Rivering the Roding started in the mud above; September 2014, as you can see if you scroll to the bottom (this one of many* returns!). These tweets are obviously incidental scraps but they do suggest or ghost if not exactly tell a story (again; bottom up). It’s a story about London, thinking like a river, which requires articulation (#rivering) and for me to show what such ‘thinking’ might be. I am coming in to land (circling back and now very close to the muddy confluence), and yes, you can start to hold your breath. Please 😉
I really didn’t know what I was starting when I first walked up the River Roding in September 2014, more or less just to see what happened when I did so, and with three other under-known or -explored or -articulated tributaries to come. I intended them to make up a single chapter in a larger -vast!- book on London; House of Trees.
Always, though, I found my way back to the Roding, especially to the mud of it all at the confluence and the mudflats nearby, at low tidal dawns and equinoxes. Standing, sitting, lying there (while the massive scale of development all about had stilled and during its revival at speed). Photographing, filming, and filming, and filming the endlessly variant mud-of-it-all, to try to capture what it was I was seeing in that mud…
In the end, I couldn’t keep away from the Roding itself and as a whole, realising that it was the only way to come at writing about London as a city in the 21st century that interested me and which could engage that unique experience in visceral, urgently exact and powerfully original ways too. Looking at it awry. #Rivering emerged as my private reference for articulating* these things, and discovering which of them would float down the river with me…
More? Soon…
NOTES FROM A FRUITSTORE 