John Rogers in conversation, Sunday 22 May 2-6 pm
Edgelands exploring urban landscapes from London to King’s Lynn. Meet and walk with John Rogers, author of This Other London – Adventures in the Overlooked City.
Writer and film-maker John Rogers will guide us through his many ways of approaching the familiar and the unfamiliar in the city.
Now you can come and meet him, talk, walk and spend time enjoying his new ways of seeing and understanding the city.
Bookings
Edgelands exploring urban landscapes from London to King’s Lynn is an event held in collaboration with Norfolk and Norwich Festival. Tickets are £6.00
Book direct from the Festival website here
Edgelands
First we will hear about his many explorations of London. Then we will take him on a walk through King’s Lynn, a true edgeland and which for him, is unfamiliar territory. We will invite him to respond to this new urban environment and introduce him to its extraordinary beauty and history.
‘That sounds like fun’, he said.
Exploring urban landscapes
Because of his original approach to urban discovery paralleling their own artistic curiosity, haptic/tacit commissioned John to write an essay for our exhibition FieldWork. You can read it as part of the exhibition text for GroundWork Gallery.
“John is like an alchemist, not only in the he is unkempt and dresses like a person who has fallen through the cracks, he also makes the mundane and unremarkable glow with newly imbued magic.”
– Russell Brand, from the foreword to This Other London
Writer and film-maker John Rogers
Author of This Other London – adventures in the overlooked city, and director of the documentaries London Overground (with Iain Sinclair), The London Perambulator, Make Your Own Damn Art – the world of Bob and Roberta Smith , and In the Shadow of the Shard. Also co-presenter and producer of the radio show and podcast Ventures and Adventures in Topography on Resonance fm. He was psychogeographer-in-residence for Waltham Forest London Borough of Culture 2019, and was commissioned to create a project for Brent Biennial in Brent 2020 London Borough of Culture.
“He’s the everyman’s psychogeographer, hobbling across the hilltops with only a can of Stella and a dodgy knee for company….
But this down-to-earth, booze-hunting ‘hippy wizard’ is a star in his own right. Brand describes Rogers as ‘like Prospero crossed with Mr Chips’, and a ‘tangle-haired shrub shaman’. We’d rather think of him as the Brian Cox of topology, inspiring wonder and curiosity on esoteric subjects (without using complicated words like topology and esoteric).”
“John is Elizabethan, a film-poet, writer/walker from a better time. He has a history of alternative stand-up, alliances with Russell Brand and the deep-topographer Nick Papadimitriou. A history of persistent engagement in the politics of protest, being there, bearing witness. Keeping the record. And posting it. He was good company on a second circuit of London Overground; a series of excursions fitted in between school-delivery and school-collection. It seems that John did most of his own work, writing or editing, at night. He was self-funding, self-starting, a guerilla documentarist in the great tradition: green anorak, ruined left knee, camera in pocket.”
– Iain Sinclair, from The Last London
