Psychogeography

the tradition of writer as walker

Hawksmoor

writers such as Defoe, de Quincey, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen, paints a uniformly dark picture of the city as the site of crime, poverty and death.

all share a perception of the city as a site of mystery and seek to reveal the true nature that lies beneath the flux of the everyday.

Patrick Keiller’s films London and Robinson in Space

Psychogeography: a beginner’s guide. Unfold a street map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw round its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go, in whatever medium you favour: film, photograph, manuscript, tape. Catch the

dramatise the city as a place of dark imaginings.

Machen once again seeks out the strange and otherworldly within our midst – a single street, event or object capable of transforming the most mundane surroundings into something strange or sinister, revealing that point of access, called the Northwest Passage

remapping of London through an alignment of those churches designed by the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor.