John Rogers (1972-) luke chamberlain Writer, Film-maker, & Psychogeographer Interview via Zoom Meeting / November 20, 2024
Luke Chamberlain: Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me today I've got a couple questions that are more focused on your perspective regarding psychogeography, and then I have a few more that are specific to your experience of the Black Path and how it relates to some of the research I'm working on.
John Rogers: Yeah, go for it.
LC: Great I'll start by saying I think it's been pretty well documented to this point your feelings towards the importance of walking and experiencing a city’s psychogeography. I'm wondering how walking as opposed to other modes of transportation allows for a deeper engagement with the urban environment, and how architects or urban planners could enable such engagement?
JR: So, just to remind me, is your approach coming from studying urban design?
LC: I’m majoring in architecture, but I've got a studio project that's focusing a little bit more on urban design or urban fabric, so I'm interested in this realm a little bit more during this semester specifically.
JR: Alright, I think for me it breaks down in a couple of ways. One is the idea from one of the topographical writers from the 1920s that I was very inspired by and think provided a brilliant template for urban rambling, urban exploration, and experiencing the city. It was a really interesting time for exploring London because really what they were doing in the 20s was exploring the London that had burst its boundaries from the London County Council and into the countryside. London was gobbling up parts of the whole of the county of Middle Essex, parts of Kent, Essex, and Surrey would be absorbed into London as they were exploring this new terrain. So it's very similar to the London I was trying to recapture in my more recent book Welcome to New London whereas This Other London was exploring their terrain.
Anyways, one of those writers wrote that when you walk, you are in and a part of the landscape. You're not experiencing it through the filter of a motorist in a sealed pod. They create their own sensory environment. They have their music playing, they've got their heat or their air conditioning on. The sounds that they hear, everything they experience is filtered. They're removed from the city around them. So, in many ways the walker is free of these things. They're not just trying to survive, nor are they removed from the city, but they are in it. They're experiencing it. And if you're walking as part of a practice, or walking deliberately or consciously, you can experience this fusion of yourself in the city where you feel like you've got a more intense relationship with the city, a more symbiotic relationship with the built environment and the topography, but I suppose cyclists also experience the topography. I remember I did something with Jon Day who wrote a book called Cyclogeography. Before that, for me at least, the difference was split between either being on foot or using any wheeled vehicle, so anything with wheels was bad and the pedestrian was a superior being. At that point I didn't distinguish between cyclists and motorists, but he pointed out the experience of river valleys, which obviously deals with topography and is a real interest of mine. He said, “You really feel it in your legs on a bike in a way you couldn’t
possibly when you walk. Any slight incline in the landscape is going to hit you immediately.” And I thought, okay, fair enough. Cyclists also experience the landscape to a degree, but they're moving at speed through the landscape. They're part of a machine and their relationship with the city is being filtered by it, so it's really only the walker who has a direct relationship with the environment around them.
The other thing as well, is if you look at it from the point of view of urban design, so much goes back to the way the Situationist International came from with their approach to psychogeography and the use of the dérive, in that so much of the built environment is trying to control you or push you in a certain way, make you do a certain thing, or make you feel a certain way. There was a period of time where I was interested in shopping malls and centers, and they're definitely designed in a way that’s asking: “How can we maximize your consumption?” So in a way, walking is a way to resist those forces. I used to walk to work every day when I lived at the Angel and worked in the South Bank and that's when I really started to blog. I wrote in notebooks about my walks, and then I started to blog those walks, and then that became a radio show, and then it became my YouTube channel. So, when you travel by the bus or the tube you're reacting to the people around you, the schedule of the transport, and once you get there there's advertising in your face. They know where you're going to be, they know that if you sit here then you'll look there and stare at whatever they want to subject you to.
At that time as well, I was not commuting during the 7/7 Bombings, which happened on the 7th of July in 2005 and hit the London Transport Network. That became a real time of fear and paranoia in London because it happened within something considered such an everyday thing. Some guys got on tubes or buses with backpacks and blew themselves up and killed a bunch of people, so there was a sudden paranoia that even the most ordinary thing in the world could be dangerous in a way no one had anticipated and you wouldn't even necessarily see it coming. And again, the pedestrian was completely free of this fear and paranoia. You didn't look at your fellow citizen in a suspicious way if they had a bag that was too big, or if they stood up and left their bag behind, or whatever it was. It’s mentally liberating in that way, in that you felt like you were freer from the idea of control and surveillance. It was a dual act of freedom. Your freedom of movement but also your psychological freedom.
LC: That freedom I suppose is how you start to break yourself away from the boundaries of development associated with grid, right? In your documentary London Overground, you and Iain Sinclair talk about how development projects like the Olympics can create a “microclimate” which impacts the surrounding area's psychogeography. How do you feel large-scale architectural developments like these affect the emotional and psychological experiences of a place, especially when their historical character or landmarks are removed?
JR: Well, the first psychogeography project I ever did was a response to a town center redevelopment where I grew up in Wickham. That's why I first used psychogeography, because it gave us a set of tools. When they build a shopping center for example, architects and planners have a load of tools. So, I actually interviewed the architect of that shopping precinct, and I was aware that a lot of architects study psychogeography. I wanted to see if that had in any way informed the sense, or the feeling he wanted to transmit through the shopping center. It turns out that it hadn’t at all, and the idea that we could think that way blew him away. Now, this was 20 something years ago, but I was really surprised that they only studied the impacts of the actual area where the development was taking place, with no attention to the four to five mile
impact where the articulations of movement alone will spread beyond that and into the surrounding area. The way people drive, the way they park, their journeys, their habits, their routines will all be affected by this in a large radius. So, you can't just look at the impact exactly where you're doing the build, you have to look at the four to five mile radius surrounding it. Once you're doing that, you have to look at the psychological impact of what you're doing to someone's place. When you remodel and redevelop and rebuild, you wipe an area clean and rebuild it. That's going to mess with people's sense of place. It's going to mess with their mental map, and that was an idea that this architect had never heard of before. They weren't resistant to it, but they were like, "Wow, that's really interesting, we'd never thought of that." They had purely looked at it in those hyper-local terms, and psychogeography seemed to have a set of tools where we could collaborate with people on dérives, get them to record their movements, get them to record their reactions, their feelings, their senses, their emotions. and harness all those memories.
I think in a way, the biggest impact is on our mental maps, because our sense of place can be a lot more fragile than we like to think. I did some walks with a guy who lived in a housing co-op underneath what's now the Velodrome in the Olympic Park. When we did the walks, he couldn't remember where things were because everything had been so thoroughly erased and the landscape rebuilt. The thing that had really messed with his head was that they redeployed a lot of the same names but just in different places, so they reused street names but the roads went in completely different directions, which was incredibly confusing. So if you don't capture these things and venerate them or constantly rewalk and remake them, my idea used to be that it didn't really matter. We seem to be powerless to stop physical changes to our environment, and I was involved in some activism opposing some of these developments, but they didn't seem to succeed. But they can't change your mental map. They can change the physical environment, but you can still keep hold of an idea of a place. I don't know how true that is, but theoretically, you can conjure up your place from your memory and your nostalgia as a conscious act of resistance against development, and then that can be transmitted through literature or film-making. I mean it's one of the things with my books when I've worked with a publisher or or even when I make my regular YouTube videos, very little of what I actually feel is visible.
The most extreme example is actually an interesting parallel. I made a video over the weekend where I walked a section of 1520s London. There's a map that's been created from various records which I walked, and at one point there was a big friary or monastery with lots of buildings and gardens, and now it's just one massive office block. It would have been a landscape of a large monastic building, various gardens that were connected through a series of courtyards, and there would have been porticos and chapels and all sorts of stuff, which is now just one monolithic block, When I'm making the film and I'm looking at it, I'm seeing the office block, which is so bland that it doesn't really do much to my imagination, whereas the idea of that friary does an awful lot.
LC: In your film London Perambulator, Nick Papidimitriou makes the distinction between deep topography and psychogeography, something Iain Sinclair also begins to question. How do your views align or differ from theirs, and how might your perspective have changed since then?
JR: I don't feel I can disagree with either of them. I think someone asked a question about psychogeography while Iain and I were together, and then Iain deferred it to me which was amazing. So I answered the question, but I also had a sense that the brand of psychogeography that Iain's associated with and how
that differs from the Situationist idea of psychogeography is in itself a deviation. Iain's obviously completely open about that and I don’t think he’d disagree, but I think the idea of psychogeography that most people have is the one associated with Iain, but it’s not an association he made himself. Take a look at what Iain was doing in the 60s and 70s. There's a video on my channel where I walk around a recreation of an exhibition called Histories and Hauntings at Swedenborg House, which is based on an exhibition that Iain did at the White Chapel Gallery in 1974. So, you can see there that Iain's walking along lay lines, he's visiting standing stones, he's walking ancient trackways in the countryside, that kind of stuff. He's a bit of an old hippie or a poet, right? He made his first film about Alan Ginsburg. So, he wasn't necessarily a revolutionary, and this is a very important distinction to make between him and the Situationist International. They were revolutionaries. They wanted to overthrow capitalism very explicitly, and that’s why I think they're great for architects, isn't it? They had very strong views on town planning and the way it restricted the human spirit. This is the overlap actually, this is where a lot of Iain's work actually does conform to theirs with things like London Orbital with the M25 in terms of a proper dérive, where a simple walk will unpick the economic and political forces which act upon us. Iain does a lot of work which is classical psychogeography, but he also deals more with what you might call Anglo-Celtic mysticism, which is inherent in the landscape of the British Isles. The French intellectuals of the left bank were not interested in that shit at all. They were political theorists, and they wanted a revolution of everyday life. Now, you could say the hippies also wanted a revolution of everyday life so there might be a lot of symmetry between them, but I would say that ignoring the resistance element of psychogeography would just result in people wandering around and moaning about stuff so I suppose there was a kind of programmatic element to it.
In terms of deep topography, the way Nick always used to talk about it anyways, is that if you read Iain's work, which I’m obviously a big admirer of, there's no natural history in it. He won't talk about plants or insect life or birds, which Nick is very interested in. I mean ecology is a big part of Nick's world view. His engagement with the relationship comes from looking at almost an insect-like or even a molecular level. Nick's very interested in geology and ecology, and that's where deep topography is very personal. Although psychogeography is by its nature subjective, it's not personal. Let's also be clear about one thing, I mean, I'll go on the record with this one: There is only one deep topographer, and it's Nick. For him, a lot of it was about processing personal pain. As we talk about in the documentary, Nick had a very personal, very difficult childhood. He was in prison a lot and had a drug addiction, and his engagement with the landscape is through a lot of rejection. Sometimes he was dealing with romantic rejection, or rejection by society as both a junkie and a criminal. For someone with a criminal record, your options of engaging and getting a sensible job are pretty remote, so that's very much where deep topography is from. Then there’s also an enormous affinity with plant life, and Nick's writing is about plant or insect life and that kind of thing. It's also very transtemporal, which is slightly different to psychogeography although it can be in ways. The Black Path in a lot of ways is kind of transtemporal, but less in a local history type way and more in a kind of hallucinogenic way.
LC: I'm conducting a studio project about urban planning for a city in Ohio which I found drew some similarities to the characteristics you describe in your newest novel The city we’re researching was built atop a network of ancient Native American burial mounds, which were also used as a place for gathering and as paths for trade between different cultures. In The Black Path,
you discuss how although the path disappears beneath modern construction at times, it still has an influence on the present topography What do you think this suggests about the relationship between historical pathways and modern urban development, and how do you think unseen or hidden elements beneath a city can still impact its psychogeography?
JR: Well, you can't build there Luke [laughs].
LC: Yes [laughs], that's the conclusion I’ve come to as well, since it's such a complex situation at the moment. There's a golf course that was just built over top of the mounds and they use them as a putting green. It's absolutely terrible, but they're finally getting rid of that stuff on January 1st of this upcoming year Our studio is looking at what can be done once the land is reclaimed so the descendants of these cultures can come back and reuse these earthworks as a place of gathering once again I'm proposing a series of paths throughout the city to make the earthworks experienceable for people to come and visit it again because right now it's really inaccessible and completely overrun with residential construction and roads and highways.
JR: Yeah, making it usable as a public space, right? And not just being privately owned but genuinely publicly owned as well?
LC: Yes, which they're in the process of doing now by reclaiming the golf course from the owners who are finally having to give up this land after over 100 years. It's being given back to the Ohio History Connection from the golf course that's privately owned due to the earthwork complex’s recent instatement as a UNESCO World Heritage Site
JR: It's alarming, isn't it? In a lot of ways it's difficult to see how the Black Path has survived because there's no real reason. I suppose you could say there are solid reasons when you see where the connections are, like across the marshes. The marshes are protected, and they flood, so you can't build in them, so they were always bound to survive. Others are in cases like Millfields, which have been developed in the past and have reclaimed parts of the path. Now, its current function as a cycling path is a very practical way to get from any of the places along it. But you still have a lot of people that work and live in Walthamstow and Leyton and Hackney in particular who work in East London and around Shoreditch which is now a real kind of digital hub for companies. I mean literally outside my office is what would have once been the medieval priory of St. John. Outside the door is Clerkenwell Road which is the continuation of the Black Path. Across the road is the stone medieval gateway to the prior of St. John and on the other side of that is Smithfield Market, which is where the Black Path went. So people like me are traveling it, and if you were cycling, that would be the way you'd cycle. There’s a lot of people that do that but obviously they're a different kind of demographic. They're not market porters anymore so it's become a very practical commuting route, but what I'm curious about is how that would have only been in the last 20 years.
You can look at each part of it, like Millfields recreation ground for example. They needed recreation ground for local people of a very poor, very densely populated area. There was a football ground there where Clapton Orient played, and there was a power station there because next to the river what else are you going to do? You're not going to build next to a power station. London Fields is another ancient place of recreation. Hackney is very densely populated. Broadway Market is Victorian. I mean this is the thing, a lot of the street markets that identify along it are not that old in reality. One of my favorite parts of the Black Path story is the Columbia Road Flower Market, which a lot
of people talk about as being one of London's oldest street markets. It’s old in the sense that it's late Victorian, but the market that produced Columbia Road Market was a slum clearance project to help the poor people of the area where they built a very grand cupboard market that failed within 20 years. What had happened was the Jewish flower sellers who operate at Common Garden Market during the week had started to sell at the Columbia Road Market as well because it was a 7-day market. So the people that would work on a Sunday were the Jewish people that lived in the East End since it wasn't their Sabbath. They had things left over from the Jewish Sabbath they needed to get rid of before the Monday flowers were cut, so they were the only ones operating there on a Sunday. When that covered market failed they just went into the street nearby because people were coming for these cut price flowers, and they stayed there selling them in the street and people would go down to Columbia Road on Sunday and buy cheap cut flowers. It’s still what people do although they're not poor Jewish flower sellers from the East End now, it's all a bit more boujee, but it's got nothing to do with the Black Path. I guess my point is that you can reverse engineer meaning into it, but the markets aren't a direct legacy of its status as a medieval drover's path or porter's path bringing cattle and goods into the city markets. I just found it unbelievably uncanny, and this is why it’s kind of bonkers that you could stand in Hackney and look at Walthamstow four miles away in a straight line all through the urban landscape.
Also, when you get to St. Leonard's Church in Shoreditch, it was mind-blowing to discover that there was a very early Roman military outpost established there before the second time they invaded. The first time, they came over, stayed for a bit when it was cold and wet, and then went back to Rome where it was nice and warm. They left for nearly 80 years and then came back and stayed the second time round, but in between they had this presence in London and it was there on the site of St. Leonard's Church where it's believed that some of the very earliest Christian worshippers brought Christian worship with them. It's potentially one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in the world. Later it became one of the Civil War defenses when the Parliamentarians were protecting London against the crown, because they knew that if you controlled London, you controlled the nation. It's a truism that goes back to the establishment of Roman London. You can't rule England without ruling London. You could invade wherever you wanted and then capture as much land as you wanted, but you're not actually in control of the country until you control London. Once the Parliamentarians had London, they had to make sure they kept it, and the king was forever going to be in exile unless he could recapture London. That site was one of the parliamentarian fortifications. It was a very important spot because it’s just outside the city wall and a good place to defend. It's mad because from there, Old Street is a pre-existing trackway anyway so I don't count that as being part of the Black Path. It defies logic in a lot of ways. Maybe it's a little bit of a joke, but that industrial estate where the Black Path is marked in Leighton is still a place of food. I mean, there could be anything in the industrial state, right? There’s a cash and carry there, I mean, if you go to a corner shop anywhere around East London, North London, Hackney, or Shoreditch and you buy a can of tin tomatoes, for example, it'll have come from that cash and carry. The Allied Bakery who make all the crappy sliced white bread: That's their bakery. And if you're a little bit more high-end, like the home grocery delivery company Ocado, they've got their distribution center there as well. So, I don't know, it's mad.
LC: You mentioned there that the Black Path is a pretty linear route straight through due to its use as a drover’s path Do you think having such a defined route enhances or limits the potential for psychogeographic exploration?
JR: I suppose it depends on if you want to deviate. For me, it was about sticking on it. I don't know where this term came from, but back when I was remapping High Wycombe I tried to codify the different types of walks. Even the walks you might call “constrained” have a value. You can't say one has more than another because a constrained walk can have enormous value, and I think the Black Path is a really good example of a constrained walk that tells you so much. If you set out to do something like that, then you have to stick to it, otherwise you're not learning what it's going to teach you. You’ve got to try and listen to it, so in that case you have to stick to the constraint.
LC: To my understanding, you’ve spent a bit of time in Italy. Having studied abroad there myself for a semester, I’m curious how you perceived the many layers of architectural history present in such a place, and how it might compare to your perception of London or other cities you’ve been to with that type of historical resonance?
JR: That's an interesting question. I lived in Modena for about seven or eight months from 2000 to 2001 and at the time I was very interested in what you could say was a flâneur, or wistful wandering around, observing, and noting, looking at the architecture, looking at the history, but I didn't yet have much of a sense of structured psychogeographical work. If I had, I would probably have looked at it differently, and I tried to write a book about it initially, but I realized it didn't work. God, that would have been so much better if I'd understood psychogeography because it gives you a set of tools and a structure to write about places that I just didn't have. So it was just a sort of series of random wanderings around Modena trying to understand it. I guess that's why, well that and a few other reasons, why it's never seen the light of day. Some of it's just unpublishable crap. But, I think I found Italy really interesting because, well I went there to teach English and there was a couple who I knew from the school I had worked with in London, and they were in Mantova. So, when we met up with them, they were quite blunt in some ways. Obviously I'm still a big Italophile so I was rhapsodizing about Italian heritage and culture and they went, “Yeah, but they've not really done a lot for the last 500 years have they?” I thought well I guess that's kind of true, [laughs] but not entirely. The thing is, when you experience those cities they're about stasis rather than change, and I think that the overwhelming sense in some ways about those cities is that they have breathed new life into them, but their priorities are not in trying to change things. So, as much as someone like me might say, “Don't knock that building down,” when you go to a place where they do follow that through, it doesn't always produce the most dynamic culture. In that sense I think the culture became quite constraining and you can see that in the way that they actually just myopically hang on to the past.
LC: I would agree. I think there was definitely an emphasis on preservation, but in some cases more so for the sake of tourism than anything else.
JR: Yeah, it can be constraining on people just as much as the rampant development that we engage in is a constraint. The kind of modernist postwar development in Europe in France for example, like the Situationists reacting to the concrete collar around humanity; that kind of dogmatic preservation of the past for no reason at all can be a constraint on the human spirit as well.
LC: Well, thank you so much for your time, it's been incredibly insightful, and I really appreciate you meeting with me today Have a good rest of your evening, and I hope to see you on your next walk, wherever that may be
JR: Take care Luke, all the best. Bye-bye.