A Psychogeography of the Six Towns: city|walking|poetry

Stoke on Trent is a post-industrial city comprised of six original towns, resulting in a polycentric conurbation with six administrative, cultural and civic centres. Each has a town hall, a concert hall and a Victorian park at its centre. The decline of traditional industries, dis-investment and consequent social issues have created a palimpsest of industrial heritage, landmarks and personal stories and histories.

This paper employs the practices of psychogeography to record the experience Psychogeography is a mode of urban exploration developed by the Situationist International group of writers and artists in the 1950s and 1960s. Guy Debord and Asger Jorn were key figures in the movement and they established the key activity of the dérive or drift. The urban drift was a radical political and artistic act that sought to explore how the human body and psyche were acted upon by the forces, fabric and landmarks of the modern city. But they were not just concerned with the iconic spaces of cities such as Paris and Berlin, they were also fascinated by the banal—those aspects of urban experience that are barely noticed by the urban inhabitant but which direct them in their daily lives and journeys. The drift is both objective and subjective, rational and impressionistic—it would not be random, but neither would it be planned. The drift is a method of mapping the sensations of urban wandering while conceptualising the forces which shape urban lives. Michel de Certeau, in his essay ‘Walking in the City’, describes walkers as a potential locus of non-conformist and resistant urban practices whose footsteps generate a ‘chorus’ of ‘pedestrian speech acts’ which combine in ‘the long poem of walking’.

City as fragments; cutting, atomic, grain, syllable, phoneme.

Erosion of dissipating boundaries; entropies, fields and particles.

Walking the city; kinesis and the rhythm of body and breath in space.

Stoke on Trent is unique in that it is a poly-centric city made up of six towns, federated in 1910. Each town (Longton, Stoke, Fenton, Hanley, Tunstall and Burslem) has its own centre with a town hall, library, civic hall and square. Between the main centres are liminal spaces with awkward and often contested identities. The city has a rich industrial history of pottery, mining and steel making, much of it erased or hidden now, but with a palimpsest of economic, social and civic traces apparent along many of its streets, canals and abandoned railways.

This project will combine the insights of psychogeography with urban theory, architectural history, urban planning and poetical responses to urban phenomena through a series of semi-structured walks around each of the six towns.

The result will be a pictorial, historical, mapped and geo-poetic account of Stoke on Trent and its polyvocal identity, as well as an exploration of the practices of psychogeography in a contemporary setting with a significant industrial, civic and architectural heritage.