An Alternative Writing Retreat
Edinburgh is perhaps the most vertical of any major UK city. It has ups. It has downs. And sometimes the transitions between the two can be surprising and difficult to parse. As we navigate from place to place we might find ourselves tackling elegant staircases, perilously steep streets, or unexpected bridges…
Maps aren’t boring. Or, at least, they’re not boring enough for some people. The Royal Society for the Presevation of Boring Grid Squares is the largest organisation of individuals who dream of more boring maps, more blank grid squares, and a more featureless, relaxing world…
Take a ruler. Take a map of Wales. Draw a straight line from border to coast… then pack a bag and walk it. To anyone familiar with the brambly, moist, sometimes-rocky terrain of the Welsh countryside this might seem like an insane idea…
We believe that there are cameras everywhere, and that security is a ubiquitous presence. But how much of the security we see is actually real?
We’d arranged to meet in front of the Whitworth Art Gallery and head onto the baths from there. Being a time before mobiles, the plans had been made on landlines back at our respective houses – of course back then we didn’t call them landlines, we just called them phones…
There is a somewhat-sinister rumour that nobody has ever been allowed to die at Disneyland. We investigate the spectre of death within theme parks…
In 2006, the city broke ground on a brand new airport: Brandenburg Willy Brandt Airport. It was a project which would swiftly become a civil engineering nightmare…
We walked around the ragged, disputed edges of Heathrow Airport. From ancient coaching inns to robot cars on raised roads, here’s what we found…
When the bridge was built it was brilliant white, but now the cars have spat their soot and the rain has found the cracks in the paint to make it rusty and orange. They painted it 10 years after it was built, 20 years after, 30 and on and on until one year they painted it and the next day it looked grey and orange again and the council said they weren’t coming back for it…
One summer, my father took us, Rob and I, to the Orkney Islands, to see the Viking burial sites, Pictish and Neolithic ruins, and to do some fishing. I was still in primary school – year five, I think. The first evening we arrived, we watched three locals unload their catch from a small motorboat onto the boggy shore of the lake we were staying on…