Geography and all that Jazz

On the hottest day of the year so far, I caught a train down (bargain thanks to my Network card) to King's Cross, and wandered along Euston Road to the BBC Broadcasting House. Had my usual West Cornwall Cornish pasty (wholemeal vegetable), and a swift half in a classic London corner pub. Over to queue and go through security, and met up with some geography chums. Once inside, it was deliciously cool with the air conditioning kicking in. Image of BBC Broadcasting House by Flickr User Hugovk and made available under Creative Commons Into the BBC Radio Theatre: art deco decoration. Laurie Taylor chaired the discussion. A recording of the BBC 4 show: THINKING ALLOWED 3 people on the panel: Professor Richard Sennett : sociologist from the LSE Professor Doreen Massey : Open University Geographer Will Self : author of 'Psychogeography' (blogged about that before) and 'Book of Dave' Some notes from the session - lasted about 80 minutes, which has to be edited down to around...

Be a Flaneur for the day... A flaneur is a word which you may not have heard before. To be honest it's a tad pretentious, but I've never knowingly been unpretentious, so here goes... It's someone who goes for a stroll through a city in order to 'experience' it. Been browsing the Canadian online SPACING magazine which has some interesting features, one of which is some psychogeography . There's also a great set of images showing a ROAD COLLAPSE .

Regular readers will know that I have mentioned Will Self and his Psychogeography column before. This is featured in the Satuday "Independent". A collection of the columns is due to be published in October, and can be preordered from AMAZON . Great Ralph Steadman cartoons too...

Good PsychoGeography column from Jura this week by Will Self.

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY Will Self is one of my favourite journalists and commentators. He often appears as a 'talking head' on Grumpy Old style programmes, and is also responsible for the PSYCHO GEOGRAPHY column in the Independent on Saturday, which always has something of interest. He wrote a great piece on Google Earth a good while back, and the column has spiky illustrations by the great Ralph Steadman. You can read past issues of the column by visiting THIS PAGE. I was struck when visiting Will's blog that his writing room also has a geographical air to it. There is a 360 degree view of his writing room and maps (and post it notes ) play a prominent part. This image taken from Will's blog of his writing room. ( If there is a problem with me reproducing this please get in touch, although the unrelenting sycophancy of the post would hopefully put you on my side ;) ) However, there is a dark side to all this geographical content: Will doesn't seem to have been too taken ...