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Brickopolis: under Manchester
Manchester walks offer an occasional tour titled ‘Underground Manchester’. From my past experiences in London, these tours promise much in their titles but usually deliver very little as regard actual...
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The Vienna sewers
1. The river Wien, Vienna The prevailing image of Vienna is of a city of pleasure: the opera, waltzes, refined luxury etc. Yet, like all modern cities, it has an underside – real underground spaces...
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Sketching, photography and the tourist gaze
Sketch of buildings at Freeland, Oxfordshire, 2004 ‘Today everything exists to end in a photograph’ (Susan Sontag) Writing in 1979, Sontag could never have anticipated the explosion of photography that...
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Tallinn,Tarkovsky and Stalker
1. The Flora chemical factory with the old city of Tallinn behind Stalker, released in 1979, is a Russian science fiction film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It’s an enigmatic film, almost devoid of...
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Seeing and being seen: seaside balconies
Iron balconies proliferated in the Georgian period, when large estates of terraced housing were laid out in newly developed suburbs of cities and towns across the country. The uniformity of these...
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A seaside icon: the Blackpool Tower
1. The Blackpool Tower in 2011 By the 1890s, Blackpool was one of the fastest-growing resorts in Britain, with its working-class reputation firmly established. More than any other of its buildings, the...
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Measuring Victorian London: Mogg’s cab fare map
1. Mogg’s Postal-District and Cab-Fare Map, 1859. Drawn by Edward Mogg, lithographed by C. Whittingham, London, published by William Mogg, London. 532 x 720 mm (Paul Dobraszczyk) Running parallel to...
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Communal reading and everyday life
Taking an everyday journey on the London Underground in August this year, I witnessed many different types of reading; in the carriage in which I travelled, a middle-aged couple jointly consulted a...
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The intestine of Leviathan: visiting the Paris sewers
Light and darkness in the Paris sewers The contemporary historian David Pike has drawn attention to nineteenth-century ideas about underground space, in particular the ways in which these articulated...
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Into the Forbidden Zone: Varosha, ghost city of Cyprus
Varosha from Palm Beach In 1974, the glamorous resort town of Varosha in Cyprus was abandoned by its 35,000 mainly Greek Cypriot residents after the Turkish army invaded the northern part of the...
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Authentic ruins
Collapsing shed on a farm in the Peak District, Staffordshire In the early 1780s, the English artist, author and Anglian priest William Gilpin (1720-1804) visited the ruined Tintern Abbey on the banks...
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Ruins in reverse: Ciudad Valdeluz, Spain
It was the American artist Robert Smithson who, in 1967, first coined the phrase ‘ruins in reverse’ when describing some of the strange forms he encountered in the post-industrial landscape around his...
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The heart of the city: under Senate House
What is the ‘heart’ of a city: a large public plaza and grand civic buildings; a skyline of corporate skyscrapers; a transport hub, such as a railway station or shipping terminal? Of course, a big...
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Brexitecture: the Redsand sea forts
On an overcast and cool morning in early summer, I climbed aboard the X-Pilot vessel moored in the river Medway in Rochester for a 6-hr round trip to the seven Maunsell sea forts at Redsand, situated...
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The view from the Shard
Of course, I was not the first to climb London’s 1,010ft Shard: a small band of urban explorers ascended to the tip of the building a long time before I did, back in 2011 when it was still under...
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Freetown Christiania: city-in-the-city
With over half a million visitors every year, Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen is the city’s third largest tourist attraction. A self-governed community of around 900 residents – the largest and...
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