Three Hours From: CAMBERWELL

On this second journey I ended up walking from Denmark Hill in Camberwell to Clapham Common, via Brixton and Stockwell. Initially it was difficult to find a focus as I started out in a fairly mixed and quiet residential zone.

However, by the time I'd reached Brixton I had noticed a proliferation of churches and religious centres en route that suggested an ongoing theme of faith and religious devotion. This trailed off once I got into Brixton but here with the noise and visual blare of Brixton on market day I developed an interest in the strong community I witnessed, largely Afro-Caribbean, and how an area of town known for being dodgy and shabby is also home to genuinely cheerful and community-spirited people. When I reached Clapham I saw an altogether different community. The weather was glorious so people were littered across Clapham Common sunbathing and chatting. They were a community in that they were all out together. But they remain within their social pockets. As I understand it, Clapham was shabby and run-down until about the 1980's when the property-market exploded, and the 'Sloane Rangers' (sons and daughters of both the aristocracy and the upper-middle classes, who, either single or married, wanted to work in London), who traditionally bought or rented in Chelsea and South Ken, could not afford to. It became necessary for them to find new areas to colonise, and Battersea/Clapham/Balham were just across the water, and still close to the West End and the City. Thus, the gentrification of these areas.

While it's got a lovely atmosphere, I felt like the little groups or pairs of people in cafes, on the common, etc. were isolated from one another. I saw lots of people shooting disapproving looks at playing children, tutting at dogs, sitting quietly on their own reading books. There wasn't any real sense of community, nothing like that I experienced at Brixton.

Three Hours From: SOUTH KENSINGTON

Despite changeable weather I really enjoyed this first full-length journey. I literally wandered in whatever direction I felt like, not looking at a map once. This strategy took me on a journey through the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, one of the most affluent and beautiful boroughs of London.

I hoped that on each journey I undertook for this project, a defining theme or feature specific to each individual walk would emerge. In this case, I found myself continually noting architectural detail, the intricacies of ironwork, carvings and sculptures. With such a proliferation of historically rich and important buildings in this royal borough, I think the focus of follow-up work for this first outing will be the attention to detail and the resolute high presentation standards of this area of London. As the royal borough, it is imperative that Kensington is kept as pristine as possible; the rare piece of litter on the streets looks guilty and lonely, graffiti is minimal (removed immediately) and the streets are patrolled by wardens particularly concerned with keeping it clean and orderly.

The defining artworks of Kensington are in most cases hundreds of years old. Their grandeur and detail have been designed to showcase the wealth, prosperity and regality of the city, and to continue to bear evidence of this through the centuries. They are built to last, considered, and very well-guarded. This is an interesting contrast to the edgier, less privileged areas of London, where the surfaces of the streets are continually being modified and adapted. Artwork is more transient, rules of preservation less stringent. The pride and grandeur evident walking through this affluent pocket of West London will be the subject of my work for this first journey.

Wrong-footed - Progress update

Despite a very disheartening trial run, during which I lost the will to live somewhere in the middle of a puddle in Hackney, I am going to continue with this concept. I will also continue to research the Situationists because the writings I have been reading are genuinely interesting and I think they will inform my observations and the conclusions I'll draw from what I will see.

Quote: Raoul Veneigem

All we have in common is the illusion of being together. And beyond the illusion of permitted anodynes there is only the collective desire to destroy isolation... By producing isolation, contemporary social organization signs its own death-sentence.
The Revolution of Everyday Life:
Impossible Participation or Power as the Sum of Constraints

Where to start

I spread the map out on the floor, held nine coloured pins in one hand, shut my eyes, and randomly distributed the pins across the map. That's it, that's final. I'll start from those locations.

1) Harts Lane, New Cross Gate
2) Warner Road, Camberwell
3) Thames Street, Blackfriars
4) Mare Street, Hackney
5) Hyde Park
6) Wandsworth Bridge Road, Walham Green
7) Grove End Road, St Johns Wood
8) Cromwell Road, South Kensington
9) Westferry Road, Limehouse

This could be quite an interesting project. I have a wide variety of starting points. Today I will make my first journey, taking with me a camera, sketchbook/notepad and a sadly much-needed umbrella. It'll be interesting to see if this actually works.

Three Hours

I don't want to regiment this project to the extent of its predecessor. This investigation into observation and documentation should focus on those things without being bogged down by the details of how I reach the places I end up in. However I should develop some rules to ensure a common structure to the journeys I make.

I was listening to Nick Drake's Three Hours, a song about escape and the eternal seeker. I thought how far one could travel in three hours, then decided this could be the guiding principle to this project.

Electing at random a number of different starting points, I will travel away from each one for three hours. I'll employ similar but less stringent practices to decide how to move away from those places, to maintain the element of 'the unknown', but essentially the concern in each case will be observation.

Three hours is needed
To leave from them all
Three hours to wonder
And three hours to fall.

Next step: select the random starting points
Following this: get moving.

Oh, to wander free...

Faced with the opportunity of effectively doing whatever I wanted for the final few weeks of term, I toyed with a variety of ideas that probably wouldn't have been sustainable/possible for that length of time - illustration & art direction for the band Hush the Many (Heed the Few), a photographic series based on the depressingly repetitive interiors of chain fast food restaurants, even the construction of a ghost ride.

A recurrent theme in my work is making observations of the world around me and my recordings of those observations. In the first term I designed a game of chance based around travel in London, allowing chance to dictate my route and developing a complicated system by which to document my movements.

During these prescribed journeys I saw and heard and experienced a huge amount that was not possible or appropriate to document within the confines of the brief. This always frustrated me.

Therefore I propose to revisit the concept from which I allowed myself to deviate, the concept that interested me the most - the idea of setting out on a journey at the mercy of the unknown and learning from the environments in which I end up. The proposed outcome will be a boxed collection of short documents, taking various forms including illustrative, photographic, typographic and perhaps even filmic. The structure will be inspired by the Sagmeister 'Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far' publication.

Researching:
- Hamish Fulton
- Richard Long
- John Cage
- Fluxus
- Situationism (in more depth than before)

Think on.