Wilding the Edges

Abstract

This was a CCW Graduate School public event, consisting of a walking tour and BarCamp. Recently the interest in psychogeography has crossed from popular literature into the fine art domain. Bestselling authors focusing on the landscape from a personal and itinerant perspective include George Monbiot, Rebecca Solnit, Paul Kingsnorth, and Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts. They discuss how we are engaging with landscape as culture – specifically where the “wild” and the “cultivated” environments overlap. This resonated with us, so we used encounter, experience and enchantment as the starting point for an interactive walking tour of little known areas of Wimbledon exploring the ‘unexamined places that thrive on disregard’*, which straddle the city and the countryside. We asked, how proactive should we be in regards to both the landscape and the city? *Farley and Roberts, Edgelands, Random House, 2012