Category Archives: Reflections

Still trying to make sense of South Africa

(above: View from a balcony, Cape Town)

With the death of Nelson Mandela recently, and the acres of newsprint and billions of pixels devoted to the past, present and future of South Africa now that he has gone, I have been thinking a lot about Mandela and the country that I visited three and a half years ago during the World Cup, the final of which happened to be his last, major public appearance. I have also been thinking further back, to those posters on the wall at our home in the 1980s, the two concerts we went to as kids at Wembley Stadium, and standing in the drizzle of Millennium Square in Leeds a decade later as he addressed the crowd.

I thought about the fact that Nelson Mandela was – along with Vaclav Havel – one of the heroes of my political education, and one of the inspirations for my long-standing and continuing interest in societies in transition and how we manage our collective past and memory to move forward to a more positive future. Both men were flawed, because – after all – everyone is and must be, but in post-apartheid South Africa and post-communist Czechoslovakia (and later the Czech Republic), both Mandela and Havel offered examples of how we can bring together a fractured and damaged society, and how appealing to the good in people, the positive and the progressive, can shape that society for the better.

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Little Langdale

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By Chris Hughes:

I have driven along the small valley of Little Langdale many times. En route for the Wrynose Pass and Hard Knott and then on to Wasdale in the 1960s, over the Blea Tarn road and down into Great Langdale for the climbing on Gimmer, Raven Crag, White Ghyll and Pavey Ark and visiting the hugely impressive Big Hole slate quarry containing the vast and wonderful cathedral hole, but rarely stopping very much back then – just the occasional pint in the tiny back bar of The Three Shires Inn. With our children we often visited the ford on the track to Tilberthwaite to play in the clear waters of the River Brathay but it is many years since we had actually stopped in the valley and spent some time there. So when visit to Grange-over-Sands was necessary it gave us the excuse – unnecessary really – to have a short stay at The Three Shires Inn and revisit the little gem of the south Lakes, Little Langdale. The hotel was excellent and to be recommended – especially their winter offers – but it was the day, a Monday in late November, which made a little gem into a real, and hugely valued jewel of a place.

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A journey through memory and the imagined city

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I arrive in Berlin at Ostbahnhof, from where I catch the train to Alexanderplatz. They are ready for Christmas in the heart of the square, the wooden market stalls clustered on the wide expanse of concrete. Smoke and steam rises and the crowds stream and warm along the paths of an imagined village attempting to return the visitors to some mythological past on the very site where the leaders of a regime attempted to create a new mythology for the future. Is that what I think, looking down on the scene? Not really. Instead I think, like the people do, of a sausage and some glühwein, distracted by the bright lights of the department store, ushering in those of us who are searching for the perfect gift.

No shopping today – I am not sure who I would buy for – and so I walk away, towards Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße. It is darker here, just the street lights and their reflection in the damp pavement. Soon, at some point in the future, there will be fashion stores and burritos that will be exported to Wittenbergplatz, but not yet. Just the old Kneipe with the wooden benches outside and a cavernous kebab shop built by an investor who was ahead of his time. I wonder if, in years from now, he walks the Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße and regrets calling it quits. If he had only hung on a year or so longer…

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As darkness falls: a walk through Berlin

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On Thursday afternoon I took a walk through Berlin. I had decided to follow the Berlin Wall Trail from Potsdamer Platz to Ostbahnhof for my project Traces of Border, a walk of five kilometres through the south of the city centre along the boundary between the districts of Mitte and Kreuzberg. As always with these walks it was a combination of the familiar and new discoveries, but for the first time I was walking as darkness encroached on the city which gave it a very different feel.

It was my own fault, only starting to walk at about half past three, and at this time of year the streetlights have already flickered into action and the main roads are a stream of white lights approaching and red lights retreating by the middle of the afternoon. Through the half-light I followed the line of cobblestones that marks the route of the wall past the Topography of Terror and through Checkpoint Charlie and its collection of memorials, exhibitions, souvenir shops and fast food joints, and then the site where Peter Fechter died and the enormous Axel-Springer building that houses publishing company of the same name.

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Alpacas be praised, Saltaire

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The sound of an alpaca’s hooves on tarmac, a muted cricket appeal and a group warming up on a band stand set against a backdrop of giant Victorian industrial architecture. By Tom Salmon:

A walk around Roberts Park in Saltaire, a world heritage site near Bradford in the north of England, earlier this year gave us an opportunity to reflect on the impact that the industrial revolution still has on the way that we organise our lives. It’s August, the Sunday after the bank holiday – a Victorian invention created in 1871 – and families are walking around the park enjoying weekend time together – the weekend-off-work concept started for most people in the 1890s.

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Walking the old customs wall, Berlin

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The idea for the walk came from Patrick, who had sent me a copy of his map. It showed the route of the old customs wall of Berlin, a fifteen kilometre circle that until 1861 was the limit of the city. There is nearly nothing remaining of the old wall today – just a set of foundations not far from Anhalter Bahnhof and – of course – the Brandenburg Gate, but it lives on in other ways. The route of the U-Bahn line through Kreuzberg for instance and the stations along the way; Kottbusser Tor, Hallesches Tor, Schlesisches Tor… the gates are no more but they live on in these names.

Patrick had walked the route of the old customs wall before and invited me to join him as he did it again. Along the way we would see, as our footsteps followed the path of the invisible wall, how it shaped the development of the city and how you can still see its influence more than 150 years after the city broke through its limitations to become the Weltstadt of the early twentieth century, its population swelling to a number that the old wall could never have contained.

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Sand, Starlings and The Small Heart of Things

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Julian Hoffman writes the wonderful blog Notes from Near and Far, and last week he celebrated the publication of his book, The Small Heart of Things:

The two Prespa Lakes are split by a flat isthmus, a spur of sand which pelicans glide across in summer as they swap one body of water for the other. Those two lakes, though, were once one, a single blue bowl encircled by steep slopes. Over thousands of years, silt and sediment from the mountains were sluiced down their gullies and creeks into the river that drains the valley. As the river emptied, spilling its mountain hoard into the lake – all the spoil of sand and silt that had been worn down by wind, rain and time – those tiny grains built up in a slow process of accumulation until they spread out across the water, building a bridge one particle at a time, turning one lake into two.

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Cities built on sand

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By Ian Hill

I cross the square, and the damp sand squeaks beneath my feet. Wet from rain, it seams the cobbles of the pavements, sifts into the gutters and drains. The sand smells of gunmetal and earth, with a scent of the sea, as though tides once lapped these ancient squares. It is a reminder of our proximity to water, the shifting base of rivers on which we build our monuments to progress.

Here, sand is like the innards of the city; its hidden viscera, its soft core beneath a carapace of buildings and roads. I pass a construction site where a vacant plot is being excavated for development, and I see a vast hole in the ground, foundations for a new building, which is layered with stacks of yellow and ochre sand, like the glass lighthouse-shaped paperweights I remember from beach holidays of my youth, filled with striped layers of coloured sediment, like a history of geological time. As the construction deepens, older and older layers are exposed, each one a slightly different colour to the last, each one telling a story of water, holding a memory of currents gently teasing the sand into ripples and banks.

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On Ilkley Moor…

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This weekend we were back in Yorkshire for just a couple of days, celebrating a very special birthday with close friends and family, including quite a few Under a Grey Sky contributors! The images and text below were actually put together during a trip a month or so ago… this time around there were no views from the airplane as Leeds Bradford was shrouded in mist. In fact, we were unable to land and we were diverted to Doncaster…

Coming in to land at Leeds Bradford airport I look out of the window and can see Ilkley Moor, squat and smooth, not so much towering over the surrounding towns and villages as hulking in its presence. Perhaps it is because we don’t have much in the way of moorland in Germany that the sight of it always makes me feel as if I have returned home, even if the wheels have yet to touch down on the runway tarmac.

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Walking the City

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“I love to read about the city, to live the city, to walk the city.”

This quote comes from a fascinating New Yorker article about William Helmreich, a sixty-seven year old sociology professor who has just spent four years walking every block of New York, some six thousand miles, and whose new book about his walks looks like it is going to be an absolutely fascinating addition to the literature of exploring our urban environment on two feet. As readers of Under a Grey Sky will know, this is something close to my own heart, as walking the city has become something of a passion of mine, not only through corners of Berlin or elsewhere that are new to me, but also by stepping out the front door and taking the time to explore my immediate surroundings.

During the summer I was walking to Pankstraße U-Bahn station. I do this probably five or more times a week, usually along a short stretch of the Panke river, peaceful and secluded, before emerging through a covered walkway onto the Badstraße – a bustling city street filled with kebab takeaways, call shops and travel agents… the tell-tale signs of a neighbourhood with a large immigrant population. These signals – the type of shops, the people on the pavement, the adverts in the kiosks – help us read neighbourhoods and districts, in the same way the buildings can give clues to the history of a particular quarter, and even the proliferation of election posters and how they are targeted in one part of the city compared to the next can help us make an educated guess as to which way one constituency might swing compared to another across the invisible administrative boundary.

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