Category Archives: Diary

Discovering the ruins at twilight, Berlin

The subtitle of this blog includes the phrase “dispatches from beyond the front door” and what I was getting at when I came up with it was the idea that you don’t have to look far for adventure and discovery, and that to find something new among the familiar you just have to look up or down, stop for a second, and basically just open your eyes. I thought of this again this morning as I read this short but interesting article on the polis blog by Min Li Chan, that included a quote from the Australian writer Gail Jones:

I’m very interested in psychogeography, and the idea that we must walk around our own place with an active intelligence and a degree of radical attention to what is there. … We ought not be the flaneur who is idly and languidly consuming the sights of the city, we must look at its shapes, at its motions, attend to its sounds, corridors between spaces, the unexpected things looming up or falling away as we turn a corner. Continue reading →

Among the trees and above the ruins, Beelitz

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The Beelitz Heilstätten stands in the forest some 35 minutes by train south of Berlin’s Zoologischer Garten station. This hospital and sanatorium complex opened in 1898 as one of the biggest tuberculosis clinics anywhere in the world, and by the outbreak of WW1 had developed to include its own power station, water tower, laundry and restaurant, farm and post office. Between the wars it developed even further to occupy over 200 hectares of the forest, and following its use as a military hospital during WW2 it was occupied by Soviet forces until their final withdrawal in 1994.

The Beelitz that we explored earlier this week under soft October sunshine is the crumbling ruins of an almighty complex abandoned with the Soviet retreat and pretty much left to nature and the attentions of (sub-)urban explorers and graffiti artists. The buildings are landmark protected, but the scale of the complex makes it hard to imagine what kind of project could bring life back to these structures in the woods. And so they are left, trees and plants growing on balconies and roof-tops, the buildings slowly being swallowed by the forest as people walk amongst them, for it seems that ruins – and not just of the antique variety – hold an endless fascination for many. Continue reading →

In the shadow of Schmitz… running Leipzig and the Battle of the Nations

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It is strange to visit a place that has already appeared on your own website to which you have never seen with your own eyes before. Katrin visited Leipzig’s Monument to the Battle of the Nations (Völkerschlachtdenkmal in German) a couple of years ago and wrote this post for Under a Grey Sky. But even her pictures could not do justice to the looming scale of the thing, as we arrived to face it on Saturday afternoon as I registered for the Leipzig Half Marathon that was taking place the following morning.

Before we got there, I was wondering what my feelings would be when I came face to face with this looming presence. Monuments built to commemorate battles, especially when triumphalist in conception and execution, always make me a little uneasy. The monument was built in 1913, but the battle itself was 100 years earlier, when on the fields south of Leipzig the combined armies of Prussia, Russia and Austria gathered to defeat Napoleon’s army in what was the biggest mass battle of the 19th century. From Katrin’s blog: Continue reading →

On foot through Epping Forest

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Buckhurst Hill

The underpass beneath the tracks at Buckhurst Hill tube station had that smell, that mix of urine and rain and absence of natural light, and so I quickened my step. I was running, not from anything in particular but because this is what I do most mornings and just because I was in Essex I saw no reason to change my habits. On the ramp up, back to fresh air, my footsteps startled an Arsenal fan, dressed for the match and on his way into town.

I had no real plan of where I was going to run, except a quick look at Google Maps offered up a green space on the other side of the railway from where we were staying. Lord’s Bushes and Knighton Wood. From the tube station I picked my way through residential streets until I came to a road called Forest Edge, and began to look for a way in. Forest Edge, because this collection of trees surrounded by the suburban streets of Buckhurst Hill and the north end of Woodford belong to Epping Forest, that ancient woodland that stretches from Forest Gate, not far from Stratford and the extravagant and impressive folly of the Olympic Park in the south, to Epping in the north. Continue reading →

On cities and a bridge across the river, Erfurt

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The other day, as I was walking with a friend through the suburbs of Hamburg, I was telling her about two views of two particular cities that will live long with me. They are the two views that I see in my head whenever someone speaks of the anonymity of the metropolis, or a landscape that has been entirely shaped by human hands.

The first was in Beirut, standing on the balcony of a friend’s apartment to talk to another friend on a fuzzy and expensive mobile phone connection about the birth of his first child. As we talked I looked out across the rooftops, a jumble of buildings, of balconies and air-conditioning units, the streets invisible between them and the sea a hazy, unreal blue, seemingly miles in the distance. The second was from a hotel room in Tokyo and also high up, with high rise office blocks and hotels and a sense, even more so than in Beirut, of a city where every space was built upon and where nothing was more than a couple of decades old. The only trees I could see from that Tokyo hotel room surrounded nearby shrines, tiny green splodges of colour on a canvas otherwise painted in concrete and glass.

It is not that there is anything particularly wrong with this, and in any case it would be unfair to characterise Beirut in this way as during my time there we moved quickly between the city, the sea and the mountains. I found both cities fascinating and I have a strong desire to return. It is just that these views are what I think about when I imagine the cityscape that I love to visit but have no desire to live in, views that fascinated and repelled me at the same time.And I still find it a little odd that although I never really thought of myself as someone who would live long-term in a city, I have done so ever since I was eighteen (which, as suddenly occurs to me as I write this, is half of my life). Continue reading →

Summer swimming and the Wedding Riviera

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This morning, as I walked with Lotte down the street towards the U-Bahn on her way to the second day of the school year, we noticed that we could see our breath in the morning air. Is the summer over already in August? It certainly feels that way, with school returning and the football season long begun. So it seems like a good time to reflect on the summer and to return to the grey skies of this website.

Our main trip this summer was to the Thuringian forest and then on to the Ardennes, with more trees and plenty of Trappist beer. There will be more on that journey in the coming weeks, but in some ways it was an unrepresentative fortnight when it comes to this particular summer as, if there was a theme of the last few months, it was finding some lake or other in which to jump in.

Almost all of our swimming (we could call it ‘wild swimming’ but then, how wild is it when a little further down the shore a couple of retired women are preparing for the morning swim, even the smallest lake has a Badestelle and every Berliner or Brandenburger has their own favourite lake?) took place in the waters around Berlin. There are hundreds, if not thousands of lakes in Brandenburg, and we found some pretty special ones. The Gamensee near Werneuchen. The Steckelsdorfer See near Rathenow. Both were connected to nearby campsites, but it felt like we had the lake, the water, the reeds and the big skies all to ourselves. Continue reading →

The Lost Neighbours of Rathenow, Brandenburg

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At the harbour in Rathenow on a sunny, summer’s day, the atmosphere is fine. People take pictures of the “lock spitters”, a memorial to the piece workers who used to kill time whilst waiting for the barges to pick them up by holding spitting competitions against the canal. Others queue at the specially-erected wooden info stands for their maps and tickets for the BUGA, Germany’s premier flower show being hosted in 2015 by Rathenow and other communities in the west of Brandenburg. The BUGA has brought many people to the town, and it seems well-scrubbed in anticipation of their visit. The streets are clean and the bicycles lanes smooth, the balconies of the GDR-era Plattenbau filled with flowers, and every shop and cafe seems to be welcoming the flower-peepers to their corner of Westhavelland, proud of their town.

But as we cross the bridge from the harbour and into the old town – a collection of cobbled streets around the church – I get the sense of something missing… the old town itself. For in Rathenow, the Altstadt only contains a handful of pre-war buildings. The red brick church (itself needing massive renovation over recent decades) and some half-timbered houses, but otherwise most of the the old town seems to have been built either during the years when Rathenow was part of the German Democratic Republic, or even since. It is not that it is bad, or it is ugly, but just you cannot help but get a sense of loss as you walk the streets… and you want to find out more.

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On the Regional Express

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In the bowels of Berlin Hauptbahnhof the platforms are lined with trains that will take you are long way from the German capital. Czech railways. Polish railways. The slim lines of the ICE. But on platform eight – which is thronged with young people as three separate school groups have all just arrived for a few days in Berlin – there is a small train waiting, in orange and green, whose final destination is about an hour out of the city and the town of Rathenow, close to the Sachsen-Anhalt border but nevertheless still firmly in the state of Brandenburg.

But a train is a train, and there is something special about Germany’s regional expresses. Often they are – as this one is – double-deckers, which mean they offer a fine view down over the embankments and fences that line the railway into back gardens or the forest, across the fields and the lakes. They move slow enough that you get a sense of really moving through the landscape, and they stop at every small settlement along the way. Berlin-Staaken. Dallgow-Döberitz. Elstal. These are all places we will pass through on the RE4 from Berlin to Rathenow, and although they may be small, some of them have their own stories to tell.

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The Possibility of an Island

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The Possibility of an Island is a better title than it is a book. Indeed, although I have read it I cannot for the life of me recall a single scene from Michel Houellebecq’s book, but the title has stayed with me. To me islands always seemed to be filled with possibility; they are an endless source of fascination. Perhaps it is because they are contained, a world in and of itself, that can be explored and mapped. There is an end to an island. A natural border.

A few weeks ago I read about a short journey I have always wanted to take. The writer Richard Carter had climbed into a canoe on Coniston in the Lake District and, slowly but surely, made his way across the lake to Wild Cat Island. No matter that the island’s real name is Peel Island, for any readers of Arthur Ransome’s wonderful Swallows and Amazons will know what it is really called, and thirty five years after reading the book for the first time (about six or seven years before I did), Richard discovered the magic was based on reality:

We drift past a low, rocky promontory and some rocks. This is so right: it’s just like in the book! We’re almost past it before I see it: back to our right—I mean starboard—a steep-sided, narrow channel leads straight into the heart of the island. A few feet to either side of here, and the channel would be invisible, obscured by rocks and headland. This is the place! We’ve found the secret harbour! Continue reading →

What can be found at the end of the line… Wittenau, Berlin

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It has been a crazy month. It appears that launching Elsewhere, a new journal of place, even more than a blog about adventures beyond the front door, means you spend more time in front of a screen, behind piles of paper, or in climate-controlled storage facilities (that are at least a kind of Elsewhere because they could indeed be anywhere) than you do exploring the world around you. I am reading submissions based on places in Australia and Rwanda, the islands of Scotland and the two sides of Budapest, and it is all very inspiring if only we had the t…

No. There is no need for this. In my diary I have a note, scribbled every Monday. UaGS. It means don’t neglect the blog. Don’t forget the blog. But I have been neglecting and forgetting, and then I remember… adventures beyond the front door. That is how all this started in the first place. You can go to Rwanda and leave it all behind. You can go to the islands of Scotland. Or you can take a morning and, if you live where I live, you can go to Wittenau.

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