“Tourist In Your Own Town” progress report

Progress with “Tourist In Your Own Town” is going well, and proofing is now at an advanced stage. The cover, featuring a stereotyped tourist in a well-known London location, looks great. The first attempt at printing has been undertaken. This has demonstrated that the preferred typeface, Garamond, doesn’t come out too well, with the crossbars on the e’s and the H’s, in particular, tending to vanish. Current thinking is to go for a bolder and denser font for the main text, probably Baskerville Old, and at a larger point size. This will mean a fatter book, currently estimated at around 488 pages. Everything always takes longer than expected!

Allowing for other commitments, publication of “Tourist” is at present projected for early October. For anyone interested in the subjective aspects of geography, the psychology of places, how we experience travel, and what has become known as psychogeography, “Tourist In Your Own Town” will be an essential book to purchase.

Blurb on the beach

In the throes of preparing for publication of “Tourist In Your Own Town”, and seeking an alternative to being molested by dogs on an otherwise glorious Norfolk beach, it occurred to me that I needed to write a kind of blurb, which would serve as an introduction but also, well, act as a kind of blurb. In a blurbish kind of way. So what I wrote was along the following lines.

“The central theme of “Tourist In Your Own Town” is how, subjectively, we perceive the geographical environment, with an emphasis on the experiencing of ordinary places, as it applies to daily life and to travel and tourism. The book is concerned with how it feels to be alive in the sorts of very ordinary environments most of us inhabit, the impact that places make upon us, the sense of place, and with why some places are interesting or pleasant, and others are not.

Subjects covered include the impressions that places make when we first encounter them, why some places are perceived to have humorous qualities, subjective similarities between places, the recent enthusiasm for psychogeography, nostalgia, the psychology of travelling within and between places, and the associations and imagery that places hold for us.

The book’s primary purpose is to encourage an appreciation and enjoyment of one’s surroundings, drawing on references from geography, planning, architecture, the psychology of perception, autobiography, fictional literature and visual art, in an original synthesis. There are also implications for the sensitive redevelopment of places.

The book will be of interest to anyone who takes an interest in places, plus those with a professional or educational interest in travel, tourism, geography, the built environment, and the psychology of place. “Tourist In Your Own Town” is extensively referenced but is not academic in style, is occasionally humorous, and is accessible to the general reader”.

With that, blurb provisionally completed, a raincloud appeared, and – though probably Normal for Norfolk - it seemed prudent to retreat.

A new departure

‘The Railway: Keeping Britain on Track’, shown on BBC2 earlier this week, portrayed the train services from King’s Cross as a farcically dysfunctional, outrageously expensive, unbearable to use, national embarrassment. Some of the staff, however, when not being patronised by a manager who evidently modelled himself on David Brent (yeah?), were clearly saints; overworked, underpaid, unappreciated, on the front line to passengers who were justifiably angry or despairing. The one good thing shown in the programme was the new grafted-on western concourse at King’s Cross.

A curious structure, a lilac-tinted exercise in conic sections meets string vest meets Las Vegas, the new concourse provides additional space for would-be passengers to view the destination boards reading “Cancelled” and “Delayed”. Passengers who have managed to arrive on incoming trains are meanwhile channelled through the existing frontage of the station, and out into the street or down into the Underground. What goes against the historical grain with this development is that, traditionally, it was arriving passengers who had to be impressed, not those about to leave. Historically, railway companies competed to provide a grand entrance to the city, whether it be in size of trainshed, lavishness of hotel, or – in the case of Euston – Doric Arch, the legally vandalised remains of which lie, allegedly, beneath the River Lea.

With the arrival of mass air travel, effort and expenditure became similarly focused on impressing the new arrival, not just with the airport itself, but with the wealth and sophistication of the host city, region, or nation – hence Saarinen’s TWA terminal at JFK, the “steering wheel” at LAX, and the doughnut-shaped Terminal 1 at Charles de Gaulle. Ironically, though, arriving airline passengers typically get herded into low level immigration halls and baggage claim areas before finding their way out into town, and see little of the architectural wonders above. Instead it is the departing passenger, the anticipation of his journey artificially protracted thanks to procedures enforced in order to stymie those who would otherwise blow him out of the sky, who gets time to enjoy the architecture – at least from an internal perspective.

And this is the situation at King’s Cross where, in this respect at least, rail travel has now caught up with aviation. Once again, it is departure rather than arrival that is celebrated, and there is time and space to savour one’s imminent voyage of adventure, perhaps to Stevenage or Biggleswade, Peterborough maybe, or with any luck somewhere a little further north.

15 February 2013