The Wood Green Revisited Tour

Today's tour was of the stalwart North London neighbourhood Wood Green in the affable company of Hugh Chapman. I say stalwart because Wood Green is one of those areas that has the character of always being there but never being too obtrusive, like the waiters in the excellent Kervan Sofrasi Turkish Restaurant on the High Road. This is in complete contrast to attention seeking Dalston, for example. This can mean that the place gets taken for granted, which is a pity because changes, such as the imminent demolition of the gas holder, can just happen like weather: it lurches from grey to grey.

Our tour of Wood Green was not a rehearsed walk with a set script, but Hugh did have several locations in mind to take me to. That is what brought us to the Chocolate Factory, a former industrial building now housing creative businesses. It still bore traces of its history of sweetening the tooth of the British Empire but today it housed such things as overspill from Mountview Theatre Academy. As we were walking around this oversized shoebox and later waking beside some of the other refashioned industrial units in the area, I had a sense of familiarity that I now realise came from the old Middlesex University Fine Art School being based here on Western Road back in the 90s. I first visited it as an undergraduate student and then later as a judgemental life model; a cash-strapped 22-year-old performance artist who looked down on life drawing but had to keep his opinions to himself and humbly take the money. The school has long since moved elsewhere, the building changed its appearance and my attitudes to drawing softened.

Back out into the cool grey we ascended the multi-story car park in search of a view and this is the best we got. Whilst Wood Green's centre has some density, it is surrounded by rows of two-storey houses with cars parked out the front and little back gardens filled with patches of grass, bikes and children's plastic toys.

For an area whose name evokes a Robin Hood-like image of a clearing deep in the forest, the reality is resolutely urban with no wood to see and scarce little green either. The slither of greenery that we did come to was the New River, reached by walking under the train tracks, which neatly slice the urban fabric in two. To the south we arrived at Turnpike Lane Station where the slender Ducketts Common stretched before us but which marked the limit of our walk: we turned around and headed back up High Road. That park is another old haunt of mine: many moons ago I directed A Goat to Grind a performance for six cyclists that briefly interrupted the assembled Special Brew drinkers. Whilst I have been away too long, they looked as if they were still there, still putting the world to rights and peeing in the bushes. It is reassuring that some things don't change.

One of the purposes of the tour was to test out an idea of mine to explore an urban environment via the reproductions of art that can be found in it. This picture on the left, sitting in a charity shop, is an example. I wanted to first identify its origin and with this see if there was a way to connect this Rembrandt (right) to its contemporary environment. The first thing that I noticed doing this was how unevenly art is distributed: there are vast swathes of the city that art barely touches. What you do see everywhere, however, are the byproducts of art, namely design. Looking for both art and the traces of it through the etymology of images, proved to be a quite fascinating exercise that offered an original method of viewing the city. How the art reflects back upon the city remains to be seen but it can be so rich in content - Balthazar's Feast, Rembrandt's life and the painting's history - that these will, without the shadow of a doubt, include stories that could be reactivated in Wood Green.

Hugh is working for the social enterprise Green Rooms, a hotel catering for the arts sector which has its own arts programme. Naturally, they have an affinity with independent local businesses such as the Big Green Bookshop, a sympathetic place tucked away off the main street. Here we met the people running the place who were happy to chat and willing to be involved in some sort of artistic tour too. This is quite a contrast to another one of our stops, the frozen food store Iceland, where a security guard asked us to stop taking photographs, afraid we might be stealing their stellar design concepts. This division between local stores and national chains was predictable but is worth bearing in mind when making a tour. The temptation is to make tours on a personable and local level, bypassing the brightly lit mall, but that would give a very false impression of the neighbourhood. Somehow, it seems to me the resistance or impersonality that you can encounter in the larger places is interesting in itself and a tone not to be avoided altogether. 

All the time that we were looking around the neighbourhood as a form of artistic research, there was also a secondary very practical task of looking for a suitcase going on. This took us up and down High Road in and out of large and small stores alike. I did finally find a decent case in a sale in one of the smaller places and it was put to use immediately as I checked out of Green Rooms. I expect to see more of the area and, in the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I will be back. Touch wood (Green). 

The Dorset Stones and Geology Tour: preparing for Inside Out Festival

Day three of my research around Portesham and Littlebredy got me on the bike again and up into the village. I had been reading the book 'Ancient Stones of Dorset' and thought it time to see how the reality compares to the page.

The centre of the village is hard to quite pin down but this shelter is one candidate for it and, next to it, to my surprise, is a stone that was listed in the book. This, apparently, is a 'mark stone' on a ley line that passes through the village church and onwards to tumuli and more stones. The theories in the book get, step by step, more and more out there, and even though I didn't get fully immersed into the Earth Mysteries section that explains site memory and how these stones will save the planet, I feel I am already in over my neck. The thing with the book is, it was composed from having done field work but then written from the point of view of one sitting down in a quiet place surrounded by maps. This meant that it is not wholly suited to being used in the field. I had the impression that it would be a lot more fun to have the author show me around and explain site memory, ley lines and the meaning of the stones rather than piecing it together between the pages. I might just write to him and see if this is possible.

I wanted to stay more focussed on the village and since that is the only verified ancient stone, I shifted my attention onto other phenomena. The water of the lake here is a significant feature of the place and I followed the course of it to see where it ran. I was basically interested in ways to use features of the place to navigate around the village.

After following the water course it was time to move onto power lines which create their own web. What is nice about them is that they cut across the built and natural environment in a different way to that of roads, paths or water course. The power lines sometimes cross diagonally over roads and weave their way between the houses which means that in following them you see the village from a quite different perspective.

Most of the tours I've discovered so far don't take place in Littlebredy. The village is a quiet place that few visit and I will have to talk about the area more generally and not just the village itself. In order to do this it can be useful to have objects and sites within the village which relate to locations outside of it. The roads are an obvious example, this now disused public telephone box another. 

This is the sign for the cycle route or should I say routes as the new Tour de Manche piggybacks onto the National Route 2 around here. I followed the route out through the far side of the village and into the countryside before turning around, getting up a pace and trying to experience Littlebredy in the way someone doing one of these long distance cycle routes might. As there are no shops, no pubs and nothing very curious to immediately draw the eye, the way I encountered the village was to simply cycle straight through it without stopping. The most memorable thing about the village, from the cyclist's point of view, is the hill you have to climb leaving it heading up towards Hardy Monument. In the cyclist discussion forum there is some debate over the newly opened (2013) Tour de Manche and the main topics  are whether to camp or stay at B&Bs, annoyance that some parts of the route have not yet been signposted despite the route having been officially opened, and how to reduce the weight of your gear. This last point resonated with me as I slogged my way up to the top of the hill.  

I then took a Geology walk from a guidebook written by professional Dorset Geologists which took me to this quarry. There was a detailed description of the rock formation that went quite above me, or maybe I should say, below me. In any case, it was rather esoteric.

There was the 'compare the picture' or in this case illustration with the reality trick and there is something quite satisfying about this that I cannot quite explain. It might be the connection between the past and present is made graphically clear or it might just be the feeling of completing a small visual task.

The geology tour took me back to the UFO junction of yesterday and once again there was a complicated description that you needed to be somewhat close to already for it to make much sense. Like the ancient stones, this tour would have been better with a live guide as the guide would have had to communicate in a way that the people following the tour could understand. I remember, for example, my Geography A level field trip to the Yorkshire Dales and while there were limestone pavements and all that, it was intelligible as our teacher knew only too well our not so advanced level. I remember that trip well also because we went to the Red Lion in Settle every night, but that's another story.

The one thing I will say in defence of the Geology Tour is that of all the tours I've taken so far around here, it has been the one that has taken me to the nicest places. Later in the evening I went to the pub here in Portesham and hung out with the locals and staff. They were a friendly bunch of people from a surprisingly wide spread of places: there was born and bred Portesham, South London, Romanian and Portuguese all siting a the bar getting on with it. I'm now done for this trip down to South Devon but will be returning in the Summer to prepare a tour of Littlebredy that will take place mid-September. I'll be happy to see more of this place and when it is a bit warmer and drier I suspect it will be easier to both spend time outside and get talking to people in the village. Right now it is somewhat in shut down mode but it will, I hope, like the nature surrounding it, blossom.