This is from the press release we sent out Friday morning which sets out our current interest:

‘On leaving West Bromwich by train in February 1936 George Orwell could famously reflect upon, '... the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs'. Equally striking is his vision of, '... the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to mis-carriages and drudgery ... kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drainpipe'.

What would a visitor to Orwell's Black Country 'slums' find when revisiting these locations today? Does any journey through the urban Midlands inevitably dwell on its failures?’

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I have been interested in Orwell in a loose sort of way since school and my first encounter with the paranoid atmosphere of 1984. This interest has intensified since reading the journalism and works of cultural studies, and he now seems to me as much a part of the English cultural heritage as Cadbury’s or Raleigh bicycles, as someone who has a profound effect on how we think of ourselves as Englanders. Apart from being a pioneering and daring journalist, by turns amateur anthropologist and adventurer into the slums of England and abroad, he was a man with a restless investigative temperament who made writing the means by which he might discover a world. He has been described as, ‘… the archetypal Englishman, the most native and English of writers.’

This blog however is not about filling you in on the well-known facts of Orwell’s life any more than it considers them relevant to our current project. Find out more about Orwell's life here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n12/terry-eagleton/reach-me-down-romantic

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Orwell was a great tramper and tramping is a definite theme of our own project. There seems something faintly anarchic in repeating Orwell’s 1936 winter walk from Coventry to Manchester via the Black Country and the Potteries, offering some sort of spike to the idea of what you should be doing at this time of year (i.e. escaping or conserving) and where you should be doing it (abroad or indoors).

Ours of course is a self-conscious attempt to confront and reveal a landscape (if you can call the West Midlands conurbation that) and engage in the sort of foot-dialogue popular again recently thanks to Londoner Iain Sinclair.

Ted Allen and I can only aspire to Sinclair’s erudition largely because, although we’re both from the Midlands, we’ve been exiled away in London for the last ten years and have long ago jettisoned any cultural baggage we might have carried over from our forgotten pasts. This is probably in line with a lot of peoples’ experience of living away from the northern homesteads, of a wilful cultural dislocation and trendy reinvention in the south east. It seems that Sandwell and Dudley is the sort of place your parents work hard to exit, to make sure you yourself don’t have to grow up there; but this sort of gesture, this mobility is problematic not least for the psyche and that elusive sense of identity.

Ted and I return to the Midlands then at least in part in the spirit of Orwell’s study, as a journey into those curious industrial lands of the imagination, with pen and camera ready to pick up the striking and the resonant. In other respects however this is a journey home.

We can sympathise with the Orwell Raymond Williams writes of, whose lifetime project is to explore his own,

'... uncertain and ambiguous relationship to England: the society he knows and belongs to, yet in other ways, except in abstraction, does not know at all.’