Fleet Footing is a downloadable work combining music, maps and gentle interactive performance with a walk charting the course of London’s lost river. Take the walk any time you like, do it in stages, or if you’re not in London, you could map an imaginary Fleet onto the landscape wherever you are and go for a walk with the album anyway. It uses binaural recording so is specially made for listening to on headphones.
The Fleet has flowed into the Thames for thousands of years, turning a Roman watermill, transporting convicts to the colonies, hosting health spas and bear baiting and slums. It’s largely underground now, but if you know where to look - and if you listen hard enough - you can still find her flowing beneath your feet. The Thames Tideway Scheme will soon be diverting the Fleet straight into a new super sewer - improving water quality in the Thames (yay!) but ending a conversation older than London. At this end of an era, Fleet Footing celebrates and mourns the Fleet and all those who’ve lived and died along her banks.
Download the album and maps, get your walking boots on and go find that river.
(Just got this from Sarah. I will be there on 3rd August.)
No comments:
Post a Comment