We’ve been working with some great partners and co-creators in the last few weeks to bring together Sound Walk Sunday / September

One such partner has been George Fort from Placecloud app –  the app that allows you to record your opinions of a place, building, park, river or even a tree and have your story told as a “placecast” on the Placecloud app and website.

Towards the end of August, on the Strand in London, we ran a ‘placecast walkshop’ with George called  Storytelling for places #mylandmarks in which we demonstrated how straightforward it was to record a placecast.  We were joined by two experts Andy Williamson, an historian who researches and writes about hotels and Mitch Ferel a music hall performer who has a passion about the heritage and history of music hall. You can listen to the placecasts that Andy and Mitch made during the walkshop while they stood just yards from the place at which they were talking about.

We thought we would try our own hand at making a placecast but we found it very difficult doing it ‘off-the-cuff’ so instead we wrote a 250 word script and read from that about our chosen place Bonnington Square and nearby Harleyford Road community garden in Vauxhall you can listen to what we said here .

That got us thinking about how to encourage other people to either record a placecast or to write a story about a place and so was born Flash #mylandmarks competition in which we ask you to write a story about a place in fewer than 250 words. We are hoping to have enough stories about places to create a chapbook anthology. To make it a little bit more enticing, we are going to hire an actor to voice the winning stories so that they can be published as placecasts on the Placecloud website.

We are also looking forward to celebrating National Poetry Day on Thursday, 3rd October, and as we did last year,  we have devised a haiku workshop in which you get to compose and recite haiku on a route through the City of London.

Sound Walk September continues with more events being added every week and we would like to learn from you which are your favourites, so we’ve created a website page to allow you to register and vote on your favourite from 2019. Please register and vote

Isaac Newton by Eduardo Paolozzi – British Library forecourt

Last week, we joined Museum Co-creator Tim Ingram-Smith and his wife Gail Astbury for walking tour of public art from Kings Cross Square to Regent’s Place, and were joined by local residents and passionate art followers.  As the evening drew in, the sunset gave a perfect backdrop to many of the works, and Tim had researched the route so well, that darkness actually provided the opportunity to see work inside buildings too!  Gail who has several art pieces in public spaces in London is going to lead the next Art Exploration probably around the neighbourhood surrounding Victoria station – more details will appear shortly.

Tomorrow marks the first in a number of global events under the tag of #ClimateStrike It feels somewhat glib to write that we’ve been advocating for a reduction in the use of fossil fuels for more than two decades however, we are delighted that increasing number of people are beginning to recognise that society’s love of the motorcar should now end and that instead we should look forward to using human powered transport – let’s get walking and cycling, at the very least to do our daily errands, and possibly help save the planet.

All about walking blog posting is unpredictable – if it’s raining biblical downpours then a blog post is more likely to appear, in most other weather conditions we are out walking and not blogging on a keyboard…..