The Library: The Moor, by William Atkins

Review: Paul Scraton

What do we read when we look at a landscape? What do we see, and perhaps as importantly, what do we feel? I have lived in Berlin for a decade and half, a move eastwards from my childhood home in West Lancashire first to Leeds and then to the German capital. Until I left England the landscapes of my imagination were always raised ones – the sea cliffs of Anglesey or the mountains of Snowdonia – and in Germany I had to learn to love the different and distinct attractions of the flatlands, the forests and lakes of Brandenburg or the big skies and low dunes of the Baltic.

Alongside the mountains and cliffs of North Wales, the other landscape of my imagination and the one that I would think of when I thought of “home”, was the moors. Living in Leeds for four years and returning ever since to visit family and friends, moorland spotted through a car window on the drive from Liverpool or Manchester airport gives me that first feeling of a sense of return… to land at Leeds Bradford is to play “spot the rocks”, searching through that tiny cabin window for a glimpse of the Cow & Calf above Ilkley and the brooding expanse of moors squatting above the towns and villages of Wharfedale below.

So it was not surprising that, standing in an English-language bookshop in Berlin, I was drawn to William Atkins’ The Moor and its cover image of boggy ground and tough grass. Subtitled A journey into the English wilderness I reached for the book as a salve to a bout of homesickness that comes every so often. What I found when I opened the pages was a captivating journey from south to north, from Bodmin Moor to the White Lands of the Otterburn Training Area, and a book that combines travelogue, history, ecology, literature, folklore and reportage in the way of the very best writing on place.

There is much that is thought-provoking about Atkins’ book, not least the fact this very “English wilderness” has been, for thousands of years, shaped by humans. From the Mesolithic tribes to the Romans, humans cleared and burned the uplands that would grow ever more hostile as global temperatures cooled. And so the people moved ever lower, felling more trees and clearing more land as they did so, the moors following them ever deeper into the valley.

It was man, then – man, with the climate, but not ‘nature’ alone – that made the moors. And it was man who continued to shape them: sheep grazing under the abbeys discouraged the resurgence of all but the least palatable vegetation: mat-grass, purple moor-grass, cotton-grass.

In recent centuries the moorland streams were dammed to create reservoirs to provide water for the ever-expanding cities of the industrial age, and heather was encouraged for the raising of grouse to be shot by guns of the great and the good. Indeed, it is only in exploring a restricted zone that had been declared around a military base over halfway through his journey that Atkins finds an expanse of moorland that has not been burned, grazed or afforested.

If man was to be eradicated, here was what would happen.

The other big question that The Moor inspires the reader to ask is that of land ownership and the impact of this human influence, not just on the moorland itself but for the communities below. I read The Moor as much of northern England was under water, as those “hundred-year floods” returned for the second or third time in recent memory, and the book explains exactly how burning and land management above, in order that a few rich folks can shoot a Land Rover’s boot-full of birds, can have catastrophic impacts on the people living below.

These are just a couple of aspects of what makes The Moor such a fascinating read. There is also plenty of literature, for one of the great gifts of the English moorland has been its inspiration for writers and poets. Atkins is no different, and as he describes the wildlife or the people he encounters, tells the stories and legends of the moors, or reflects on the politics of land and its uses, he does so with lyrical writing that certainly does justice to the melancholy and mysterious nature of these places that are, to my mind at least, both forbidding and appealing all at the same time.

William Atkins’ website

Cry of Despair - 71 Years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 27th January, which was the day Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated in 1945. One year ago it was the 70th anniversary of the liberation and Elsewhere editor in chief Paul Scraton wrote the following post on his personal website Under a Grey Sky: 

Today is the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. As events are held across the world to commemorate the anniversary, I dug out an article I wrote based on a visit to Krakow in the early months of 2006. Katrin was pregnant, and we had travelled to the Polish city to scout locations for an international hostel conference she was organising. A few months later, when the conference took place, we had to travel overland as Katrin was no longer allowed to fly, but on the first visit we landed at the airport and were driven into town through socialist-era suburbs that reminded us of Berlin to the beauty of the old city centre:

On a clear winter’s day, with a light mist hanging overhead, weak sunshine bathes the Old Town of Krakow in a gentle, almost dream-like light. It softens the cobbled streets, the towers and spires, the market square – a more beautiful city in Europe is hard to imagine. In the bone-chilling cold people move at a brisk pace. Young women students scurry between university buildings wrapped in heavy scarves and jackets, hats pulled low, their round, pretty faces open to the elements. Only tourists loiter – that’s what tourists do – framing the city through digital lenses. But in January they are few in number. As the city ebbs and flows, people go about their daily business. For them beautiful Krakow is commonplace; while visitors gaze in wonder, local eyes rarely rise above street level.

We had plenty of time to explore in those first few days, our appointments few and far between. But as much as we enjoyed wandering the streets, ducking into basement bars and cafes, searching out the youthful side of this old city there was always something lingering in the back of your mind. We had planned a day later in the week to travel out to Auschwitz-Birkenau, but it was of course the old Jewish quarter of the city that we discovered first:

For over five hundred years the focal point of Krakow’s Jewish life was the Kazimierz neighbourhood, south of Wawel Castle. Today, alongside renovated synagogues, cemeteries, museums and cultural centres documenting the City’s Jewish life are bohemian cafes and bars, regular haunts of the city’s artists, students and intellectuals. Before the Nazis an estimated 68,000 Jews lived in Krakow, now there are only 5,000 in Poland, just 100 of which live in Kazimierz…

A day later we caught a ride in a minibus out of the city. The mood inside was pensive, the landscape outside the window bleak. The driver did not speak the whole way, concentrating instead on the road and the radio, on which cheerful presenters chatted away between songs by Tina Turner and Prince. Ours was not the only minibus to arrive:

Each day scores of minibuses and taxis take visitors from Krakow to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Drivers gather in the snow-covered car park, smoking and waiting under a steel grey sky. It’s just another routine working day. Yet etched in the faces of those arriving at the gates for the first time is horror, shock and pain.  Here, at Auschwitz and the larger Birkenau camp close by one and a half million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners, Poles, and many others were exterminated by gunfire, gassing, starvation or the wretched conditions.

Despite their familiarity, the magnitude of the Holocaust overwhelms the capacity to reflect. What captures the imagination, tragically, are small things: the pair of glasses in a case with thousands of others, somehow apart from the rest, or the suitcase with a Berlin address just two streets from your own, or the photograph of two young guards standing on a train platform, sharing a joke in the aftermath of the murderous selection. Stark moments, frozen in time, feeling like hammer-blows to the chest.

It is difficult to describe now the mood in the minibus as we drove back to Krakow, but I can still feel it. There we headed for our (by now) favourite cellar bar, filled with loud and cheerful students, smiling staff bringing vodka and beer to the table, conversations swirling all around us in a language we could not understand. Katrin was not drinking of course, but I can remember leaving the bar with a fuzzy head, the journey of the day turned into a strange and horrific dream. But of course it wasn’t.

I have been to many sites of memory over the past twenty years. I live in a city that has perhaps more than most. I have visited the District Six museum in Cape Town and the murals of Belfast, the Hillsborough Memorial outside Liverpool’s Anfield Stadium and walked the length of the hundred mile Berlin Wall Trail. In all these places and more I am constantly struck not only by the emotional impact such sites of memory have, but their importance as well. The International Memorial at Auschwitz-Birkenau is inscribed with the following words:

For ever let this place be
a cry of despair
and a warning to humanity,
where the Nazis murdered
about one and a half
million
men, women, and children,
mostly Jews
from various countries
of Europe.

We need this cry of despair, and we need to experience it. Sadly, we cannot as a society make the promise of “never again.” I don’t think it is in our power. But if we can manage “never forget”, then there is always the chance we might make it.

Postcard from... Reykjavik

By Marcel Krueger:

Leif Erikson ignores me. As I walk past his statue in the shadow of rocket thrower-shaped Hallgrímskirkja he stares at the horizon, at Greenland maybe or at the planes tumbling through the wind towards Keflavik airport. The two ravens sitting on Leif's shoulders, however, croak mockery down at me. Maybe they’re not used to see a hungover tourist without colorful plastic jacket and selfie stick. Would it not have been for the appointment with a friend I would have not left my hotel bed, but we had a hot dog and a coffee and I feel good. It is 4.30 in the afternoon, and the sun is setting. 

Iceland has changed since I’ve been here the last time, four years ago. I’m thinking of Harpa, the impressive concert hall by the harbor, and how I once watched Björk making music with Tesla coils there, on an equally cold and dark day. But there are no Tesla coils now, only American tourists buying overpriced t-shirts and magma rocks that someone labelled as jewelry. The city center is as busy as the Berlin one, cranes and building sites everywhere, new hotels rising skywards where skate parks and public spaces used to be before. In 2015, the tourism industry contributed over 5% to the Icelandic GDP, and the number of foreign visitors exceeded 1,000,000; you can now purchase a special ticket for the bus from the airport: where in the past tourists had to make their own way from the main bus terminal BSÍ now there's an armada of smaller buses waiting, ferrying tourists directly to their hotels so no one has to walk through the bitter cold, as if it was a nuisance and not a feature of the land and the season. 

Before I got drunk in Kaffibarinn yesterday, I took the bus to the Seltjanarnes neighbourhood and walked along the coastal trail, towards the tip of the peninsula and the lighthouse on Grótta Island. Icelandic artist Ólöf Nordal has created a basalt sculpture named Kvika here, a hot water foot bath I planned to use, aiming to sit in the icy cold with my feet in hot thermal water, looking out over the bay and snow-covered Mount Esja rising behind it. I walked along the rocks on the seafront, while ravens sat on the street lamps along the trail. Other pedestrians I did not see. The sun was sinking fast, but the light over Reykjavik and the mountains had the outstanding clarity that only the winter sun up here in the north has. When I arrived at the foot bath it was occupied by a tall Norseman with long blonde hair, who had immersed himself completely in the small bath, his naked upper torso and legs out in the cold and his midriff covered with the hot water. I did not mind, and instead watched the ravens, playing over the water.

Image: Joseph Carr Photography

The language of the land is water – the Lake District

By Ellie Broughton:

On Boxing  Day I walked up Brockle Beck, a little stream outside Keswick. At the bottom of the path sits Spring Farm. A heap of sodden toys, carpets and chairs lay outside next to a silver Rolls Royce that gleamed in the sun.

Marks from the floods, which had happened two weeks ago, were still present. From the mounds of soil by the roadside to the still-wet floodplains around the Derwent, the water's draughtsmanship was everywhere.

The footpath led up Brockle Beck through the woods. There were still sweeping traces down the lane of leaves and gravel, marks made by the overflow.

A 30-foot oak lay on its side in the riverbed, redesigned by the force of the floods.

Snapped branches and washed-up bushes framed the now-tiny stream, a picture of a disaster described through ruins.

Further up the track, a bridge had tumbled into the water, as if a subject of a primary school art class on perspective. It had been decorated with yellow tape advising ‘do not cross’.

I visit the Lakes every Christmas to see with my parents, who moved here ten years ago. Their house is hundreds of feet above sea level, thank God, but every year now the rest of the county faces what used to be ‘freak’ flooding.

The signs are everywhere. Even as the Virgin Pendolino climbs Shap, you can see how swollen the river has become, how much spray churned up on the M6.

This year, the storm came two weeks before Christmas. I knew things were bad when my mum uncharacteristically texted to tell me 'not to worry'.

A quick Twitter image search revealed the road to Thirlmere washed away in a starburst of gravel. In Keswick, murky river water lapped over the tops of the town's four-year-old defences.

Cockermouth has seen some of the worst of it, hit three times in the last 11 years. In 2005 the town saw its worst flood since 1822; in 2009 residents faced what was called a once-in-a-thousand-year event. Last month the town flooded again, with an estimated 400-700 homes and businesses inundated.

Many businesses in Cockermouth were back up on their feet by Christmas, just as York went under and Tadcaster evacuated. But any shop by the river had to be gutted, and now lay empty. Winter sun fell through the shop windows onto bare plaster walls. Dehumidifiers stood alone, humming to no-one. A thigh-high watermark still stained the brickwork outside.

The language of the land here is water. Windermere was named for its lake, Cockermouth for the river Cocker, Morecambe for the ‘crooked sea’ (more came).

Cumbria has been the spring for so many words for water courses. Meres, gills, becks, holms, tarns and forces existed long before the south had rivers and super-mares.

But as we drive back to the Northwestern Fells over the Honister Pass it is clear that ‘draughtsmanship’ is not a good metaphor for flood damage. The damage is violent.

Chunks of earth have been bitten from the banks of the stream running down Honister Pass. The waterfall at Buttermere, usually just a silvery scratch in the dark woods, is today thick as a keloid scar. New weather patterns fluctuate and jag; the land suffers.

Ellie Broughton is a writer from London and will appear in Elsewhere No.04, to be published in September 2016. On Twitter she's @__ellie

Five Questions for... Laurence Mitchell

The next in our series of interviews about home and place with the editors and contributors to Elsewhere is with Laurence Mitchell. Laurence’s article on Tamchy in Krygyzstan appeared in Elsewhere No.02, and he has an essay on walking in Japan appearing in the upcoming edition of the journal, to be published in March (Image: WWII pillbox, Horsey Gap, Norfolk):

What does home mean to you?

I have always experienced two strong conflicting urges: that of the home-bird and that of the nomad. Both are equally important to me, so I am part farmer, part pastoralist I suppose. Actually, to continue this analogy I am probably more of a latter-day hunter gatherer – someone who likes to go on hunting expeditions (I am speaking figuratively here) yet wants a secure home base to return to. As any anthropologist will tell you, a lot more time is usually spent digging roots and gathering nuts and berries than catching game to eat.

I have been based in Norfolk, mostly Norwich, for forty years or so now, and am as much at home here as I am anywhere. I grew up in the West Midlands greenbelt and that still exerts a strong pull and, even after decades away, still feels to be as much ‘home’ as East Anglia does. In many ways I feel at home almost anywhere I go; I have never failed to be amazed by the universality of people around the world – we all share much the same hopes, dreams, fears and aspirations. Essentially, we carry home within us wherever we go.

Where is your favourite place?

This partly depends on how ‘favourite’ is defined. If I were asked what is the most beautiful place I have ever visited I would have no hesitation in saying the Hunza region of the far north of Pakistan, where enormous glaciers come right down to the Karakoram Highway and the improbably jagged mountains – 7,000 metres high or more – resemble the sort of things you see in children’s fairytale books. South American cloud forest – the mossy, misty, orchid-dripped terrain that lies between high altitude altiplano and lowland jungle – is also pretty hard to beat for sheer beauty. Central Asia, particularly mountainous Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, is also scenically gorgeous in a lonely, slightly desolate sort of way.

But I also love more modest landscapes closer to home – the marshes, dunes and estuaries of the Norfolk and Suffolk coast; the velvety green valleys of the Lake District; Peak District moorland. Coming from hillier terrain in the English Midlands there was a time when I didn’t really appreciate the low horizons of East Anglia but things have changed now. I particularly like evocative coastal landscapes that have a bit of an edge to them, a sense of dark history – Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast springs to mind here.

What is beyond your front door?

I live in a Victorian house on a Victorian Street that was created in the mid-19th century when Norwich built its third railway station, Victoria Station, now long gone. The territory that was once covered by the station buildings and marshalling yard is now a Sainsbury’s supermarket; the course of the old railway line, a cycle path and walking thoroughfare. Much of the street is much as it was 150 years ago, although the Luftwaffe did quite a bit of remodelling one fateful night back in 1942 – a so-called Baedeker raid. The gaps that were created have since been filled with 1950s semis.

Immediately beyond my door are three pollarded lime trees that shield us from the street beyond. If I turn right out of the gate I am soon at one of the main roads into the city, actually the very end of the A11 as it meets the southern city gate, now extant in name only. More or less directly across the main road are the gentrified red brick buildings of the old Norwich and Norfolk Hospital complex – the site now redeveloped with smart new housing. Nearby, within less than two minute’s walk, are three pubs, two cafes, two florists, a Turkish restaurant and an Indian takeaway. There is also a physiotherapist, a dentists’ practice and a huge Brutalist-style concrete office block where suited workers gather to smoke outside its entrance.

The area is virtually inner city – there are flinty fragments of the old city walls next to the inner ring-road just a minute’s walk away; traffic noise is fairly constant. If I lean out of my attic/workroom window I can just about see the cathedral spire and the Norman castle – well I could if I were a giraffe.

As with anywhere in the city, the whole area is layered with history – a palimpsest in which traces of modern, 1960s planned redevelopment, Victorian, medieval and Norman overlap one another. But Norwich is even older still, it was already well established when the Normans came and expanded it for their own purposes. Plus ca change...

What place would you most like to visit?

The short answer is probably northern Greenland, closely followed by Haiti, Paraguay, Madagascar and Ethiopia. The long answer? Well... like almost anybody who has read Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will by Judith Schalansky I am intrigued by the remote islands she describes, all of which are very difficult or impossible to visit for the average traveller. I am lucky to have visited just one of these briefly, Hirta in the St Kilda archipelago, a group of islands that has always held a strong presence in my imagination and continues to do so. If I could choose another from the book then – call me greedy – I would go to Deception Island, an uninhabited former whaling station in Antarctica.

Having said all of this, I far less compelled to travel far afield these days and am more content to discover new territories closer to home. Overall I am probably currently more interested in walking routes and ancient ways than places per se – the journey itself rather than the arrival.

What are you reading?

Lately I have been reading Alan Garner again, reading or re-reading some of his stories and have especially got a lot out of The Voice that Thunders, a collection of talks, lectures and presentations that explain his approach to writing. Having recently visited the John Clare museum at Helpston, Cambridgeshire, and also having seen Andrew Kötting’s film By Our Selves, I have been re-reading Iain Sinclair’s Edge of the Orison. In this, the writer recreates the poet’s painful solitary journey back to his birth village near Peterborough after escaping from a mental hospital in Epping Forest. I’ve also recently finished another enjoyable book with Orison in the title – Horatio Clare’s Orison for a Curlew – which documents an unsuccessful search for a very rare bird that may already be extinct.

You can read more from Laurence on his blog East of Elveden.

This Far East: Beckton and Barking

By Gary Budden:

We pull up into a deserted carpark by the Showcase cinema, by the saddest Frankie & Bennys I’ve ever seen. Star Wars, The Hateful Eight and Bollywood films I don’t know are screening.

We head onto the path, flanking the Beckton sewage treatment works on our right. There’s the smell of damp concrete, something sour, flowing water. Not a soul to be seen, yet here we are, in London. Even the walls here show no human life, free of graffiti and tags.

The flood barrier comes into view, by a refuse-disposal site where black-headed gulls flock and machines roar. It’s a sci-fi edifice, little known and colossal. I wonder if it’s been use with the recent rains, or has ever been in use. It looks like the gate to a sunken and forgotten city.

Where Barking Creek meets the Thames I wish I’d bought my binoculars. The river never fails to inspire and this far east it can take the breath away with its sheer size.  The opposite shore is a world away.

Twenty turnstones or more skim over the water. Demonic cormorants pose like black statues on the concrete. Gulls bob on the river surrounding tugs weighed down with the city’s waste. I’m amazed to see a black tailed godwit take flight perhaps a hundred metres from where we stand and I start to take photos. Then an orange-jacket man walks up to the fence of the treatment works, look at us and walk back. I imagine he’s bored.

We have to double back. There’s a hoppable padlocked gate into the tiny nature reserve. We hop it and walk through sibilant reeds watching rabbits break cover at our approach. Still no other walkers seen. A new tree-planting scheme has begun, and I wonder if this is why the gates for this public space are locked.

We hop the other gate and head along the River Roding into Barking. FUCK OFF TO ALL FORIGNERS screams the graffiti. New developments, the wooden remains of a boat half-submerged. I read the signs on the window of a new empty block. Creative arts spaces for rent provided by Bow Arts. You can feel which way the tide is going.

The Roding is muddy water and the familiar detritus of crumpled beer cans, discarded underwear and puddled shit. But I’m happy to see gorse bushes, still in bright-yellow flower, a plant I associate with the flatlands of East Anglia.

We visit the ruins of Barking Abbey and the newer church. The abbey has Anglo-Saxon origin (names like Ethelburga in the information signs). It was dissolved come Henry VIII. Carved skulls adorn certain graves, mossy and weather-beaten. In the distance are red buses and pound shops, London going about its business.

Back to the river. We follow a dead-end path, over a wall into a mess of bramble and trampled razor wire, crawl under the railway bridge to where the river is breaking its banks and green plants grow in the murky half-light.

Like trolls, we wait, filming the trains as they pass. What would the passing traveller think if they saw us?

Walking back the way we came, a bird of prey breaks cover from the trees above but I can’t identify it in this weak January light.

We come across a Tesco with a Costa attached. Coffee break.

As we sip in the carpark, I think how unknowable this city is and after over a decade here, I’m still just beginning.

Gary Budden is the co-director of Influx Press and editorial assistant at Unsung Stories. His work has appeared in Structo, Unthology, The Lonely Crowd, Gorse, Galley Beggar Press and many more. He writes regularly for Unofficial Britain and blogs about landscape punk at New Lexicons. Gary’s essay on Romney Marsh appeared in Elsewhere No.01.

Watch a film of this journey, and beyond to Gallion's Reach, by Martin Fuller.

The Library: The Island that Never Was, by Robert Alcock

Review: Paul Scraton

As stories go, the building of the Zorrozaurre peninsula in Bilbao is a fascinating one. In the 1950s and 1960s a canal was dug to improve access to the Euskalduna shipyard as part of Franco’s policy of industrial expansion. Many of the residents of the area had already been rehoused when the plans changed and the project ground to a halt. The canal, that would have created an island, never reached its destination. And as Robert Alcock explains in his short but fascinating The Island that Never Was:

“Instead of an island, after the economic collapse of the early eighties the peninsula had become a lost world, forgotten by the rest of the city. Most people had no idea that four hundred residents still clung on.”

It was into this forgotten neighbourhood that Alcock moved in 1999 with his partner, and overthe course of the nine chapters that make up this book he creates a portrait of a community, of his neighbours and their worries and concerns, of the graffiti and where it came from, of its plant- and wildlife, and crucially how different people – some important and listened to, others not – had plans for Zorrozaurre that would completely transform the peninsula and by definition the lives of those people who called it home. Faced with a development master plan that would see many of them evicted, the locals were finally roused into action, including forming a residents association and taking to a bit of street-art themselves to paint a mural depicting life in the neighbourhood:

“It was a reminder that the neighbourhood existed – a fact of which, even now, most people in Bilbao remained ignorant – and a collective nose-thumbing at the authorities. It wasn’t only the squatters who could paint walls.”

It is not simply the story of an anonymous neighbourhood and its struggle for recognition and self-determination that makes this book interesting, although it most certainly does. It is the fact that it reminds us once again that everywhere – every district, every estate, every village, every town – has its story and there is a value to listening to what it is. It is the fact that it reminds us once again that communities develop on what seem, on the face of it, unlikely and perhaps even unappealing locations. And that what makes a community is worth fighting to protect.

Although it is not explicitly stated, the fact the The Island that Never Was has been published in a tri-lingual edition – English, Spanish and Basque – would suggest that Alcock’s intention was to make sure his neighbours in Zorrozaurre have access to this telling of their story. I am sure that they would be very proud.

Robert Alcock is a writer and ecological designer who moved to Bilbao in 1999 to undertake fieldwork for a PhD in marine ecology. He and his partner lived in Zorrozaurre for several years and were founder members of the Forum for a Sustainable Zorrozaurre. They still keep active ties with the neighbourhood. You can order The Island that Never Was via the Abrazo House website, where it is also possible to purchase an Ebook version.

Looking Back. Looking Forward.

So as the dust settles on New Year’s Eve here in Berlin, the pavements strewn with the debris of a million fireworks and the first of the abandoned Christmas trees, I thought it was about time we had a little look back on the first year of Elsewhere as well as a look forward to what is to come in 2016. It is just over a year since Julia and I first announced the project and then we began the process of working on the successful crowdfunding campaign that took place during April and May, Elsewhere No.01 which we published in June, and Elsewhere No.02 that came out in September.

These are the cornerstones of the year but they tell nothing of the story. We learned so much over the past twelve months, not only when it comes to journal production but also marketing, distribution and all those elements that you need to get a project like this off the ground. We had issues with printers, worked with lovely (and professional) writers, illustrators and photographers, and added some people to our team. Tim has been invaluable when it comes to editing; Marcel as our Books Editor; Corinne working on sponsorship to help move the project forward; and Katrin, helping us out with the events.

We need to especially thank those people as up to now all of us who have worked on Elsewhere during the first year have done so for love of the project. Although we made a commitment to pay our contributors from the beginning and have done so, we have not been able yet to pay the rest of us… which makes their commitment all the more impressive and our gratitude for their hard work all the greater!

As for contributors, it has been our great privilege to publish some wonderful writers, artists, photographers and musicians over the past twelve months. In the pages of Elsewhere No.01 and No.02 you can see the work of the following fantastic, talented people:

Elsewhere No.01

Kavita Bedford, Gary Budden, Stephen Cracknell, Nicky Gardner, Julian Hoffman, Chandler O’Leary, Eve Richens and Paul Sullivan

Elsewhere No.02

Alejandro Cartagena, Nick Gadd, Stuart Fowkes, Satya Gummuluri, Paula Kirby, Amy Liptrot, Laurence Mitchell and the good folks from the Uckermarker Project

You can find many of our contributors on our Twitter list here

What else? Beyond the physical journal that is, and remains, the centrepiece of the project, we have also been publishing interviews and short writings on place on our blog. There we have also established the Library series of book reviews from work that has inspired and interested us, and the Printed Matters series of posts about other print projects that we feel worthy of support. Tied to the latter was our first Printed Matters event, held in December, and we hope to take the Printed Matters idea beyond our home city during the coming year. Another event we hosted was our launch event in June, and again, we are hoping to host more events in Berlin and beyond in the coming twelve months.

We would also love to return to #IndieMagDay, which we attended in Hamburg at the end of the summer, and build our connections with other journals, magazines and independent publishers out there. Although there is much doom and gloom about print, we are convinced that there has never been a better time to launch a project such as ours. The internet means we can reach readers and contributors quickly and directly, and people can support the projects they like from their own home. The challenge, as ever, is to make it sustainable and that will be the major focus of 2016 alongside producing two more editions of the journal.

The next edition of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place will come out in March, with the contents already finalised as follows:

Places…
Black Mountain, Northern Ireland by Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh
Berlin, Germany by Paul Scraton
Faversham Creek, England by Caroline Miller
Iqualuit, Canada by Knut Tjensvoll Kitching
Kumano Kodo, Japan by Laurence Mitchell
Lappland, Sweden by Saskia Vogel
Trieste, Italy by Paul Scraton
Yangon, Myanmar by Alex Cochrane

Plus…
An interview with Darran Anderson, author of Imaginary Cities
Endbahnhof: The photography of Kate Seabrook
...and more illustrations and reviews

We will begin pre-orders closer to the publication date, but you can of course take out a 4-issue subscription to guarantee your copy. We are also looking for patrons for the third edition, so if you are interested in supporting the journal and seeing your name on the inside cover, please follow the link for more information.

Finally, and most importantly, both Julia and I would really like to thank all the readers who have supported the journal, whether via the crowdfunding, buying individual editions, reading the blog or newsletter, or sharing our posts and links on social media… it all helps and we really wouldn’t have got this far without you.

Have a great 2016, and here’s to more adventures in Elsewhere,

Paul Scraton
Editor in Chief
January 2016

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Photo by Patricia Haas (post@patpat-studio.com)