Up Conistone Dib, Yorkshire Dales

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We stopped at the village crossroads, a walker’s picnic on the bench of sandwiches and misshapen chocolate bars, while a pair of cyclists leaned their bikes against the stone wall and debated on which road they would do battle with speeding drivers next. A car stopped, its driver leaning out of the window to ask directions to a pub somewhere hereabouts. None of us could help, but a local woman in wellies could, sending him back the way he came. Summertime, lunchtime, in Conistone.

We had followed the river from Grassington, from the car park above Linton Falls and then upstream before taking a back road popular with speeding cyclists until we reached the village. After lunch our aim was upwards, following the path around the side of some cottages where family played cricket in the garden, right through the middle of their game. Around the back of the last house the limestone rocks from which this part of the world is built started to close around us. This gorge, formed most probably as a glacial drainage channel, was the aim of the walk.

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Sechs Kilometer (Ost) Berlin: Walking from Warschauer Straße

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There is no reason for this walk except for the locations of two appointments; one in Friedrichshain, the other in Hohenschönhausen. I call them both up on Google Maps and ask for the distance between them. A half second later and I have my answer: Six kilometres and an hour and twenty minutes when travelling on foot. Half an hour on a combination of trams. Fifteen minutes in a theoretical car. Outside it is overcast and blustery, but the forecast is that it should remain dry. Walking it is.

I start out from the RAW complex beside the railway tracks, below the bridge at Warschauer Straße. At home I have a reproduction of a 1902 street map of Berlin which tells me that this used to be a railway maintenance yard, part of a network of lines and stations in this corner of the city that linked Berlin with territories far to the east. Now it is a hub of cultural venues; of bars and clubs and galleries; a poster on an outside wall promises a swimming pool. Inside the walls appear to be held up by spray paint and fly posters.

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Elsewhere No.04 – With essays from Prague and Rhoscolyn

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I am extremely proud to report that we have just launched the fourth edition of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. Long-term readers of Under a Grey Sky will know that I am the editor-in-chief of Elsewhere and founded the journal in 2015 with the incredibly talented Julia Stone as the Creative Director. In the journal you will find writing, interviews, photography and reviews all relating somehow to the topic of place, and one of the most striking elements I feel are Julia’s illustrations which can be found throughout.

We have had a great response to previous editions, including nice reviews and quotes from the likes of Robert Macfarlane and Monocle magazine, and we have published some very talented writers that it has been an absolute pleasure to work with. In Elsewhere No.04 I have two essays; one on the subject of memory, literature and memorials on the streets of Prague; and one on memory, nostalgia and landscape on the headland of Rhoscolyn. Aside from my feelings about the journal as a whole, I am very proud of both of these pieces of writing. Here are a couple of brief snippets from both:

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The stories of the Simonside Hills, Northumberland

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We walked up through the forest, following a rising track surrounded by trees, waiting for the moment that it opened out and offered us views east to the calm waters of the North Sea that we had left behind a few hours before, and north to higher hills along the Scottish border. As we walked we told stories, imagining the path we were following had been cleared by dragons, or that the dry-stone walls half-swallowed by the undergrowth were ancient territory markers of beasts and beings that existed only in our imagination. We did not know it then, as we walked through the forest, but the Simonside Hills that we were aiming for have long been a place of stories and storytelling, and we were far from the first to have been inspired by this landscape.

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Out from Craster along St Oswald’s Way

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Craster in the early morning. The North Sea is calm, still like a mill pond. Down below the path oystercatchers pick their way across the rocks of what – at a higher tide – we have named ‘Jacob’s Island’ but which is now very much connected with the mainland. At low tide a rusted ship’s boiler can be seen resting on the damp sands, the legacy of a hundred-year-old wreck and a reminder that while the sea may be calm this morning, the rocks along the Northumbrian shore have claimed many ships over the centuries.

Through the village and there is little sign of life on the streets. Outside the cafe a young woman wipes the overnight moisture from the picnic tables on the terrace, preparing for a day of serving tea, cake and sandwiches to daytrippers and long-distance walkers following St Oswald’s Way along the coast. A drinks delivery is unloaded at the the pub and in the smokehouse someone is working as the smell of kippers drifts out from the stone buildings and down towards the harbour.

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Notes from the end of summer

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On the last day of the summer holidays the sky – which has been clear and blue all week in the Uckermark – is overcast. Down by the shore of the Kölpinsee the mood is melancholy. Starlings flock around an old cherry bush. In the fields cranes stand in groups, preparing for a long journey. We are heading south too, to Berlin, but it won’t take long and we are stretching out the last day of summer, pausing here and there to see what we can see.

At the small beach a man stands by the firepit with a couple of plastic bags, eyeing us suspiciously. He is the only person we have seen out on this Sunday morning, aside for a couple of car drivers. We walk down to the jetty to look out past the reeds and across the choppy waters of the lake. I can feel him watching us, his eyes moving from us to our car and its strange numberplate. We are a long way from Nordrhein-Westfalen, it is true. But none of us are from there and the car does not give us away, indeed it only complicates matters in the small villages of northeastern Brandenburg.

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Democracy without populism: Reading Joseph Roth

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There are certain memories, and certain moments, that linger longer than others. I can remember clearly the first evening, some time around 2007, that I went to the Joseph Roth Diele for the first time. I was there to meet Nicky and Susanne, editors of the wonderful hidden europe magazine who would soon become my close friends. They had chosen the venue for our meeting, and for three people for whom wandering through and writing about central Europe is something of a calling, it was the perfect location.

The Joseph Roth Diele is a cafe bar on Potsdamer Straße, in Berlin Tiergarten, a short walk from Potsdamer Platz and close to where the Tagesspiegel newspaper used to have its offices. It is next door to the house where Roth – a newspaper man himself – lived when he was a working journalist knocking out page after page of incomparable prose in articles that should have been destined for the chip wrapper but which are still being read almost a hundred years after they were written.

Inside the Joseph Roth Diele there is a lot of wood; wood panelling and wooden tables, covered by red and white check table cloths. The floor is covered by black and white tiling, the walls with black and white photographs… when they are not lined with books. Those books are, of course, the ones written by the man whose name is above the awning and who used to live next door. Continue reading →

On the edge of the New Venice, Berlin

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What is it about Venice that draws so many visitors to its islands and canals, that has so many writers and artists searching for inspiration, that captures the imagination of even those who have never been to the city? Jan Morris, who wrote a whole book about the city, described it as “the loveliest city in the world, only asking to be admired.” I am not sure. On my one and only visit I was distinctly underwhelmed. But perhaps I had been expecting too much. The idea of Venice still appeals. A city where the streets are water. A city seemingly floating in the lagoon. And Venice has inspired many imitators. There are New Venices to be found here, there and everywhere. It has been recreated in Las Vegas. It has been recreated, kind of, on the southern fringe of Berlin.

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Feels like coming home? (Rotterdam to Hull)

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The journey began before we even caught a glimpse of a boat, a ship or a patch of water, let alone the open sea. The motorway, having swept across flat fields, canal-flanked and criss-crossed, now swung around Rotterdam and – beyond the pylons and the billboards, the railway wires and a raised bike path that might be a dyke – the first cranes of the Port of Rotterdam appeared against the skyline. It is the largest port in Europe, a fact that I knew and yet was unprepared for as we seemed to drive for ever past a procession of container yards, refineries, warehouses, yet more cranes and – finally – the first glimpse of ships flying flags from all around the world.

At the terminal for the ferry to Hull we stood in line as the ship loomed over us, above the waiting room for foot passengers (there were not many) and the wire fences that kept us all in place while advertising the sun-faded glories of the East Riding of Yorkshire to the travellers about to head across the North Sea. A family kicked a football across an empty patch of concrete. Motorbike riders compared horsepower and routes. Cyclists compared panniers and aching legs. We walked down the line and counted the numberplates.

GB. D. F. B. DK. NL. White letters on a blue background, surrounded by stars.

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The tram to Hohenschönhausen, Berlin

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On the corner of Prinzenallee and Osloer Straße I wait for the tram, standing on the platform of the stop between the currywurst Imbiss where they grade their sauces by how red it will make your face and the old pub on the corner that was a den for serious drinkers when we first moved to this neighbourhood five years ago but which now sings over its polished wooden tables as the canary in the coalmine of gentrification. Except, as I wait for the tram and look down Prinzenallee, past the pub towards the Spielothek and its slot machines, towards the Späti with used mobile phones in the window and the line of kebab shops, halal butchers and shops advertising cheap calls home to wherever home may be in this neighbourhood with the highest number of foreign-born residents in the city, I can’t imagine that you could gentrify Gesundbrunnen. It was once a spa town, north of the city. Then came the railways and industry and then the bombs of the Americans and the British and as the Berlin Wall cut it off from its southern and eastern neighbours the industry had long fled, never to return. The printworks is a cultural space. The factory on Osloer Straße is a children’s museum. The bus depot is a dance studio. The queues at the unemployment office are long.

Here comes the tram. It is an imposter, one of the few lines in this city that breaches the old East-West border. Look at a tram map of the city and it is like the Berlin Wall never came down. But it did, the first hole opening at Bornholmer Straße in November 1989, across the bridge that the tram I am waiting for will soon take me as I travel from Gesundbrunnen into Prenzlauer Berg. The bridge rises up, over the top of the railway lines and past the allotment gardens and the Lidl supermarket where the checkpoint once stood. Into the east, towards my destination. Continue reading →