Urban Walks 2011/2012
The Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) hosts a programme of Urban Walks designed to expand on Navigating Urban Life lectures for MA students. While students taking Wolrd Cultures and Urban Life and Photography and Urban Cultures as well as those taking Navigating Urban Life as an option would benefit most from these walks. All MA students are cordially invited to join us. Our thinking is that Urban Sociology is more effectively done walking around urban environments than just in the classroom/library. You are strongly encouraged to come along and bring your cameras.PARIS VISITS
PARIS FIELD TRIP SUMMER 2012
Introduction to Paris and some of its Photographers
Date: Saturday 12th May 2012 Time: 11.00 am -1.00 pm
By Peter Coles, Visiting Fellow, CUCR
Please remember to contact Peter Coles direct if you wish to be added to the list we already have.
For those attending the Paris fieldtrip, this introduction will present Paris as seen through the lens of some of the great photographers who have lived and worked in the city since the very earliest days of photography in the 1890s. These include Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Kertesz, Lartigue, Boubat, Ronis, Horvat, and Koudelka. More recently, William Egglestone and Ralph Gibson have also photographed the city.
There will also be an overview of the geography and social history of Paris, which has distinct areas where concentrations of different waves of migrants have settled or where certain trades, crafts and industries are carried out, much as they have been for a century or more. Despite being a showcase for the French love of technology and modernity, Paris is also conservative, slow-moving and traditional, making for striking juxtapositions and surprises.
See the work of some of the photographers mentioned above at:
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/
If you can find it (it's out of print), try to read Paris Dreambook by Lawrence Osborne (1990), Bloomsbury Publishing. There are a few remaindered copies on Amazon and Abe Books selling for next to nothing.
URBAN WALKS PARIS
Date: Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th May 2012
led by Peter Coles, with Paul Halliday and Caroline Knowles
These two walks are not typical tourist/cultural walks. They are an opportunity to explore, with someone who has lived and worked in Paris for
nearly 20 years, the fascinating, sometimes surprising, traces that successive waves of urban development and migration have and are still
leaving on the city. They also attempt to provide some historical, geographical, architectural and social keys to help ‘decode’ the city.
Meeting place: Saturday 19 May 9.00 am. – Place des Abbesses (exit of Metro), 18th Arrondissement.
Meeting place: Sunday 20 May. 9.00 am. Outside McDonalds, corner of rue Buffon and Boulevard de l’Hopital. Metro Gare d’Austerlitz (5th arronidissement) next to Jardin des Plantes.
Parisians can become very attached to their neighbourhoods (quartiers). So much so that the city is often experienced as a string of islands arranged in a snail-shell spiral, formed by the twenty ‘arrondissements’, or administrative districts. Yet the compactness of the city within the
‘péripherique’ (ring road) invites the curious explorer to wander on foot, exploring the quality of the light, sounds and smells, the
juxtapositions of old and new, wealth and poverty, wide pavements and café terraces, technocratic innovations that come and go – and pronounced variations in ethnic mix, with shops, restaurants, markets and places of worship catering for communities as far apart as South-east Asia, North and West Africa, as well as Sephardic Jews from Tunisia... And, across the péripherique, the ‘banlieus’ (suburbs), with their high-rise social housing (cités), as well as their sedate detached houses, chateaux, parks and woodlands…
Getting there and where to stay
You will responsible for making your own travel and accommodation arrangements. Cheap Eurostar train bookings can be made up to 4 months
before the travel date.
www.eurostar.com
There are many offers of shared apartments on a number of websites, such
as: http://www.all-paris-apartments.com/en/paris-apartments/Sacre-Coeur/
Please Note: We anticipate a high level of demand for this urban fieldtrip
(last year over 20 people attended) and we would suggest that you confirm
your attendance with workshop leader Peter Coles as early as possible. If
you would like to join these walks, and for more information, please
contact the postgraduate Secretary, Sheila Robinson s.robinson@gold.ac.uk
or Peter Coles at p.coles@gold.ac.uk
Woolwich Walk – “Each for All and All for Each?"
Alison Rooke Date/Time: 26th November 3pmMeeting point: The café at the Royal Arsenal Firepower Museum at the Woolwich Arsenal
‘The act of walking is an urban affair, it tells us about cities, the way they are shaped and formed, attitudes to the pedestrian’ (Michel de Certeau). The purpose of this walk is to explore the traces of the past and future in Woolwich and consider the spatial realisation of social differences. This walk works with sessions on urban regeneration, cities with troubles pasts and imagining the creative city. Woolwich is an area where Britain’s industrial and imperial heritage are in evidence, whilst the area continues to go through major socio-economic and spatial changes through the planning imaginary that is the ‘Thames Gateway’.
We will begin at the Royal Arsenal Firepower Museum located at the Woolwich Arsenal (http://www.firepower.org.uk/). The Royal Woolwich Dockyard is a site which speaks of Britain’s imperial and industrial past. The changing fortunes of the Arsenal, which at its peak employed 100,000 workers, are reflected in the local area. Woolwich was once the birthplace of workers radicalism, trade unions and co-operative societies which placed the Arsenal at the forefront of a social revolution. In Powis Street you can see what is left of the original Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society building with its motto “Each for All and All for Each", carved into the front of the building. Established in 1872 to feed the workers of the Arsenal the co-operative Society ( todays Co-op’ supermarket) the society's activities expanded from food retail into a huge range of commercial, social & political activities including workers housing, libraries, women’s guilds, choirs and libraries. The area suffered decline after the closure of the Arsenal in 1967. Today Woolwich is going through a period of development. The Arsenal site which has been transformed into a mixed use development by Berkeley Homes with its residents' only gym, a Couture Food Hall, and a 24-hour concierge facility. Gated communities replace military boundaries. If you have time you may want to cross the river on the free Woolwich ferry (which has
been running since the 1880s) or alternatively take the Woolwich foot tunnel. An audio memory walk of the south London area is available on here.
http://www.memoryscape.org.uk The walk is narrated by the people who used to work in the docks and wharfs in London. Their stories are taken from a unique collection of 200 interviews gathered when the docks fell into disuse, which is now stored at the Museum in Docklands.
A link to the archive of George Plember who photographer working class life in Woolwich and nearby Thamesmead in the 1970s.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/gallery/2008/may/14/communities?picture=334096320
And a link to the northern bank of the river
http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/2008/07/nil-scrap-value-silvertown.asp
Suggested Reading: Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography. Chapters 57, 58, 59 on London’s Rivers, Vintage, London, 2001.
Directions
British rail trains to Woolwich run regularly from London Bridge. The journey takes about 40 minutes. You can also take the DLR from Bank and all stops in between (recommended if you want to get an idea of the scale of development in East London). You can get a 53 bus from New Cross. Alternatively, you can experience the grandeur of the river, take the Thames Clipper boat and alight at the Arsenal.
This walk is open to everybody, If you wish to join Alison on this walk please email her CUCR
The 2012 Olympic Development site and the Lea Valley
Peter ColesDate/time: Friday 12th November 2010. 10.00 a.m
Meeting point: Stratford station (DLR, Overground, Jubilee, Central) main entrance / ticket office
Duration: About 2 hours
We will still do the walk if it is raining, so please anticipate by wearing good footwear and a light raincoat or anorak etc. Bring a (charged) camera and (if you use it…) film. A notebook and/or binoculars could also be useful. This walk works with sessions on poverty and disadvantage, urban regeneration and whose city? Construction work on the 2012 Olympics has already transformed much of the area around Stratford and Hackney Wick. Victorian buildings have been flattened. The earthworks are busy with a frenzy of lorries and bulldozers. The air rings with the clang of metal piles being driven into the ground. Some recreational spaces, thoroughfares and allotments have been taken over or closed to the public. A high security fence skirts all public walkways near the
site. Vestiges of the area’s 19th- - 20th century industrial past survive, sometimes metamorphosed into living spaces, or leisure facilities, sometimes as derelict buildings. The River Lea and its navigable canals criss-cross the area. Also cutting across part of the Olympic site is the Greenway, a pubic footpath, flanked by wild vegetation, giving crane-shot views of the construction site, otherwise off-limits to the public and even, to a large extent,
the media.
The walk will be centred on the Greenway, first taking it east, then looping south and back up to rejoin it and carry on west to the Lee Navigation. The walk will then follow the Lee north to Hackney Wick (one stop on the overground from Straford). There is a café in Hackney Wick where we can have a hot drink and/or lunch and discuss the walk. The walk provides an experience of an area of London undergoing massive, and rapid change. The old and the new form odd bedfellows. During the transformation, the area is heavily demarcated with barriers, fences and signs. People, as well as Nature, are resisting
these barriers, or attempting to reclaim them with their own imprints. You will be encouraged to explore at your own pace, taking any detours and short-cuts you want. We will then meet up again at a pre-arranged time. You will be expected to collect at least one significant image from the walk, whether visual, auditory, olfactory, natural, or a found object, that expresses, for you the atmosphere of transition in this part of London.
Suggested reading:
Iain Sinclair: The Olympics Scam London Review of Books, 19 June 2008
Available online at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n12/iain-sinclair/the-olympics-scam
This walk is open to everybody, If you wish to join Peter on this walk please email him Peter Coles
The Acquisition of Local Taste
Alex Rhys Taylor
Date/Time: 15th October 2010Meeting Point: Monument Station
Finish point: Shanghai Dim Sum Restaurant, Dalston
Distance: 3.75miles
Duration: 2.5hrs-3hrs
The tastes of London’s inhabitants reflect the city’s social history and contemporary life. This walk traces the relationship between London and the food that Londoners eat, and have eaten. It starts at the Thames, which was central to feeding the city, both economically and calorically from the birth of Roman Londinium until the 19th century. It moves on northward, tracing the development of tastes in industrial London and foods that sustained the industrial growth through the 19th century, stopping to sample some of the era’s more popular cuisine. From there it heads further north, tracing the importance food in both the social and economic life of twentieth century migrants into East London. Moving further north through a street market, the walk finishes with a twenty-first century/second century afternoon tea, in what was once an old East End eel bar, now a dim-sum restaurant.
This walk is open to everybody, If you wish to join Alex on this walk please email him Alex Rhys Taylor.