Ways to Wander
Ways To Wander
Clare Qualmann & Claire Hind (eds.)
Triarchy Press 2015
(I need to declare an interest; I am one of the 63 walkers whose tactics are included in this book.)
This is a handbook for turning a pedestrian into a trippy hazard.
Claire Hind, one of the editors of Ways to Wander closes the book with a pencil line running to the edge of a square. It is an appropriately oblique gesture for a book that comes sideways at walking, knocking it off its stride and putting it out of step, disturbing its everydayness into poetry and resistant eccentricity.
Ways to Wander is a treasure-filled toolbox of simple tactics and complex projects for taking a walk. Something for a five minute diversion and something else for a day’s venture to a deep turning point; there are provoking reflections on what is going on around such walks, and email speculations by the editors on their outcomes. Yet in the end this is a book that can only be fully read on your way through the streets.
If you do, you will tread dogshit, appropriate betrayal and failure, follow a river, circumambulate, test gaps with buggies, tunnel randomness, meet strangers, tread beaches, think octopus, throw spoons, listen through trumpets, deploy bubbles, close down and open up cities, fall in love with a space, wolf trot, eat chips, talk publicly about public space, swing, get nostalgic, grave bother and more.
There is a certain elegance to all this. Instructions as minimalist poems. But with the fine detail of some entries, the allusive and unfinished qualities of others, and the deep immersion in walking of its writers, there is far more practical toolkit here than armchair contemplation. It adds to a string of handbooks like its immediate inspiration Carl Lavery’s ‘25 instructions for performance in cities’, Simon Pope’s London Walking, Sophie Mellor and Emma Cocker’s Manual for Marginal Places, Simon Whitehead’s Walking to Work, and the Wrights & Sites’ ‘mis-guides’ to Exeter and Anywhere.
The tactics come from the walkers’ varied practices, but the editors have shaped the order to create a complex and spiralling ‘narrative’, moving inside to outside, private to political, ecological to pleasure-driven. There are plenty of names familiar to me from ‘walking as art’ here (Barbara Lounder, Vanessa Grasse, Bram Arnold, Jess Allen and so on), but plenty more names and people I don’t know. The book is a symptom of the explosion of walking arts and activisms of the last few years and it is a new resource to further fuel that pedestrian fire.
Crab Man
Clare Qualmann & Claire Hind (eds.)
Triarchy Press 2015
(I need to declare an interest; I am one of the 63 walkers whose tactics are included in this book.)
This is a handbook for turning a pedestrian into a trippy hazard.
Claire Hind, one of the editors of Ways to Wander closes the book with a pencil line running to the edge of a square. It is an appropriately oblique gesture for a book that comes sideways at walking, knocking it off its stride and putting it out of step, disturbing its everydayness into poetry and resistant eccentricity.
Ways to Wander is a treasure-filled toolbox of simple tactics and complex projects for taking a walk. Something for a five minute diversion and something else for a day’s venture to a deep turning point; there are provoking reflections on what is going on around such walks, and email speculations by the editors on their outcomes. Yet in the end this is a book that can only be fully read on your way through the streets.
If you do, you will tread dogshit, appropriate betrayal and failure, follow a river, circumambulate, test gaps with buggies, tunnel randomness, meet strangers, tread beaches, think octopus, throw spoons, listen through trumpets, deploy bubbles, close down and open up cities, fall in love with a space, wolf trot, eat chips, talk publicly about public space, swing, get nostalgic, grave bother and more.
There is a certain elegance to all this. Instructions as minimalist poems. But with the fine detail of some entries, the allusive and unfinished qualities of others, and the deep immersion in walking of its writers, there is far more practical toolkit here than armchair contemplation. It adds to a string of handbooks like its immediate inspiration Carl Lavery’s ‘25 instructions for performance in cities’, Simon Pope’s London Walking, Sophie Mellor and Emma Cocker’s Manual for Marginal Places, Simon Whitehead’s Walking to Work, and the Wrights & Sites’ ‘mis-guides’ to Exeter and Anywhere.
The tactics come from the walkers’ varied practices, but the editors have shaped the order to create a complex and spiralling ‘narrative’, moving inside to outside, private to political, ecological to pleasure-driven. There are plenty of names familiar to me from ‘walking as art’ here (Barbara Lounder, Vanessa Grasse, Bram Arnold, Jess Allen and so on), but plenty more names and people I don’t know. The book is a symptom of the explosion of walking arts and activisms of the last few years and it is a new resource to further fuel that pedestrian fire.
Crab Man