An Alternative Writing Retreat
Walsall railway station doesn’t really exist. I was once mesmerised by the dark polished floor in the vast booking hall, and in awe of its wrought-iron canopy. Now whatever’s left has been swallowed inside a shopping centre named Saddlers as commemoration of a vanished industry. The usual shops – Poundland, Claire’s Accessories, a Costa Coffee…
Half an inch from the south shore, a line is cast from nowhere, black dots, black dashes, almost north, almost parallel to the line of the Humber Bridge, red on green, half an inch to the left. The bridge is cut off by the ordnance grid. The dots and dashes float in a pale blue square…
A Google search for “Voldemort’s grave” will return more than 100,000 results, most of them pointing to Greyfriars Kirkyard – a modest graveyard in the middle of Edinburgh, best known as the final resting place of Greyfriars Bobby…
There are 24-hour gyms open around the clock in most cities and towns in the UK. Here we examine the daily rhythms of these strange, liminal spaces…
It’s so easy to gaze disparagingly, even mournfully, on the site of an LPG tank in a garden. Easy to consider it misplaced, miscreant, a boil on the face of a view. An objection at a local planning meeting to its placement was met with a wry smile…
I’d spent too many hours at the wheel, racing the December dusk to get to our destination before darkness fell. Too many hours scrutinising every junction, traffic lane and sign, of passing through new places and barely seeing them…
“Crystal Palace Park still carries the name of something that is no longer there, a building of plate glass and iron from the high Victorian age…”
Journalist Mackenzie Weinger travels in the footsteps of Thomas Hardy, through the partly real, partly dream-country that inspired his fiction…
“I’ve kept on being aware of sky since I lived in Norfolk. Up at Ivinghoe Beacon sky is paramount. Everything around you bleeds into it…”
Gaynor Jones participated in the Alton Towers Residency in April 2019. We spoke to her about making the complex simple, Alton Towers memories, and how fear becomes creativity.