Pete Ashton

I’m running it half-with and half-for Chris Unitt. It’s a spin off of Created in Birmingham, that blog what I started back in the day which Chris now owns and runs. It’s in the Bull Ring, Europe’s largest shopping centre or some shit. It sells stuff by local artists. We’re there for at least a couple of months. It’s opposite the Apple Store near the entrance with the Bull. With the help of many others we built, stocked and staffed the shop in four days. Here’s an interview at the end of the opening night.

It’s all going rather well. So well I haven’t had a chance to blog about it (oh the fucking irony!). I will do soon though as it’s all very interesting.

I was reading an article by Will Self and thinking it was a bit psychogeographically which reminded me that Self had this thing he did when he flew into a city of walking from the airport to his final destination which I blogged back in 2006. Partly this was he’d quit heroin and had replaced it with walking obscene distances but it was also because this allowed him to see the city from a different vantage point and track how it changes from motorway-laced countryside to urban downtown.

“People don’t know where they are anymore,” he said, adding: “In the post-industrial age, this is the only form of real exploration left. Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?”

I was also reminded of one of Bill Drummond’s psychogeographic exercises where he wrote “BILL” across his A-Z of London and then followed the lines, walking his name. Again, this isn’t so he can say “I walked my name” but to force a restriction upon himself, to say “I will experience the city through rigid yet random parameters”. And then to record that experience and see what it reveals about the place. (I can’t find the original piece online but I suspect it’s somewhere in his book 45.)

This is, of course, what Jon Bounds’ Eleven Bus project is all about, encouraging people to go all the way around Birmingham’s Outer Circle bus route and experience the city in a new way. The project takes place every November 11th from 11am (see what he did there?) but the framework of the Outer Circle is, I feel, too great to be restricted to this one idea.

When I did the 11-11-11-11 thing last year I didn’t take the bus. I cycled and it gave me a much better sense of how the city changes, or indeed doesn’t change, as you move around it. But I was struck by how do-able cycling 26 miles was when you stopped every quarter mile to photograph a bus stop. Sure, I was exhausted the next day, mainly because I’m super-unfit at the moment, but it wasn’t an endurance thing at the time.

So with all that in my mind pot I’ve come up with a project I may well have a go at this Spring: Cross City Walks.

The idea is you pick a spot on the Outer Circle bus route, preferably at random, and draw a line that crosses the City Centre and stops on the opposite side of the Outer Circle. Here’s two I drew earlier.

You then walk this line. Hmm, maybe the project should be called Walk The Line. Or maybe not.

As soon as you start walking an immediate problem will occur. The Line will not correspond with the roads, especially in the suburbs with the cul-de-sacs and canals and such. For example, here’s how you’d walk a section of the line in Handsworth:

The Line only covers 3/4 mile but the route is double that. Especially when you include the two rules I just made up – that every intersection of The Line with a road must be passed and you cannon double back unless the road is a dead end.

There may well be more rules. And if you do this you’re welcome to make up your own.

The diametre of the Outer Circle is about six – seven miles, depending on where you start. Using the above as a terribly unscientific formula I reckon a cross city walk would be between 15-20 miles. Which is perfectly do-able in one day even when you’re stopping to take photos and record your thoughts.

I hereby submit this project to the hive-mind.

– — – –

A little later and I’ve decided on my first route. Using a random number generator and my Outer Circle TTV photos I landed on the Acock’s Green Bus Garage, the spiritual and actual home of the Number 11 bus and thus the perfect place to start a project.

I drew a line from there, through St Paul’s Phillips’s Cathedral in the city centre and out to Soho Road in Handsworth. And then I mapped out a road route to see how far it actually is. Turns out that thanks to a freak straight line through Digbeth and the Jewellery Quarter it’s only 10.5 miles, less if I can cut through the parks and industrial estates. Pretty reasonable for a first go.

The Google map isn’t saving properly so here’s a screen grab:

Now, I just need a date.

As ever my online activites are rather distributed but a pattern has emerged of late which I think will remain stable for the forseable. So if you want to read and look at things by myself here’s where to read and look at them.

This very blog remains my hub and while I might not update it as much as I used to it’s where I’ll post anything pertaining directly to me. I’m pretty terrible with blogging links these days but do throw stuff onto Twitter, about which more later.

My Tumblr has been my Internet scrap book for a good three years now and I continue to fill it regularly with daft nonsense, beautiful gems and everything in between.

The TTV blog gets most of my attention at the moment. I’m trying to post at least once a day there and I’m trying to make it about more than the mechanics of TTV photos. If you miss old-school Peteblogging this is the closest you’re going to get to that.

Flickr has seen a bit of a resurgence with the TTV stuff kicking off as I’m trying to post there every day too. I’d like to get more involved with the groups on Flickr but haven’t really managed that yet.

ASH-10 has calmed down a bit since I moved my focus away from the social media quagmire but I still post there occasionally. Despite my misgivings about the “industry” that’s emerged I still have a serious interest in Internet culture and the phenomena of increased access to publishing and distribution and I still earn a living from this. I also use this blog to post about events I’m doing. (The peripheral stuff needs a bit of a refocus though.)

Twitter continues to have an iron grip on my online social activity despite my misgivings about centralised services and it’s woeful inability to allow me access to the stuff I’ve poured into it over the years. I tweet a lot but I’ve been told it’s not quite as irritating as it could be. Maybe I’ve got this Performance Conversation thing down pat after all this time. Who knows. I currently have about 7 Twitter accounts, which is rather excessive, but you can follow them all with the Pete Collective list. This has the added bonus of ignoring any conversational tweets I’ve sent to other people so all you get are my status updates and links to cool stuff I’ve found.

In fact, given that all my activity online will be flagged by at least one of those account if you just want to check in on me once a day you could simply bookmark that list. It’s like a Pete Digest with extra goodies. And yes, Mum, I’m thinking of you here.

And that’s about it. Things will change (who knows, I might actually start using Facebook again) but I will always be blogging at this address no matter how far or wide my activities spread. Just as I have done since June 2000.

Yup, 10 years of blogging this summer. I should mark that really. Any ideas for how would be appreciated.