Urban explorers on the community channel
My documentary Urban Explorers: Quests for Myth Mystery and Meaning will be showing on the Community Channel starting today for those of you with a...
Read MoreAuthor: Bradley L Garrett
Britain by night
In late August, Winch and I were part of a program on ITV called Britain by Night. The show is now off-air but if you’re interested in seeing it I have a direct link...
Read MoreCapital striation
In the new issue of Photoworks Magazine, I have a piece called Capital Striation (pp 80-83). In the article, I highlight the increasing spatial constriction taking place today in cities and offer up urban exploration as a tactic of counter-surveillance that renders the city more transparent and playful. Photos are by myself and Dan Salisbury. For those who would like to read the article but can’t afford the issue, here is the text. Capital Striation The modern city is undergoing constant mutation, each cycle offering up its own stratigraphic vernacular. As the great public works projects of earlier ages that have served our cities fall into disrepair and, eventually, are knocked down or sink into material obscurity, they are increasingly replaced by private spaces, often funded by ‘outside’ investors who build not for people, community or nation but for profit. Construction projects, pitched in terms of ‘return on investment’, are only valued to the point at which they do not contribute to a bottom line. The majority lacking public access, these spaces are revealed as primarily economic rather than cultural zones. In a sense, the city has become striated with dividing lines, often invisible, that begin to segregate action and reaction according to specific spatial requirements. The ‘wrong’ actions in the ‘wrong’ places provoke terror alerts and institutional panic. The restructuring of the Isle of Dogs and the...
Read MoreApocalypse now: thinking about ruins and radiation
I will be speaking at this event on the 28th November at the Whitworth Art Gallery. The event is free but please book a place if you would like to attend. A half-day seminar looking at artistic and scientific responses to industrial and other modern ruins, with Jane and Louise Wilson, Paul Dobraszczyk (University of Manchester), Tim Edensor (Manchester Metropolitan University), Bradley Garrett (University of Oxford), Jeff Hughes (University of Manchester), Dylan Trigg (University of Sussex) Ruins have come to occupy a central place in visual culture: as images of the aftermath of acts of terrorism or the resulting war on terror; the ruin of the housing market after the recent financial crisis; the deserted towns and villages surrounding Chernobyl and Fukishima; or a post-apocalyptic obsession in cinema. This seminar will examine contemporary notions of ruin and ruination, in relation to architecture, the city and history, and calling on a diverse range of ruin obsessives from the fields of philosophy, cultural geography, art and architectural history. Signifiers of both civilisation and barbarism, creativity and destruction, ruins call into question the solid, the enduring and the permanent, representing as they do either the end of the old or the beginning of something new. We seek to learn from this challenge presented by ruins, whether they be created by the constructive but often brutal processes of modernisation, or their opposites –...
Read MoreArchiving informal social histories
My new piece on archiving informal social histories is up on the British Library website on the Economic and Social Research Council Politics and government...
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