Writing in Built Up Areas
In contrast to the pictures, the text is full of details, both visible and invisible to the eye; there are plenty of historical facts and everyday trivia unearthed by Rogers as he plans and goes on his expeditions that take him as far as Erith Pier in the east and Hounslow Heath in the west. Some of this information comes from books whose titles range from the esoteric The 21 Lessons of Merlin: A Study in Druid Magic & Lore to the practical County of London Plan, 1943; the rest is obtained through fieldwork. On one such occasion, eager to find out what wassailing is, Rogers joins a group of locals in Hackney for this fertility ritual, which involves singing and drinking to fruit trees, an unorthodox way to explore the Lea Valley on a cold January day.
Anna Aslanyan reviews John Rogers‘ This Other London.
A Visit to the African Museum
There is something pathological, it occurs to me, in our enthusiasm for the picaresque aspects of the suffering of the disaffected and our despisal of the economic and political arrangements by which this enthusiasm is made possible: in our fervor for seeking out spectacles that provoke our outrage and our failure to see that our desire to have our outrage provoked is a symptom of our belonging to an economic class that is often, however indirectly, responsible for the spectacles that provoke this outrage. It is derisible, I then think, to cultivate an expertise in the suffering of the excluded and thereby gain ourselves a university chair or a post at a publishing house from which to declaim the evils of this suffering and exclusion to others who, like ourselves, depend far too intimately on the mechanisms by which this suffering and exclusion are produced ever really to break their ties to them. The intolerance suffusing my thoughts must relate to my irritation at having passed several hours on a bus after more than a week of uninterrupted work, because while the realities that upset me never go away, on a different day I might have been content or even cheerful.
By Adrian West.