In Between Connections...

Carole and I spent another successful and interesting day on Thursday doing the Ticket Exchange at stations around Langwith Whaley Thorns, a post about the day will appear soon!

Meanwhile, we have received a number of postcards from people we connected with from our last Ticket Exchange, many with fascinating and thoughtful comments on the experience of travel.

Film still

There is also a short film put together by Mac Canonymous which he filmed on our day around Whatstandwell - click here to see it.

Film still

Thanks to everybody who has taken part so far and especially those who have sent us a postcard!

Transitions - the Movie

If you are curious to know just what delayed Carole during the Transitions - South walk follow this link . The film was made during Walk 3 - South and explores transitions through domestic and industrial spaces, fields and woodlands, established routes and reclaimed pathways.

It features the Windmill Intervention that was created as part of the walking experience and the birdsong from within the ancient woods.

Along The Tracks

In between masses of paperwork and eBay listing, I've been watching this

Between the Lines - Railways in Fiction and Film on BBC iPlayer

"Novelist Andrew Martin presents a documentary examining how the train and the railways came to shape the work of writers and film-makers.

Lovers parting at the station, runaway carriages and secret assignations in confined compartments - railways have long been a staple of romance, mystery and period drama. But at the beginning of the railway age, locomotives were seen as frightening and unnatural. Wordsworth decried the destruction of the countryside, while Dickens wrote about locomotives as murderous brutes, bent on the destruction of mere humans. Hardly surprising, as he had been involved in a horrific railway accident himself.

Martin traces how trains gradually began to be accepted - Holmes and Watson were frequent passengers - until by the time of The Railway Children they were something to be loved, a symbol of innocence and Englishness. He shows how trains made for unforgettable cinema in The 39 Steps and Brief Encounter, and how when the railways fell out of favour after the 1950s, their plight was highlighted in the films of John Betjeman.

Finally, Martin asks whether, in the 21st century, Britain's railways can still stir and inspire artists. (R)"

We're certainly inspired! We'll be exploring a couple of stations in Derbyshire soon, but in the meantime, spurred on by railways and textiles, I've been playing on the V&A website - I uploaded the photo above to their Patchwork Pattern Maker and you can see the results here. Team of plucky volunteers anywhere to help me make it?

If you want to make your own pattern follow thislink

New commissions and a little Coalville history

Carole and I have both got ourselves new commissions!

I will be working on my Myth Maps project at Snibston Colliery in Coalville.  Carole will be working on a project for Leicestershire Museums, which she has called The Held in the Hand Hoard.  I'll let her tell you more about that herself.

I am particularly pleased with my Myth Maps project as it draws together a number of things I have been thinking about, things I have been blogging about here and it links with this project.

Leicester & Swannington rail ticket

A little history...

The colliery at Coalville, as I blogged before (see Preservation and Persistence), includes the wonderful historic railway track.  A line was put down by George and Robert Stephenson for the Leicester to Swannington Railway (L&S), one of the first of England's railways, opened in 1832 to bring coal from pits in west Leicestershire (Whitwick, Ibstock and Bagworth) to Leicester.

The Leicester & Swannington Rail Line

Whitwick Colliery, 1926

George Stephenson was known as the "father of railways", having built the first public railway using steam locomotion (the Stockton and Darlington Railway).  His son, Robert,  worked with his father and developed the famous "Rocket".  Robert was the engineer for the Swannington line and George opened the Snibston colliery the following year.

Midland Railway Station in Coalville, 1889

Sidings at Bardon Hill quarry

So the history of Snibston colliery and the railways are intertwined.  It was the success of the railways to speed up the transportation of coal that enabled the coal industry from west Leicestershire to thrive, which enabled the opening of the pit at Snibston.

Coalville East Station

Thanks to the Coalville Heritage Society website for these pictures.  Also, they have a wonderful sound archive of Coalville dialects, called Covill Tork - click on the link if you want to find out what the following mean (and make sure you have your speakers on!):

Woreeawreet?
Ayoopmissusenthemassteeratom?

Covill Tork 

the eutechnical and chance-maps

I've taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography....As Emile Durkheim observed, a society's space-time perceptions are a function of its social rhythm and its territory. So, by walking to the meeting I have disrupted it just as surely as if I'd appeared stark naked with a peacock's tail fanning out from my buttocks while mouthing Symbolist poetry.

So wrote Will Self in his psychogeography column.

Image from The Journey public art project with Highfields School, Jo Dacombe

I have been revisiting his writing and lectures, and am rather taken with what he terms "Eutechnical" modes of travel - that is, the experience of travel anywhere before the machine took over (in about 1842, he says, when Stevenson's Rocket changed everything), which was a physical, bodily experience - in other words, walking.  Your body felt the physical effort of travelling, your muscles told you how far you had gone and if it had been uphill... in Self's view our non-eutechnical era of mechanised transport has divorced us from the physical experience of travelling.

...and so to our project, Undiscovered Networks.  What Carole and I are attempting to do is a weird fusion of the "derive" or "drift" of the French Situationists with a pre-mapped route of the railway:  but by selecting random places on the network, we are subverting the planned and scheduled function of the railway and trying to find an element of chance within it.  In the same way we are putting together two opposing notions:  the mechanised travel of the railway, which dissolves the awareness of distance travelled by doing it so quickly, but at the same time we are trying to make the experience an eotechnical or psychogeographic one, being more physically aware of what the experience of train travel will be and what will we find once we get to our randomly selected destinations....

The undiscovered element of the project is to see how all these opposing concepts will play out as we travel around and interact with places and their people.

Image from Thinkspace project, Kingswood, Jo Dacombe

...does anybody remember the game Dungeons and Dragons?  I think I was about 13 or 14 when it was a sudden craze, so sometime in the mid 80's.  The craze was mostly driven by the fantasy element - you had to imagine yourself as an elfin or dwarf-like character with special magical powers... however it wasn't the fantasy element that fascinated me.  It was the maps.

You had to travel through an imaginary world and map it as you went along.  This world only existed in your head and was built by the shake of a dice - each time you travelled north, south, east or west, you shook the dice to determine what the next piece of terrain would look like.  I remember spending hours drawing out these maps bit by bit, imagining the terrain, what I could see on each horizon, how to decide which way to travel next.  There was even an instance where if you shook a certain number the game would instruct that you had become disorientated and you would find the map you had drawn was wrong and you had to redraw it.

Map of a walk onto unmapped land, Paths of Desire project, Priors Hall, Jo Dacombe

This is what fascinated me about the game when I was 14, the exploration and discovery, the randomness of it... and that is what I still like about walking through unknown places and looking at maps of undiscovered sites.

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer."

"Railway termini... are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return."

E M Forster, Howards End, 1910