Book Review – September 2024
I had for some time believed the key to effective writing was to concentrate on the surface of things. Record them faithfully, and they’d do the work for you. After all, the world is manifestly absurd and provides you with everything you need in the way of character and environment and plot; why complicate – or simplify – things with undue authorial mediation?
Recently, however, I had started to question the value of such an approach. . .
Charlie Hill’s slim paperback more than makes up for its lack of length and detail with the depth and perceptivity of his observations as he charts a series of walks he has made through locations in England, Scotland and Wales. The book’s format is simple: each short essay focuses on a particular place Hill has visited in recent years, some urban and some and others rural, and crafts a collecion of meditations on what he sees, hears, thinks and feels.
Mercifully, there is nothing self-consciously clever or showy about Hill’s prose, though his resume suggests he is more than capable of writing in this way if he chose to. Instead, he tells his story, his series of stories, simply and clearly. However, the overall achievement of these separate pieces, when considered as a whole, is to present us with something much more profound. Hill’s snapshots show a nation in flux, its people split by division. He feels the weight of history resting heavily on today and senses anxiety about the future underlying much of Britain’s public discourse.
But there is hope aplenty. Like some latter-day pilgrim Hill sketches a starburst of destinations radiating out from his home in Birmingham, England’s phrenic centre. He is everyman and everywoman, he is you and me, and he guides us on his walks with humour and good sense and, despite the despair he notes in some quarters, he also meets kindness, acceptance and positivity wherever he goes. Though simple and staightforward on the surface, Hill’s writing conjures up a deep poetic beauty.
Charlie Hill
Charlie Hill is an author from Birmingham. He has written long and short form memoir, and contemporary, historical and experimental fiction. He is the co-founder and former Director of a literary festival, the PowWow Festival of Writing, which ran from 2011 to 2017 and featured guests such as Joanne Harris, Alex Wheatle, Stewart Home and Natalie Haynes. He has also appeared at many such events, including Frankfurt’s Literaturm and the Birmingham Literary Festival.
Clevelode is Paul Newland and his collaborators. Newland was one-half of The Lowland Hundred, a critically acclaimed duo that released three albums, Under Cambrian Sky (2010), Adit (2011), The Lowland Hundred (2014).
Jon Woolcott is a writer and publisher and currently works for the independent publisher, Little Toller, where he also edits The Clearing, the online journal for new writing about place and nature. He is the author of 
Gareth E. Rees is the author of Unofficial Britain, longlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and one of The Sunday Times best books of the year 2020. He’s also the author of Car Park Life, The Stone Tide and Marshland. His first short story collection, Terminal Zones, was published in 2022 and examines the strangeness of everyday life in a time of climate change
In a similar fashion, a slew of other buildings have been reduced to rubble in recent decades. When the Hightown flats were built in the 1960s they were praised for their innovative design concept. The concrete components of the 191 flats were factory-built and assembled on site creating light, airy homes each forming part of a small, neighbourly cluster. Lack of investment in the 1980s and 1990s, however, caused the fabric of the flats to steadily deteriorate and they were demolished in 2011.
From a much earlier era, several of the Wrexham area’s large country houses have met a similar fate. 
The Vegetable Market, an indoor market hall built in 1898 with a mock-Tudor frontage was demolished in the 1980s to make way for a shopping centre.
Mark grew up in Berkshire but, arriving in London during the heyday of punk to study at the LSE, he felt that was where he belonged. Sundry abortive attempts at stardom followed, as a stand-up comedian, actor and musician. A successful career there as a shoe-seller followed, but Mark now lives in Somerset, England, doing what he loves best – writing. He has written a number of short stories, poems and other pieces of creative non-fiction which have been published online and in print.
and around water. But it was the tragic death of her friend, Kate, in a kayaking accident on the River Rawthey in Cumbria on New Year’s Day 2012 that proved to be the eventual catalyst for her to write The Flow. Kate’s death was a shattering blow to Beer and caused her to fall out of love with rivers and paddling. Several years later, while visiting the scene of her friend’s death, Beer has a sense of Kate’s presence, but not the catharsis she had hoped for. She was inspired, however, to embark on the travels and research that led to this book. Just like water The Flow eddies, swirls and percolates. And, as with water, Beer’s narrative meanders along across 400 pages, sometimes gentle, other times powerful, but always relentless in its cyclical lifeforce. She moves effortlessly from science to mythology, embracing nature and human activity and weaving in her own personal story.
details how she returned from London to the family farm in Orkney to overcome her alcoholism with hard manual labour, cold water swimming and the security of a familiar place. Now sober and a successful writer, Liptrot feels there is still something missing in her life. She is reluctant to admit to herself that what she lacks is something as simple and conventional as a relationship with a significant other, but she suspects that is indeed the case. She travels to Berlin, a city awash with other drifters, seekers and creatives. She finds cheap accommodation and spends her time walking, birdwatching and people watching. She also trawls the dating apps obsessively and embarks on a series first dates, with varying degrees of success. The Instant is a painfully humane account of alienation, loneliness and self-discovery in our current digital age.
This is oral history at its most incisive and revealing. Some of King’s interviewees are household names: Neil Kinnock, Peter Hain, Dafydd Iwan and Leanne Wood, for instance. Others are less well-known but are nonethelees important to the strands of the story that King weaves together. Activists, and in particular women, from the Welsh language campaign, miners’ support groups, the second homes campaign and CND are given great prominence. The final two decades of the twentieth century witnessed several crucial steps in Wales’s journey towards re-asserting its national identity and for the Welsh to recover their self confidence as a people. This process resulted in the creation of a Welsh National Assembly and Assembly Government in 1999, which later evolved into the nation’s Senedd and Welsh Government. Prior to this, the Welsh Language Act of 1993 put Welsh on an equal footing with English for the first time and , incrementally, began to reverse the decline of the Welsh language. The establishment of a Welsh language television channel, S4C, had already brought Welsh into the daily discourse of both native speakers and learners from 1982 onwards.
psychogeographer John Rogers takes to print again with another consideration of his favourite subject matter: London. Welcome to New London focuses in particular on the changes wrought to East London by the legacy of the 2012 Olympics. Rogers vividly captures the struggle for the future of this part of the city and examines the contest of ownership and identity between local residents and developers as well as the ongoing fight for survival by nature. He guides us through the neglected corners of London, taking time out to investigate the capital’s concealed rivers and the cultural significance of graffiti. Rogers clearly has no illusions about the negative aspects of London, but his love for the city’s flawed beauty shines through.
Paul Simpson was a key figure in the Liverpool music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He played with Will Sergeant and Ian McCulloch before they launched Echo and the Bunnymen and he then formed The Teardrop Explodes with Julian Cope before going on to put together his own band, The Wild Swans. Despite critical acclaim, penning one of the best singles of the 1980s (in my opinion) in Revolutionary Spirit, a strong following in Liverpool and, we read in Simpson’s record of those years, an odd pocket of popularity in the Philippines, success ultimately eluded the Swans. This is a very readable account of a fascinating and influential time and place in post-punk music. Simpson underpins this story with some frank disclosures, by way of exorcism perhaps, about his difficulties with mental health and his relationship with his father.
Martin Edwards was born at Knutsford, Cheshire and educated in Northwich and at Balliol College, Oxford. A member of the Murder Squad (collective of crime writers, Martin was the longest-serving Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association since its founder John Creasey. In 2015 he was elected eighth President of the Detection Club; his predecessors include G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie. He is Archivist of the CWA and of the Detection Club and consultant to the British Library’s Crime Classics.
Richard King is the author of Original Rockers (shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and a Rough Trade, The Times and Uncut Book of the Year), How Soon Is Now? (the Sunday Times Music Book of the Year) and The Lark Ascending (a Rough Trade, Mojo and Evening Standard Book of the Year, shortlisted for the Penderyn Prize). He was born into a bilingual family in South Wales and for the last twenty years has lived in the rural county of Powys, in mid-Wales.