By Bike

The situationist Guy Debord defined psychogeography as  “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.”  The medium was the message, as Marshal McLuhan suggested.  The city was a city because it was a city.    Its shape and its style came well before its use as an economic and social hub. 

Will Self had psychogeography as walking to New York from London, an exercise in discovering the personality of place itself.  Peter Ackroyd, says Self, “practises a ‘phrenology’ of London.  He feels up the bumps of the city and so defines its character and proclivities.”  Nick Papadimitriou looks for a place’s deep topography, hunting the minute detail of selected locales.  The label bends and moves.  It defines, I suggest, an alternative way of proceeding through space.  Follow the grid lines.  Listen to the noise the streets make.  Walk every road beginning with A.  Interview people wearing hats.  Use ancient maps to navigate the present.  Look below the surface and track what remains of the past.  Every place has a past.  Everywhere is rich in history.  Every local has a memory.  Tapping it is the prime psychogeographical act.

Saturday’s cycle tour (on which there are still places – book now – and if this Saturday is no good then we repeat the tour the following Saturday, the 29^th) will have psychogeographic elements.  But don’t let that worry you. We’ll cycle and stop and hear a bit about where and what we are.

I’ll read Mewn/Mas – a poem about what’s in Cardiff fashion and what’s not.  I’ll do this at the start outside Bute Town History and Arts Centre at the bottom of Bute Street.  The Docks.  Now the Bay.  Everyone knows it as that.  We’ll cycle around County Hall – why is this place here with its pagoda style?  What did its arrival herald?  We’ll go up through Cardiff’s little Venice, along the development-fronted feeder following streets few Cardiffians know exist.  We’ll visit the magic roundabout that displays Pierre Vivant’s Landmark 1992, a wonderful assemblage of traffic signs that somehow sums up just how most of us feel about roads and what they do.

We’ll pass the Vulcan, or where it once stood, with the memory of its original use mixed with the memory of the long campaign to save it from being pulled down.   Under Churchill Way lies more of the feeder.  Can we see it?  There is a place.

At the psychic centre of Cardiff, just a little north of Kingsway, the ley lines cross and the past breaches the present.  On some dark nights there are sparks and ghosts.  We’ll stop and savour before crossing through the Park to view lost rivers, shifted bridges and gates that go nowhere.

Down Westgate Street where the Taff once flowed are the memories of quays and cannons and eventually at the back of the Prince of Wales of the glory that was once St Mary’s Church.  Near here were canals and foundries and ship builders.  Their memory remains in the sculpture outside the new central library.  I have a poem on the wall here.  I’ll air it to finish.

Join us.  The Hidden Delta – Estuary Cardiff You Didn’t know Existed.  Real Cardiff by Bike in the company of author Peter Finch.   Dates and price: 22nd June and 29th June. £12 for the tour, bike hire £3 extra. Limited places.

This tour starts at 14:00 from the Coal Exchange and ends at 16:30 at the cycle festival hub in the Royal Arcade off St Mary Street.  More details here

Following The Grid Line

As I went up through Llandaf with an 1880 Ordnance Survey map of the district in my hand I wondered just what I’d find. Would the totality have changed? Would the old streets shown from a hundred and twenty years ago have vanished into the dust to be replaced by new structures, terraces, parking places, curry houses and shops? Not a bit. The grid was identical, it was just the detail that had morphed. How much had we added here in a century? Not as much as you’d think. I wrote what I discovered down.

This act, artificial, contrived, even faintly ridiculous, was one of psychogeography. I discovered this later when the book of which my Llandaf piece formed part was published. Real Cardiff. ‘Finch is clearly a flaneur, suggested one reviewer. ‘A situationist,’ remarked another. ‘A psychogeographer. One who lets the built environment inform his emotions, who has discovered new ways for the pedestrian to explore the city, someone who lets go and ambles, a literary explorer of maps.’ So that’s what I was. Amazing.

Will Self, I discovered, had for years authored a column called Psychogeography for The Independent. In it he wrote of his experiences walking to New York, using trains to reach sales conferences, living in an empty high rise on Merseyside. He was the embodiment of what turned out to be a growing popular movement of artists and activists who had for years been using such conceits to propel themselves across the planet.

There were those who used numbers, throwing dice to define a grid point and then seeing who could get there first. Others followed the grid lines themselves as they bisected the landscape. Could the line be walked? When it reached buildings could you go through them, into the window, through the door, over the roof?

Iain Sinclair, author of one of the seminal reworkings of the urban landscape, Lights Out The Territory walked the M25, staying within 300 meters of the roadway, and recorded his experiences. What was there, in this liminal landscape? Abandoned factories, mental asylums, storage tanks, waste.

My own psychogeographic amblings took me along the entire Cardiff route of the Glamorgan Canal. Gone for decades. Who knew where it had run? With photographer John Briggs I tracked the long vanished Roath Branch railway from Gabalfa into Cardiff Docks. In a single day I tried to climb as many of Cardiff’s tall buildings as I could. I visited every street named after a battle, planet or element. I drank in all the pubs of Canton.

This last episode took some doing and, I have to admit, is still incomplete. Progress is slow. The pubs are closing too fast. Check Seren’s Real series for progress.

#199

Still Real Afters All These Years

It had been a good night at Chapter, proving that the cultural epicentre of the city hadn’t yet completely shifted to Roath. The night before I’d been at Market House, the art centre’s extension next door, a mess of studios, work rooms, offices for small arts companies, designers, publishers, dancers. I’d been talking up the capital, giving the assembled my take on what makes this great place tick, how it shines and shimmers, how it had been in its dirty past, how its Welshness works, how it fits into Wales, a post-industrial coal valley capital, growing ever larger over the hills that stand behind it, recovering land from the mass of tidal bog to its south.

“I bought your Real Cardiff when I first came here,” says the Turkish girl, smiling. “I thought it might tell me where I was”. I tell them about the lost wells of Penylan and the one with the shape of Christ’s knee on the rim. I tell them about the Butes being like Bill Gates and buying out anything that sprang up in opposition. The austere second Marquis with his docks and his visions. The Catholic third with his Victorian Disneyworld at Cardiff’s heart. I talk about the rivers, the Tan, the Whitebrook, the Canna, the Wedal, which we no longer have. We sup Cabernet Sauvignon and sporadically nibble at the crisps brought by the organiser. Some of the listeners buy books.

For many years I came here to the New Welsh Review offices, presided over, then, by the late Robin Reeves. Robin was a green-leaning socialist nationalist. Voice of understanding. Knew the world’s shape. He ploughed a liberal furrow with his literary magazine, NWR. You got a free mug if you subscribed. On these were the faces of Idris Davies and R.S. Mug collectors signed up and then threw the magazine away. The magazine itself has now moved to Aberystwyth and its former offices are occupied by men with drawing boards and computers and tubes of paint. Out of the window I can see early evening Market Road revellers, setting off for the pubs of Cowbridge Road – the Corporation, the Ivor Davies, the Kings Castle, the Admiral Napier. Places full of shine and light.

It has always been like this in West Cardiff. Before the Arts Centre came to Chapter in 1971 the buildings were Cantonian High School. Before that the space was used by the monthly Canton cattle market which ran from the Police Station to Carmarthen Street. Sheep and cattle pens, stables, slaughter house, meat market, manure, dust.

But today culture shines. Blown Magazine is based here and the theatre is the venue for John William’s In Chapters performances. NWR under its new editor Gwen Davies might even launch in the bar. Watch this space.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #192

The Real Black Book

Launching a book is not like launching a ship. Not quite. Drink is involved in both cases, certainly. With the ship the bottle gets smashed over the bows. With a book the bottle’s contents get drunk. But there are similarities. Books, like ships, can be slow moving when they start and fine words get said as they slide down the ramp. Then everyone cheers and the builder relaxes. Just a bit.

So too with Real Cardiff. I’ve been on the circuit recently doing my best to promote. This has involved standing up in crowded shops, reading sections to milling crowds, visiting hotels and talking to assembled audiences of the great and the good, signing copies in hallways, on small tables, and in the street. Always smiling. Never stop.

At the Park Hotel big launch someone wanted to know if the HMS Tonypandy I referred to in the section on nuclear submarines visiting Cardiff actually existed. Jonathan Adams had already back-projected a shot of a WW2 sub with the name Tonypandy photoshopped onto its side so I said yes. And if it never existed then it should. Although Wales’s status as a nuclear free zone might mitigate against that.

At the Waterloo Gardens Teashop, recently and somewhat perversely voted Britain’s best coffee shop, I read the section that dealt with Cardiff’s thespian past. I told of Ray Smith and Ray Handy and how it once was with actors and directors and the National Theatre that has taken thirty years to arrive. I told also of Dedwydd Jones’s 1985 Black Book on the Welsh Theatre, a diatribe against state subsidy (or non-subsidy) and the way the establishment had allegedly held the whole theatrical world back. It was a ghost from a long past.

Grahame Davies, an enthusiastic Real Cardiff supporter (and author of the well received Real Wrexham) then went home to find an envelope waiting for him. Inside was a copy of that same 1985 Black Book, no letter, no explanation. Photos of Roger Tomlinson, Welsh Arts Council drama department head inside. The tired twenty-five year old arguments featuring a cast of characters largely now moved on to other pastures restated as if they were of today. Similar envelopes had apparently been sent to other literary and theatre figures across the country.

In Real Cardiff Three I discuss the fracture in time that runs right across the Oval Basin where Torchwood have their base. Fiction, of course. But seeing Dedwydd’s book winging through the mails again I’m now not so sure.

Back on the launch trail I sell four copies of the shrink-wrapped sets of the reprinted trilogy and sign another shed of the new vol. Will there be a fourth, someone asks? Maybe. Let’s see how this one shapes up first.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 30th January, 2010

Walking The Streets In Hope

I’ve been walking the streets again. Taking literature to the people. A thing which in my youth was an ideal but which the years have bashed about it. Here I am doing it again. The plan is to leaflet a whole district with invitations to the launches for my latest book. Get the news out there to those who normally hide when they hear the word culture. To those who haven’t read anything at all since they went to school. Who do you read, you ask, and like many a politician, they scrabble around in the depths of memory and then come out with it. George Orwell, they say. You can’t beat 1984.

Indeed not.

My leaflets are made of card to aid letterbox stuffing, and full colour to catch the eye. At the second house I visit I get chased up the path by a furious neighbour, ripping my card into shreds. Keep your rubbish, he shouts, scattering the thing across the road. There was a notice on his door which read “If you put another menu through this door I will never eat at your restaurant again” and above that a sign saying “No Junk Mail”. I’d ignored that. Same thing happened to me when decades ago I’d gone by delivering labour party leaflets. You are the cause of all my troubles, one large and tattooed householder had complained. People seem to enjoy ripping things up.

A few houses have sensible wide letterboxes set at hand height and a pushover to use. Most, however, have devices installed simply to make deliveries as complicated as they can be. I understand now why Postmen get so upset. The world has become paranoid about drafts. They don’t fear junk, they are afraid of cold air. Behind the letterboxes lie thickets of draft preventing brushes, deep-weave curtains, cloth flaps, springs, boxes, cages, bags. Post only gets delivered if you hammer it through. Or leave it on the mat.

On my afternoon’s round trip I counted eighteen hand-scrawled “the bell doesn’t work - knock loudly” notices, twenty-eight “we do nothing at this door unless you show us your birth certificate” printed commands issued by the Boy Scouts and at least ten “do not park in front of my house” signs masquerading as official dictates by having the words “Polite Notice” done in South Wales Police blue along the top.

The leaflets I was distributing promoted my latest book of psychogeography, Real Cardiff #3. The experience acquired has given me more than enough material for a whole chapter in Real Cardiff #4.

Will this happen? Seren, my publishers, have announced that number three is the last. But now I’ve opened a file for number four on my computer. Let’s see how that fills.

An earlier version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 2nd January, 2010

Real As It Can Get

I’m in the real city again. Water south, hills north. A city of rhomboid sprawl. Where else would I be? I’m standing on the B4487 in bright early-morning sunlight. Traffic low. Birds in inner-city twitter. This was the Via Julia Maritima once, the paved Roman route west. A thousand years on it was the stage coach route to London. Full of ruts and mud. Then it was the hard-topped A48, when A roads meant something. Newport Road when I was a kid. Still is. New arrivals are walking down it now. The endless displaced. Heading up beyond Roath Court for the Refugee Council at Phoenix House. Fewer now that the recession has hit. The Polish Shop is having a hard time. The Czech version has already closed.

We always wondered why in Cardiff there was so much new housing. Apartments rising like wheat right across the boom city. Concrete mixers. Deliveries of brick. Tower cranes like locusts. Men in hard hats in every bar. What drew them to the capital? What were we doing that made them come? Nothing, it turns out. Investors are blind. Invest where walls rise and your money will climb in step. No need to sell what you’ve built. Let the vacant towers glitter. Let their apartments stand empty, value accumulating as prices soar. Manage a let if a visitor asks. Sell one to an executive needing a town centre toehold. Rooms with a water view for singles. Wasp territory. Audi in the undercroft. Wine in the rack. Families not needed. No toy cupboards. No gardens. No schools.

Now that boom has bust these investments stand barren. For Sale. To Let. Those not yet completed stay so. Across the city are half-finished metal frames, surrounded by fencing, waiting for the interest rates to rise once again. Build has stopped. Apart from the mega projects like St David’s 2, the new Ninian Park and the scatter of enterprise across the sports village on the Ferry Road. On the hoarding at the north end of St David’s 2 are graffitied the words More Yuppie Flats Please. Word on the street is that the blocks inside will stand largely empty. Shells. Unfixed, unfinished walls. A city waiting for the bankers to take control once more.

There have been many visions for this place in which Cardiffians live. Plans for the port to take ocean liners. For the rich to sail for America from Tiger Bay rather than Southampton. Passengers would arrive by Great Western. There would have been grand hotels, piers and custom sheds and deep-water berths, but the Severn’s giant tidefall defeated them all. Now the city has changed again. Enormously. You can see what I’ve made of it in Real Cardiff – The Changing City, out from Seren on the 26th November, 2009.

Visit the web site: http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/realcardiff3in.htm or

view the photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterfinch/sets/72157622697245780/

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 14th November, 2009

The Real Cardiff Trilogy

All three of the Real Cardiff volumes in one shrinkwrap - newly updated and reprinted - and for this offer signed too. £25 a shot rather than the usual £30. The perfect Christmas present.

Order from your bookseller, direct from Seren or turn up at the launch to get yours in person. Thursday 26th November, 2009 at the Parc Thistle Hotel, Park Place, Cardiff - 6.30 pm - all welcome. Peter Finch will be in conversation with the Wales Millennium Centre architect Jonathan Adams. Wine and talk.

Real Cardiff Three - view the photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterfinch/sets/72157622697245780/

Real Cardiff Rolls On

Real Wales is duly launched and the eyes shift back to Real Cardiff Three, the book for next year that needs to be researched and written now. Is there any of the city left that it is not covered by Vol One and Vol Two? You bet there is. As much as you want.

Here's a small slice from Library, a recently completed section:

Titles the library rarely lends:

A History of Minor Roads in Wales.
A Guide to the Sub-Post Offices of the British Isles.
The Joy of Chickens
The Book of Marmalade
Highlights In The History of Concrete
Bombproof Your Horse
Weeds In A Changing World
How To Avoid Huge Ships
Did Lewis Carroll Visit Llanrumney?
Dining Posture In Ancient Roath
Cheese Problems Solved
Wanted[i]


[i] Wanted For Writing Poetry – Peter Finch, Second Aeon, 1966. His first book.

Orders not taken yet. Read Real Wales (Seren Books, £9.99 but cheaper on Amazon) first.