Dominique and I had our meeting last Thursday. After a general catch up it was down to business and thinking about what we are wanting to be doing and where we want to be going. I was looking at ESP (Extra Special People) http://extraspecialpeople.org and how they offer away days / weekends to their members to visit other groups and places. Without a space of our own why would a group such as ESP choose to visit us?
Dominique hit the nail on the head when she said “we don’t have a physical space but we have a cultural landscape’ and then we explored designing tours we could take people on and what places are important to us here in the East of England. My last post sounded a bit like a Grande Tour of places visited and shows seen.
Anyway the main reason we were meeting was to discuss an invitation from Aid and Abet http://aidandabet.co.uk/ in Cambridge to be part of their next project Space Exchange which opens in the autumn and the ideas of tours and touring became more focused.
Working with Aid and Abet on this project will help us to
a. Do something: tour & talk
b. Present something physical in their project and/or curated selling space
c. Make links and open up relationships with others.
Our conversation was lively over cups of tea and coffee and we have focused on the idea of the tour as our starting point: we both have interests in this area: Dominique with William Cobbett and for me with the Baedecker Guides.
William Cobbett went riding around the country on horseback writing down what he saw from the point of view of both farmer and social reformer in the 1820’s resulting in Rural Rides published in two volumes: http://www.archive.org/details/ruralrides01cobb
The Baedecker Guides have been published since 1832 and are still going strong today, used by foreign tourists visiting the Great Britain (amongst other places) the guides were also used to identify targets for bombing in World War II. Norwich was on the list and subsequently bombed over 2 nights. Cambridge was to be targeted also as were other towns and cities in East Anglia. My primary interest in the guides is the inclusion of industrial sites of interest (to visit and presumably been able to gain access to) and how these would have been of genuine interest at the time.
I spoke with CJ Mahony at Aid and Abet on Friday with our initial thoughts and I have to get it all written into a proposal for next week. I hope our ideas can be developed further in collaboration with another group involved in the project. More to follow as ideas as discussions develop.
Nicola Naismith
