Walking the M62

You rang, sir?

Researching my walk it's quickly become clear that the publicists of Leeds are keen to promote it as the most up-and-coming, the fastest growing city in the UK. Chapeltown residents may not quite see it this way, but Leeds is now the 'Knightsbridge of the North', destination Harvey Nichols. All this hype got me thinking that if I'm going to stay there a week on my travels then I ought to test-drive this Leeds lifestyle to see if it's all it's made out to be.

And so, before I could stop myself, today I booked myself a week in a luxury Leeds serviced apartment. Well, after slogging across East Yorkshire, meandering around Wakefield Europort and sleeping in pub rooms and Travelodges maybe I'll be ready for a little pampering.

About the Book and the Journey

We ran a pensioners' coach trip to Stratford last week. One of the travellers told me today, "It was lovely seeing Shakespeare's grave". Meanwhile I'm reading John Pemble in this week's LRB saying, 'Literary tourism is naff':

It means coach parties, blue plaques, monuments, the National Trust, Friends of this and that. It buys from Oxfam books like The Bronte Country, Dickens's London, With Hardy in Dorset, Literary Bypaths of Old England, The Land of Scott. Academic libraries don't cater for it, and academic critics have about as much regard for it as they have for Disney World or back numbers of Reader's Digest. It's been out of favour since at least the 1750s. ... Coleridge and the Romantics, then Henry James and Virginia Woolf, then the New Critics of the 1930s, followed by Barthes, Derrida and the deconstructionists, have scolded literary tourists. 'The author's dead!' they've told these vagrant supplicants again and again. 'So go home, sit still and read the works!'

I doubt that will convince our pensioners not to take off again, perhaps to Haworth next time, or Dove Cottage. Don't tell them, but I'm with John Pemble in his critique of 'soap, fudge and biscuit tin' tourism; but I'd still go for some literary tourism myself: the Laugharne trail is one I'd like to make. And my M62 walk might be regarded as a sort of aberrant Iain Sinclair homage.

Considering then that one-thirds of my journey will actually be static, sat at a table in a County Antrim tower, writing up the previous months' experiences, I was taken by an insight of Premble's regarding the root nature of literary tourism:

It's all about books and journeys, after all, and the Book and the Journey are powerful religious archetypes. But Christianity has traditionally been divided over which takes precedence. On the one hand, there's Catholic piety, which popularises the Journey over the Book; on the other, Protestant piety, which popularises the Book over the Journey. In the literary tourist, heading for a writer's birthplace with a biography in his luggage, it's easy to spot the Catholic pilgrim, led by hagiography to the shrine of a saint. And it's just as easy to spot the Protestant pilgrim, whose destination is Jerusalem, in the travel writer, who expounds the eucharistic mystery of place.

So ... two months pilgrimage, one month reintegrating with the word. I step out in a catholic spirit but seemingly cannot escape the clutches of my protestant heart.

Learning to listen, learning to see

James Attlee came to realise that to make a pilgrimage you don't have to travel that far. He began to sense that there'd be no more to discover by travelling great distances across the world on tourist routes than there would be by taking a closer look at the road on which he lived. That road is Cowley Road, Oxford, which winds away from The Plain roundabout near Magdalen Bridge, through the inner city area of East Oxford, and into the industrial suburb of Cowley.

Off the prescribed route for international visitors, nevertheless Attlee noticed that Cowley Road is lined with businesses from all around the world. Not where tourists are advised to spend time, Attlee noticed that this was a road full of variety and promise: from restaurants and sari shops to live music venues, centres of alternative medicine, various sorts of butchers, and a Russian supermarket, Cowley Road has a great deal to explore. So it dawned on him:

These words form part of the introduction to Attlee's book Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey, which describes his pilgrimage on the road where he lives.

Reading this today, and reflecting on my own journey to come, I decided to change the strapline on this website. It did read, In autumn 2007 I will walk the M62 motorway corridor, Hull back to Liverpool, in search of the True North of England. That was an impossibly inflated aim. Now it gives the reasons for my journey as being ... because I hope to learn to listen, because I hope to learn to see.

Sympathy and complexity

Good philosophy supporting my planned walk, this. The M62 is 105 miles long. I'm taking two months to walk it. That averages at 1.7 miles per day.

Hurst's epic 1909 walk - to plant acorns all the way from Manchester to the East Midlands - taught him a thing or two. Today Phil is starting out from Piccadilly to follow on Hurst's trail. He will be looking for Hurst’s oaks, planting some acorns himself, and revisiting the scenes of the various adventures and setbacks which Hurst described so vividly in his book. All of this research for a one-person show Phil's developing with New Perspectives Theatre Company, about oak trees, about England, about time and change, about walking and cars, about property and landscape, about attitudes and relationships to the natural world and to each other, about a search for how things are today through the binocular lenses of the past and the future.

I'm going to join Phil for a day after Easter, by which time he'll be somewhere outside Nottingham. And I'm sure it'll teach me a thing or two.

Sacrilising the city

I'm at my usual London blog-spot on Tottenham Court Road having just deposited a large cheque in the Cooperative Bank on Southampton Row. A generous bursary from Ecclesiastical Insurance towards my M62 venture. The friendly little awards ceremony and lunch took place in the Chapter House of St Paul's Cathedral and naturally, given that the whole nature of the project which Ecclesiastical are supporting is about urban walking, I journeyed there on foot from Euston.

Great read on the train journey down, Robert Bond's introduction to the work of London's great footsore literary fetishist Iain Sinclair. Whereas I came to Sinclair, like many people, through his mainstream London texts like Lights Out for the Territory and - especially - London Orbital, Bond reminds the reader that Sinclair is first (and possibly still foremost) an underground poet. I also found revealing something that to cleverer readers may be obvious - Bond's suggestion that Sinclair's poetic method of finding signs in the city where others only see stones, of making mystical connections between urban sites which others just could not link - this is a work of sacrilising the city. And I guess I hope my project can do a bit of that, too.

I sit now in the place where another great sacriliser of the city used to roam - William Blake, wanderer of the fields behind Tottenham Court Road, with whom Sinclair may be seen to have quite a bit in common. En-route to St Paul's my walk took me past Newgate, marked now by a plaque which made me momentarily wonder why it had gone and what had happened there at what was once, I guess, a pivotal passing-point into the city.

My quest to enjoy my free time in London led me to do some pilgrim searching - around some underground bookshops on the Sinclair trail and ending up at Bookmarks where I discovered Judy Cox's William Blake: The Scourge of Tyrants, a small book which 'cuts away all the romantic and reactionary drivel written about him, and reveals him as a prophet of liberation - political, artistic and sexual liberation.' [Paul Foot]. Blake can't be too easily placed among the ranks of those Sinclair calls the reforgotton, authors whose urban outpourings have been left outside the canon of London writing, because so much has been written about him, and more will come in this 250th anniversary year. But in attempting to re-member the whole Blake, to recover crucial aspects of the man which have nevertheless slipped from the canon, Cox's is a good and valuable project.

And in that book on Blake I find a reference to Newgate - site of the climax of the Gordon Riots in 1780 when Newgate Jail was burned and the prisoners freed. Blake was one of the ringleaders of this 'proletarian' attack on a major institution of the 'imperial ruling class', the first of its kind in London's history. I tremble now to think that in simply journeying from Newgate back to here (Holburn - High Holburn - St Giles, stopping only to gaze at the stock of Shervingtons the tobacconists) I may have retraced the steps of Blake on that fateful day, clothes scorched, smoke in his wild hair, revolution in his eyes.

I don't quite know what to do with that knowledge, nor do I quite see how it relates to present-day Newgate with its massive sites of international finance, nor contemporary Tottenham Court Road, its internet cafes and audio showrooms a buzzing global marketplace. Maybe these imperfect connections, made on foot, are an encouragement that other spirits are still at work in the city, that hidden, reforgotten works are still being made and though they will always be outside the canon, they are there to be discovered in the city's details.

To know the place for the first time

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Why spend my sabbatical in 2007 walking the M62? Eliot's verse offers one reason - travelling back home to Liverpool having spent two months slowly taking in the life and culture of Hull, Goole, Leeds, Halifax, Manchester, Warrington, and points inbetween, may just illuminate my thinking about my own context just in time for what should be a rich time of conversation, Capital of Culture year 2008.

The reason I've given my employers - the Church of England - and the grant-giving bodies I'm hoping will support me, is that my walk will be an investigation of An Urban Theology of Place in Northern England today. And that's certainly another part of it.

Readers of my other blog know that I have spent the past two-and-a-half years since arriving in Norris Green doing what I call parish walks in our area, sometimes alone and sometimes with others, recording my observations and reflections, inviting on- and offline dialogue with the various readers - practitioners of urban walking, former or current residents of our parish, psychogeographers, street performers, urban theologians, and friends trying to extract some sanity from this mad business I've made my own.

I have presented papers on this experience to the Urban Theology Unit, Sheffield, and groups of colleagues in Liverpool. In April 2005 I ran a week's retreat on Iona on the theme Healing Places. In 2006 my reflections led me into producing a series of talks / workshops on Reading the Everyday which variously ended up on mp3s from Greenbelt and as an article in Third Way.

So the M62 walk seemed a natural progression. The idea - to take two months walking back home from Hull roughly along the M62 corridor and to find people most days who will guide me on walks around their own area. They may be fellow-clerics, they may work in industry or commerce, they may be geographers, or psychogeographers or social historians or schoolchildren or journalists or bus drivers or artists. The idea is that through travelling and conversing with them I shall build up a rich picture of life along this route today. And then I'll spend a further month collating all these reflections into a publication of some sort.

So that's some way towards explaining why walk. But why walk the M62? Many people given the chance for three or four months away go somewhere exotic, you know like the Far East. But I've become increasingly convinced (helped by philosophers of travel like Alain de Botton) that the exotic is not a physical place but a state of mind. It's not where you go so much as your mental attitude which determines your perception of a place. That's how I can walk purposefully around the very ordinary streets of this Liverpool housing estate and find each time some new insight, new observation, new learning. And why the Far East of Humberside is as good a place as any, I reckon, to begin my exploration. Oh, all that plus the Bill Drummond thing:

I ... got out of Hull and on to the most alluring, powerful, even magical motorway on our lump of an island. Even saying its name fills me with a longing. The M62. The greatest motorway ever made. Chuck Berry can keep his Route 66. Kerouac his two-lane black top, Paul Simon his New Jersey Turnpike, Billy Bragg his A13. Give me the M62. Driving it east to west is always best, especially at the close of the day into the setting sun....