Psychogeography – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

A walk from Petersfield over the South Downs to Bishop’s Waltham

From the banks of the Rother (almost) via Stroud, Ramsdean, the source of the Meon (just about), Frogmore, East Meon, Old Winchester Hill, Droxford and Upper Swanmore to the source of the Hamble (very nearly). Featuring an erudite parrot, Edward Thomas and John Owen Smith, William Cobbett and Gilbert White, Charles II and Winston Churchill, Eric Ravilious and a 1791 chic doggerel tombstone, and two extinct railways.

August’s tweets from London’s Singing Organ-Grinder

Bit late. Twitter trouble. Apologies for any distress caused. Money-back guarantee applies.

London organ-grinder tweets for September 2017

Barrel/street organ stuff.

Napoleon as Harlequin, tumbler, fraudster, monkey (?): Come, come, honest gents, have you ever seen a comedy like that!

Transvestite barrel organ dancers in 1930s Whitechapel and the 1860s London West End

With acrobats, clowns, and Doris and Thisbe, goddesses of wind.

Acrobats whirling to the sound of a barrel organ on a chain carousel at the National Fair, Bergen, Norway, 1928.

Hackney Brook restoration scheme

Iain Sinclair wrote of when “global warming rolls a warm sea [up] the course of the old Hackney Brook.” The flow’s going to be the other way. Let me explain.