racetrack, grass it over, restore it to meadowland, that’d be the civilised thing to do. Forget about bowling alleys, this is Death Race 2000. The pigeons love the carpark. Police sign warning you not to leave valuables in your car. The roundabout looks like a burial mound – the final resting place of crushed up Cortinas.

I rendezvous with Cathy outside Tescos (a poster behind the checkout reads: "Helping you to spend less everyday". This could be a slogan for the anti-consumerist brigade). We survey the site from the top of the multi-storey carpark. The town pours into the parking bays below, from the roads propelled by the roundabout, from the lanes running down from the higher ground, it all runs off into this spot, just like the Wye stream.

psychogeography: some notes and definitions

2004-07-20T13:56:00.000+01:00

There are nearly as many versions of psychogeography as there are practitioners. “Psychogeography - as noted by Guy Debord, is a concept with "a rather pleasing vagueness".
In a recent conversation between Iain Sinclair and Will Self they both came up with differing definitions. Self’s question to Sinclair was “So how would you describe your variety of psychogeography, because I always understood it in the manner explained by Guy Debord and the Situationists rolling around drunk on the Rue Mouffetard?” Sinclair answered by explaining that it was a convenient way of linking up his work on Nicholas Hawksmoor, leys lines, and what he called “nodules of energy”. This modern post-Situationist flavour of psychogeography has been referred to as ‘neo-psychogeography’.
Here are a few basic definitions and notes that may shed a bit more light on the matter

psychogeography: The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals.

dérive: A mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. The term also designates a specific uninterrupted period of dériving.
Guy Debord From "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography"

"A more recent phenomenon, particularly in the UK, has been the revival of the Situationist idea of psychogeography. This, and the derive, were techniques to explore and extend the imaginative, experiential qualities of urban and other landscapes, as part of a wider attempt to achieve a revolutionary transformation of everyday life." (Patrick Keiller City Vol.7, No.3)

It is based on the technique of the "dérive", an informed and aware wandering, with continuous observation, through varied environments. It can be sought and can lead anywhere.” (Monocular Times) http://www.monoculartimes.co.uk/city-tours/psychogeography/index.shtml

“Psychogeography was a method of imagining time cutting through the space of the city and breaking up any boring ‘rational’ notion of the use of urban space. The dérive was a term for a particular art of walking or drifting: as Guy Debord describes it: ‘a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences.’ It was central to situationist practice. This session considers the dérive in relation to other modes of walking – flanerie, notably. It might also consider Iain Sinclair’s proposition that in such a media-saturated age as our own, the dériveur is less significant than the stalker.” (Birkbeck College MA Cultural and Critical Studies Dept.)

"The point (of the derive) was to encounter the unknown facets of the known, astonishment on the terrain of boredom, innocence in the face of experience. So you can walk up the street without thinking, letting your mind drift, letting your legs with their internal memory, carry you up and down and around turns, attending to a map of your own thoughts, the physical town replaced by the imaginary city."
Greil Marcus (From "Wanderlust")

Follow this link to a plethora of Situationist texts:http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/all/

A psycho-geography, then, derives from the subsequent ‘mapping’ of an unrouted route which, like primitive cartography, reveals not so much randomness and chance as spatial intentionality. It uncovers compulsive currents within the city along with unprescribed boundaries of exclusion and unconstructed gateways of opportunity. The city begins, without fantasy or exaggeration, to take on the characteristics of a map of the mind. Chris Jenks http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/london-journal/march2003/baker.html

.....Debord adds that the adjective 'psychogeographical' has a rather 'pleasing vagueness', and anyone reading recent usages would discover that it is about Jack the Ripper, ley lines, why tower blocks are bad, Hawksmoor churches, the places we remember from earlier in our lives, landscape gardening, Stonehenge and the Kray twins.
And it is indeed about all those things. Most uses of the word now involve three or four main ideas, separately or in combination: the emotional and behavioural effects of the environment, and its ambience; 'cognitive mapping' (the city in our heads, with the places that have special meaning for us); and what might more prosaically called 'local history'. Phil Baker, Secret City: Psychogeography and the East End http://www.camdennet.org.uk/groups/soundevents/articles/item?item_id=14891

Starting Point

2004-07-16T13:31:00.000+01:00

Wycombe District Council is embarking on a bold programme of Town Centre Re-development – Project Phoenix. We will be using the developers’ criteria/objectives to inform our criteria as a starting point for the project.
This is a parallel project not driven by planners and developers, but by psychogeography. The outcome will be a people’s map of the town, unlocking its secrets, language, history and topography reconnecting its people with the place through collaborative engagement and shared experience and activity.
We will be inevitably drawn towards ‘nodules of energy’ rather than ‘development opportunities’ and engage in a ‘purposeful stalk’ of the site and surrounding area.

The Fugue

2004-07-13T13:39:00.000+01:00

"The fugue is both drift and fracture. The fugue is a psychic commando course that makes the parallel life, as a gas fitter, hospital carer, or literary hack, endurable."
Iain Sinclair, London Orbital