Guided walks on youtube

[Serial_Apologist]

One of the greatly missed joys of summer this year has, for me, been the guided history walks. Almost any place hosts its own history, often in unexpected places, place names, plaques, particular trees, and even the street furniture acting as portals to the past. Thus it has been of great joy to have come across Joolz, who undertakes such Pied Piper-like tasks with an enviable theatrical aplomb coupled to a capacity for instant recall that must be an indispensable asset for this sort of thing, together with the wherewithal to post-edit. Pump up the screen, and you can really feel you're there in his company in the places he's taking us around.

Joolz posts right up to date - the link below was to a walk around the Trafalgar Square/Covent Garden district he only undertook on Christmas Eve and posted yesterday. Check out his other walks, often themed to idiosyncratic subjects and places like Bermondsey High Street. There are others who do these walks on youtube, often just with hand-held camera in silence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH-rreUJ3-s

[french frank]

Not much exercise - but first class entertainment

[Bella Kemp]

If you can't get out and want a taste of Highland air, Serial, you might enjoy this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzyM2QA4NR0

[gradus]

If you can't get out and want a taste of Highland air, Serial, you might enjoy this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzyM2QA4NR0

Certainly am, many thanks for posting it.

[french frank]

If you can't get out and want a taste of Highland air, Serial, you might enjoy this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzyM2QA4NR0

Just worked out where Cabride in Scotland is located.

[Bella Kemp]

Just worked out where Cabride in Scotland is located.

[Serial_Apologist]

Another guided London stroll, this time pied pipered by Londoner John Rogers in one of a growing series, some of which are also to be recommended for viewing on youtube. Like Joolz, John aims for less frequented parts of the capital, and he has a nice, slightly less quirky, way of introducing them. Here he's in Georgian Islington and "Little Italy" in Holborn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2br7eJ4tBJM

[Serial_Apologist]

For Vinteuil - (if he's interested!)

A guided walk of Shepherd's Bush - courtesy John Rogers, (see previous post):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qcxg8LvJK-0

There probably isn't anything there that Vints either isn't familiar with or doesn't already know about, but one has to hand it to John's guide as being incredibly knowledgeable.

Through John Rogers I've been able to familiarise myself more with the work of Iain Sinclair, psychic geography man and street walker in the other sense. He's onto something I've been feeling my way towards without having known or articulated it. By some strange means I'd had inklings of, previously separate things are connecting up in the old bonce. Finding this has been wonderful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJZ-BHAgslo

Quote at just after the hour:

"The whole thing of doing these journeys is simply to kind of locate this psychic map of the city on a series of these psychic mappings that re-inforce one's identity. Once you [I.e. Sinclair] write about them you have to come back to them and keep returning to them... over the ground that's no longer the ground necessarily of just London, but it's the ground of your own version of London. That's the way I look at London and have written about it all these years, is that you can never even begin to think you've got the story, that you've nailed it... you can't begin. Every single moment there's an addition, going backwards to tell you that, and something present in the modern world that annoys or sparks you, inspires you".

[vinteuil]

A guided walk of Shepherd's Bush - courtesy John Rogers...

... very many thanks for that, serial. Yes, streets and places I know well - but even just four years on things have changed quite a lot : the old BBC building now completely re-purposed and inhabited as luxury flats, the walkabout pub/venue now incorporated in the adjacent hotel. He caught the scruffy and scuzzier aspects of the Green well - of course we now need a second series covering the salubrious and picturesque corners of the area...