Walking Territory: In and out of Lockdown

Andrew Howe

Now in the closing weeks of Summer 2020, in a chaotic time of uncertainty, rage and hope, I look back at those first few weeks of lockdown with a mix of wistfulness and incredulity. The time already feels distant as many people around me have returned to pre-Covid activities, yet others less fortunate, continue to endure local lockdowns elsewhere. Despite superficial familiarity, there is no doubt that both the atmosphere and physical environment have changed. The restrictions imposed a simplicity to life, which could be relaxing in the moments when I could accept the constraints. As the environment became busier again, I felt an air of tension building up, soon becoming a nagging drive to be productive, to return to something, only to find it still not possible to make much progress with so many activities, without difficult adaptations.

What of those weeks, those strange times in which we walked? My cognitive mapping of the area surrounding my home shifted to a higher level of granular detail, with new areas of focus and an enhanced awareness of spatial and temporal linkages to other times and places. I am a walking artist and with other projects cancelled, it was not long before my daily walks became a mapping process from which several diverse outputs emerged as texts, photographs, drawings and prints, all gathered into a series of artist books and collaged maps. The resulting maps, displayed below, are a patchy, subjective assemblage of personal observations and memory. They may not be reliable to navigate our collective memory of lockdown, but they represent an authentic record that will accord with many others’ experience of this time. I set out initially without any particular objectives, drawn by curiosity to experience what the world felt like in this new situation, and to observe how people were responding. I sought out chance encounters with the quotidian, which can so often surprise us when we view things in a fresh context. Such surprises built into new facets to places that I thought I knew well, and this multiplicity of subjectivity generated a continual yearning to look at familiar places in a new light. The maps I made documented the human choreography of social distancing entangled with the unfolding of Spring. 

In the first 2-3 weeks of lockdown in March and early April, I did not go far, partly out of obedience following Government instructions to stay at home, and partly because I was focused on spending time with family and home-schooling. In that early stage, whilst helping my daughter Eliza with geography and history, we looked at old Ordnance Survey maps of Frankwell, the place on our doorstep in the town of Shrewsbury. 

Frankwell developed in Norman times and grew as a place for free traders outside the jurisdiction of the Lord of the Castle. The main street leading from the Welsh Bridge was called the Street of Frankevile in medieval times. It became known as the Little Borough as the area developed through the 17th Century to be a centre of commercial activity with barges unloading wine, tobacco, fruit and dye on Frankwell Quay. Frankwell’s close proximity to the River Severn enabled it to play a significant part in the development of the woollen trade in Shrewsbury, since the navigable river made the transportation of goods easier.

Buildings such as the mid sixteenth century Fellmongers Hall demonstrate the flourishing trade. Housing conditions became cramped and squalid, but in other parts of the Mount and Mountfields, there were fine villas and lodges. This was where Charles Darwin was born, at Mount House, built by his father, Robert Darwin and mother Susannah Wedgwood. And it was here that Charles and his siblings walked daily along a 'thinking path' where they made their early explorations of the natural world. I can still walk along the river where Darwin walked to Doctor’s Field adjacent to his old home.

Eliza and I researched as much about our local history as we could find in books and on the internet. Then, inspired in part by Common Ground’s Local Distinctiveness projects[1], we created a Frankwell alphabet using images of letters taken from photographs of local signage.

I began creating an A to Z Book of Frankwell with drawings of places for each letter. The drawings were in ink made from oak galls from the tree in our garden. Frankwell is not a particularly large area of town, so the first challenge was to determine what was of sufficient significance to be included in the book. The area is bounded on three sides by the River Severn, then the remaining boundary is more open to interpretation. Some of the drawings refer to old photographs of places, since demolished, but mostly I drew what I could see on my walks. 

This seed of an idea developed into plans for four more artist books to be made in response to my lockdown walks. I made a total of five of my own, and this led on to collaborative work with other artists. Sensing an opportunity to help bring the local community together and celebrate where we live, I contacted some of the artists I know living in or connected with Frankwell. Many expressed support, and six artists joined me to create a collaborative book, titled Frankwell in View. We launched the book in September,[2] and hope it will help rejuvenate community interest and raise some money for a local environmental charity, the Shrewsbury Food Hub. From this, there are plans for some public events including an urban sketching day and an exhibition to further extend mapping through collective artworks.

My walks usually took place early in the morning when very few people were around. April and May will be remembered for seemingly endless days of perfectly warm sunshine and crystal, clear blue skies, not an aircraft trail in sight. Few people failed to notice the Spring this year, as so much time could be spent outdoors, listening to bird song and watching the emergence of seedlings and flowers. 

Through regular walks, it was possible to pinpoint the day migrating birds arrived, or when trees and shrubs came into flower. I noted the day that swifts arrived, only a day or two before they were able to start feasting on the clouds of dancing mayflies emerging from the river. But I also noticed that day was at least a month earlier than the same moment a few years ago, just as I recorded that flowers and leaf budding were similarly occurring earlier, most likely a result of the extraordinary warm weather. It was very much apparent in conversation with neighbours and people in the community that there was a reawakening of interest in the natural surroundings and environmental impacts.

Reflecting on John Muir’s ideas of walking “with nature”, Haskell states:

‘In the post-Darwin world of networked kinship, though, we can extend Muir’s thought and understand that we walk within. […] Nature needs no home; it is home. We can have no deficit of nature; we are nature, even when we are unaware of this nature.’[3]

People’s experiences during lockdown caused some erosion to the established duality in the landscape in which humans have come to view their developed environment as being set apart from a natural world to which they feel they do not belong. When urban green spaces are regarded as being unnatural, then they are treated with less respect and are disowned to some extent. 

‘When human movement patterns start to realign with the patterns of other species […] our awareness rejoins the community of life in which we are born but which our built environments too often hide from us. In this unity of flow and bodily movement, belonging is no longer abstraction but is manifest through living choreography. The choreographer, though, is not an individual but the relationships among a multitude.’[4]

It was noticeable that greater numbers and diversity of people were walking in places where, in previous times, I rarely saw anyone. The removal of choice meant that people began to explore edgelands and wilder green spaces that they might not have ordinarily visited, perhaps even have felt threatened by. Dog walkers and fellow pedestrians passed through thickets and scrub woodland populated in recent times by small encampments of homeless - meanwhile, a hotel in town was accommodating homeless people.

I resisted selfish, privileged feelings of ownership when hearing about, or seeing for myself, how people were discovering local paths that were completely new to them, paths I had walked many times, talked about, made artwork about. This surge of popular interest in surroundings and slowing down, offered renewed optimism about future attitudes. In about the fourth week, I began to record my walks a little more formally beyond taking photographs to making notes of observations and experiences.

I collected wax crayon rubbings of surfaces, and occasionally some artefacts, like pottery I found in the River Severn both upstream and downstream of the town, including some pieces likely to be 17th or 18th Century slipware. Each fragment must have its own story. It was fascinating to think of the journey of the clay, from its formation thousands, if not millions of years ago, to its extraction, processing and making into utensils which were somehow lost and broken, transported and eroded in the river to be collected once again from the shore.

The government had tried to clarify guidance about where and when people could exercise. There wasn’t any definitive distance set, but at that stage, we were not supposed to drive anywhere to walk. So, I imposed my own restriction such that my walks must remain within a 2km radius of my house, and I also limited myself to not walking every day. The imposed conditions increased my anticipation of each walk, and exploring within the local boundary became an intense, highlight of the week.

Ordinarily, I do not use an automated GPS tracking of my walks, preferring instead the ritual of tracing the route on a map after the event, which helps to fix the walk in my memory. Seeing the shape of the routes, set against mapped topography gave the walks a tangible presence linked to sensory encounters. As I reflected on this, the shape of the walk took on greater importance to me than the scale accuracy. I recorded these shapes using Chinese calligraphy brushes which allowed more expression in the line so that each bend and twist triggered memory links with moments from each walk. As I overlaid tracings of my routes, the grain of the town revealed itself with the sinuous loops of the river, first around Frankwell, then the isle of the town centre being a dominating influence on the walked terrain. 

The human figure rarely, if ever, featured in my photographs or drawings, but inevitably the camera recorded residual evidence of human activity. Human actions and voices were recorded in my notes, which I included as a series of observations in my Walking Territory book, rendered uncanny in the eery stillness of lockdown.

“Week 4 commencing 13th April 2020

Sharp crack of an air rifle, a white-haired man backs away cautiously beneath a bush next to the tennis courts.

A man in a hi-vis jacket on a quad bike sprays weed-killer along the kerb of a recently finished housing estate.

A rabbit watches, motionless in the shade of a scrap of hedge in the midst of rows of new houses. […]”

Having lived in Frankwell for over 22 years, there were few if any places I had not walked in before, but the heightened awareness, the disrupted sense of time and space, meant that I did see details with fresh eyes. The urban environment is a gallery of contemporary art, and I revelled in visiting this urbane gallery rich with found paintings and collages on the backs of road signs, in the lichens on ancient walls, and scratches and rust on battered garage doors and skips.

As I went slightly further afield beyond Frankwell, I did occasionally find a new pathway or a road that I had never previously visited. I was conscious that I might be viewed as an intruder, as being a potential asymptomatic virus threat, in the quiet residential streets. What was the purpose of my walks? Was I staking some kind of psychological claim over territory, was I the self-indulgent flâneur, was it just exercise? I do not think it was any of these particularly, although it was certainly as much a mental exercise as physical, a chance to let my mind breathe in the open air and escape the confines of domesticity. I was keen to record and reflect on how we can find positive routes out of this new situation.

Against all this familiarity, I was noticing the differences: changes in the natural and built environment, and changes in people’s behaviour. Children were making the best of the sunny weather and chalked pavement drawings and upbeat, hopeful messages were in abundance on every street. Trees became decorated with bunting, ribbons and curious paraphernalia, boxes and piles of junk appeared at the end of driveways as people found time to sort out their house. Desire paths were worn across verges and patches of grass, sometimes a parallel line appeared 2m from the main path.

As the weeks passed, the choreography of encounters with other pedestrians evolved. After the initial awkwardness of crossing the road or stopping and standing well aside to avoid passing close to someone walking in the opposite direction, there was a period in which there was the briefest of eye contact, smiles and a gracious “thank-you” and careful, elegant swerves to maintain 2 metres’ separation. These actions became more unconscious, then from around the ninth week, it was noticeable that a small number of people were not only intent on ignoring social distancing, there was an element of passive aggression in the way they steadfastly maintained a line along the middle of the footpath.

By this time, physical changes had been made to facilitate social distancing by creating new one-way streets, widening footpaths and removing street furniture. I participated in a walk co-ordinately remotely by artist, Lucy Parris, with a group of other walkers across the UK and northern Europe, looking specifically at the changes in the urban environment as a result of Covid. Besides the changes to accommodate new queuing arrangements, it was evident that whilst reopening businesses were creating a superficial sense of normality in the town, the public facilities, like libraries, public toilets, children’s playgrounds and so on, remained closed, creating a sense of powerlessness and loss.

Once it was announced that lockdown restrictions would be eased and some non-keyworker school children would be able to return to school, I detected a renewed sense of purpose in the people I saw during my walks, traffic had been getting busier again, and my walks began to lose their charm. I stopped recording the walks after Week 10, and suddenly my interest waned. The sense of community cohesion that had grown during the lockdown began to dissipate, but there continued to be many voices calling for a more sustainable recovery and hope remains that whatever world we return to, it will shed some of the old baggage and head in a socially just direction.

Turning my attention to completing artist books, I compiled all of my routes and texts into a single edition book, Walking Territory, using paper made using plant materials gathered from my garden and during the walks. 

Photographs were compiled into a grid with ten columns representing each of the ten weeks I walked and incorporating my walking routes.

I also arranged photographs into two book volumes entitled Found in Frankwell. The first a formal study of lines, trajectories and connections reflecting movement through the urban environment. The second is a freer exploration of texture and light. Both books take their inspiration from the love of life reflected in the work of Robert Rauschenburg. He may not have considered himself a walking artist at the time, but much of his work originates from the findings he made whilst walking, enabling him to conjure drama from the seemingly chaotic juxtaposition of everyday scenes with unexpected encounters.

The mapping I have done in various forms cannot capture the myriad of personal stories of the residents stuck in their homes in my local community during this unprecedented time. It is a selective visual record of embodied knowledge found through walking. Glimpses are offered through a series of portals into phenomenological experiences that only I can recall from personal memory. Fellow local residents will no doubt have shared similar experiences and the maps could establish longer term meaning, drawing on a collective memory. Perhaps in this way, the maps will resonate with many other people further afield, who have walked their territory under lockdown.

Author

Andrew Howe is an interdisciplinary artist and project manager, based in Shrewsbury, working solo and in collaboration with other practitioners and community groups. He uses walking and mapping to explore how people interact with places, informed by experience of over 30 years in engineering and environmental consulting. His practice includes painting, collage, photography, printmaking, books, and digital media.   

Andrew delivers arts engagement projects with schools, community groups and in public workshops and is a member of Meadow Arts’ network of creative practitioners. Experienced with socially-engaged projects, Andrew aims to be inclusive and a catalyst for change. He co-founded the Cinderloo1821 community organisation raising awareness of the Cinderloo Uprising which took place in Dawley, now part of Telford, in 1821.  

Through an international network co-ordinated by Arts Territory Exchange, Andrew collaborates with other two artists in Japan/China and Australia. He is co-leading the Mosses and Marshes project, which reflects on changing wetland environments and links the Fenn’s, Bettisfield and Whixall Mosses NNR in the UK with work by artist, Kim Goldsmith, at the Macquarie Marshes in New South Wales.  

email: andrew@andrew-howe.com | website: www.andrew-howe.com

References

[1] https://www.commonground.org.uk/local-distinctiveness/ [accessed 18th August 2020]

[2] https://andrewhowe.bigcartel.com/product/frankwell-in-view

[3] Haskell, David George, The Songs of Trees (Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors), Penguin Books, 2018.

[4] Haskesll, David George, The Songs of Trees (Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors), Penguin Books, 2018.