Down the track
Under the railway arches of London Bridge station, during the process of the currently ongoing reconstruction programme, a fine, red bricked, cross-shaped vaulted ceiling was uncovered – reminiscent of the vast sixth-century underground Basilica Cisterns in Istanbul, where marble columns support a roof of round bricked arches. This, in a disaster of postmodern rationale was quickly masked with a shiny plastic covering and then cemented over in a crude white ‘wood grain’ finish (possibly an intertextual reference to the exterior of the South Bank Centre up the road?).
Trees, threatened by creeping urbanisation, are bound inextricably to human culture and green infrastructure is as important as broadband. Aerial analysis by Greenspace Information for Greater London found that 49.5 per cent of London is covered by water or vegetation and 22 per cent by trees or shrubs. Half of its front gardens are paved over but if every Londoner would green 1 square metre of land, London could be transformed into a national park.
The National Park City Foundation has estimated that outside the parks, nearly 50% of London is green: in its 30,000 allotments, 3 million gardens, 8.4 million trees and 14,000 species of wildlife. In June 2017, the ‘guerrilla geographer’ Daniel Raven-Ellison drew attention to all the green in a campaign to attract private funding and the backing from London’s 649 wards to preserve London’s green spaces. Starting in Enfield and moving anti-clockwise and returning to his home every evening, he walked anti-clockwise across its 32 boroughs, crossing the Thames a dozen times in a diminishing spiral of 348 miles.
In On Foot: A History of Walking (2004), Joseph Amato reflects that cities were created by walking. For hundreds of years until the end of the nineteenth century it was the most efficient way to travel distances of up to six kilometres; surfaces were made smoother and clogs were replaced with shoes more suitable for walking on cement pavements. Roads, conurbations, architecture, urban design, culture and social class have walking (or ‘human upright mobility’) at their centre in terms of their production and development. At the end of the nineteenth century, the development of transport infrastructures replaced walking short distances (for the middle-class) and put more emphasis on different kinds of mobilities.
The anthropologist Tim Ingold has made a study of lines and asserts that ‘to live, one must put out a line and in a life, all these lines tangle together.’ We generate lines wherever we go and through threads and traces, life is lived along paths. Reflecting on the path he followed in writing Lines: A Brief History (2016) he draws a parallel with fungi as webs of linear fibres which radiate in all directions and permeate their environments.
To think in terms of lines is to form connections with philosophy, sociology, art and architecture. In a series of meditations on life, the ground, weather and walking, and the significance of knots and the way things join together, Ingold proposes ‘linealogy’ as a process of weaving. He notes how his book has made connections with those who identify with his proposed linealogies across disciplines such as artists, architects, designers, musicians, linguists, choreographers and poets.
Like Lara Feigel, Ingold plays the cello and has observed how his work on lines has made particular connections with cellist readers. Perhaps, he says, it is the way in which the player ‘pulls’ a melody as if it were a line, or the movement of the bow back and forth across the strings is a parallel with spinning and weaving, like a shuttle across a loom, or in the way the fingerboard can be considered a landscape where the player has to find their way.
Further links:
www.nationalparkcity.londonRavenellison.com
The Guardian.com- books blog-The-Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald - Walking Through History
