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Lizzy Stewart talking walking

Children’s book illustrator and comic book artist, Lizzy Stewart, when drawing herself, draws herself walking – striding confidently across the urban scene. Her latest book, called “Walking Distance” is a personal account of the way she sees her life out and about on foot – she argues that walking is the ‘clearest way to participate in life’. Her work touches on themes of how women are observed in the city, both in reality and on film, as well as revealing insights into her creative process and her own ways of working. Recorded in and around the gardens surrounding the Horniman Museum in south east London on a February day in 2020. 22’08” 10.4MB

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Justin Butcher talking walking

Walking for 5 months and covering 2,000 miles across Europe from London to Jerusalem, the Just Walk marked the centenary of the Balfour Declaration in which the British Government announced their support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. In this episode Andrew Stuck catches up with Justin Butcher, who conceived and led it, who describes the Just Walk as a ‘pilgrimage of penance’ and a ‘march of solidarity’. Crossing the Alps by the St Bernard Pass to north western Italy was rivaled in its beauty by the Albanian countryside. Accompanied by groups of walkers of different faiths and nationalities, a core group walked the whole distance, meeting refugees making journeys in the opposite direction, and being welcomed as celebrities by Palestinians. It is an extraordinary undertaking, chronicled by Justin in his best selling book entitled “Walking to Jerusalem”. The interview took place on a cold winter morning on the Parkland Trail, from Finsbury Park to Highgate Woods in London. 22’38” 10.6MB Feature image credit: Eleanor Butcher

Photo credit: Mark Kensett

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Image credit: © Jeremy Sancha

In 2020-21 Justin Butcher will be touring his critically acclaimed stage show, which premiered at Dublin Theatre Festival 2017, more details here.

Watch the 4-minute film of Just Walk to Jerusalem

Download the Walking to Jerusalem 2020-21 tour guide here

Ella Parry-Davies talking walking

Ella Parry-Davies, a post-doctoral researcher at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, has been facilitating homemakersounds.org, a collection of soundwalks made with Filipina domestic and care workers employed “behind closed doors” in the Lebanon and the UK. In this interview, the ambiguity, complexity and unfairness of government immigration policy is discussed, as well as how recording and co-editing soundwalks develops an intimacy rarely found in ethnographic research. 21’12” 9.9MB

Recorded in February 2020 on a walk around residential streets in Swiss Cottage, London.  Published to coincide with International Women’s Day 8 March 2020

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STOP PRESS

Saturday 19 June 2021 Join Ella for “Home Makers: go for a walk with sounds made by migrant domestic workers” – read more about this forthcoming event.

Jack Cornish talking walking

Jack Cornish is a programme manager for the “Don’t Lose Your Way” campaign at Ramblers, the UK charity promoting walking and defending rights of way. That’s the ‘day job’, but there is much more walking in Jack than just from 9 to 5. He has walked the entire length of the British Isles and is walking every street in London. The interview opens with Andrew Stuck asking Jack what “Don’t Lose Your Way” is all about and what his role entails. 22’06″ 10.4MBY

Since the recording was made, Jack has taken on a new role at Ramblers as Head of Paths.

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Mark Reid talking walking

If you are ever going to be caught out in inclement weather on the mountains or hills of northern England, having met Mark Reid, founder of Team Walking, Andrew Stuck can think of no other person he would rather have as his guide. Mark’s passion for the outdoors is only outshone by his desire to share it with others. He has written many guide books, led countless walks and facilitated workshops in the hills, and has notched up mountain leadership and training qualifications by the score. In this interview, we talk about creative thinking as Andrew has just joined one of Mark’s regular, seasonal ‘netwalking’ events with local businessmen and women in the Yorkshire Dales. However, the interview opens with Mark describing a recent philosophy walk that he co-devised with community philosopher, Graeme Tiffany, revealing how walking with others can take you in to deeper thoughts. 22’15” 10.4MB

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Satsymph talking walking

On a visit to LISTEN: A Season of Sound Art taking place in Frome in Somerset, in the summer of 2019, Andrew Stuck participates in an immersive geo-located audio piece called ‘Walking Memories’. The piece has been composed by Phill Phelps and Ralph Hoyte, two of three partners who make up creative team Satsymph, who had been invited to use hours of recorded interviews from a Frome oral history group to create ‘Walking Memories’. Ralph and Phill, with their colleague Marc Yeats, have been making located media since 2004. Their latest work in Frome uses a hugely modified platform they call Satsymph QR with which they compose ‘spatial audio’ as Ralph describes it. For the interview, Andrew, Ralph and Phill are in a car park in Frome, a ‘sound pool’ within ‘Walking Memories’. The interview opens Andrew asking them both to explain a sound pool, and it is Phill’s voice that you hear answer him first. 19’19” 9.0MB

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Helen Ottaway talking walking

Helen Ottaway is a musician and composer, and Frome resident for 22 years, who has been invited to curate LISTEN: A Season of Sound Art taking place in Frome from the 20 July until Sound Walk Sunday on the 1 September, 2019. In this episode, interviewed midway through the LISTEN, Helen explains how it came to fruition, its breadth of events taking place, and how she particularly wanted to include a listening walk and a geo-located sound walk. Helen herself, has been involved in creating sound art outdoors and is keen to include more walking in her future work.
21’24” 10MB

Listen: A Season of Sound Art runs until Sunday 1 September – check the programme of events here

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Photo credit: Frances Ottaway

Dan Raven-Ellison talking walking

In this extended episode, published to coincide with the Festival celebrating London becoming a National Park City, Andrew Stuck talks to Dan Raven-Ellison, the campaigner behind the initiative. Dan is far more than just a ‘one trick pony’ having spent a lifetime seeking ways of getting people, young and old outdoors into nature. He has also been exploring new ways of making it easier for people to understand the scale of increasing urbanisation and its impact on the natural world of which we are all part. A self-styled, ‘guerrilla geographer’, the conversation begins with Dan explaining what that means. 34’41” 16.3MB

Recorded in April 2019 in Walpole Park, Ealing in West London on a windy day in which the recording had to be stopped as planes passed overhead.

Dan with EEG head mount recording his brain activity

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Horatio Clare talking walking

www.jamesbedford.com

Within striking distance of Hebden Bridge, as dusk falls, accompanied by his dog Freda, radio producer, presenter and writer, Horatio Clare takes Andrew Stuck on a ‘slow walk’ close to his home in an area known as Hard Castle Crags.  The sky above us fills with insects and the birds and bats that feed on them.  Always alert to the nature that surrounds him, they don’t walk far before they stop, so Horatio can point out some creature Andrew had not as yet spotted and can’t identify.  In a candid conversation, Horatio shares his enthusiasms for slow walking and how it makes compelling radio listening, as well as talking about his writing about nature and travel, and how walking through the landscape are critical to his work. 25’45” 12.1MB

Something of his Art: Walking to Lubeck with J. S. Bach (Field Notes) Little Toller 2018

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Peter Jaeger talking walking

Peter Jaeger is Professor of Poetics at Roehampton University.  For over 30 years he has been making pilgrimages to sacred sites around the world, keeping journals of his discoveries and walks.  Using these as source texts and drawing on literature and walking narratives, he has composed Midamble a long form poem of book length, in which he has held to specific structural constraints for more than 400 pages.  He compares writing long form poetry to walking long distances and during the discussion reveals how he structures the work in a rhythmical durational performance. 23’08” 10.8MB

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Simone Etter talking walking

Swiss artist Simone Etter’s ‘Walk Book’ is full of techniques to disorientate you, not necessarily to get you lost, but to muddle your thoughts, even on a familiar route.  Andrew Stuck, producer of Talking Walking, and Simone set out on a walk together towards a campsite beyond La Romieu in south west France, where they have been attending Made of Walking. They know where they are aiming for but don’t know the way to get there, and once they are there, they are not sure as to how to return via a different route. Along the way, Andrew is convinced that Simone is applying her techniques, as he becomes increasingly more disorientated as to the route – his only hope is that you as a listener can follow it too. 16’38” 7.8MB

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Simone Etter’s WALKBOOK is currently only available in German at the University of Art and Design Basel.

George Fort talking walking

Walking along London’s Regent’s canal in Hackney with George Fort who has been developing a digital platform called “Placecloud”. Placecloud is all about animating the places through which we walk with place-specific recordings (‘placecasts’) written by writers, artists, scholars and everyday people. George maintains it is not a collection of audio tours, recorded in a studio by a dislocated actor, but instead numerous placecasts dotted across London, recorded by people like you and me in the very places we are observing and describing.  He spells out an intriguing and persuasive argument for why there’s an appetite for Placecloud and why he is convinced that it is going to be popular among us walkers. 19′ 24” 9.1MB

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STOP PRESS Placecloud has launched in summer 2021!

On Placecloud, leading cultural researchers tell the stories of the world through “viewpoints” – short podcasts about places. Viewpoints reveal the significance of the everyday places that surround us, bringing the world to life.

With an initial focus on London, Placecloud will soon feature viewpoints across the world, from Melbourne to Caracas to Tehran.