As mentioned in the previous post, I became a topographer through being a blogger. The route from A to B was, appropriately, convoluted. Blogs, for me, were ‘the music press in exile’ – places where the sort of writing that had once featured in the NME or Melody Maker but had been ruthlessly excised from the media could still continue, where it was perfectly acceptable, no, encouraged, to use citations of Derrida as a means of describing a techno record you liked, to analyse Metallica via Julia Kristeva, to bring Roland Barthes’ work on the grain of the voice into a review of Michael Jackson (whether this really described any actually existing music press that actually existedI don’t know, but it describes the music press we bloggers believed had existed).

Each blog was its own magazine, its own fanzine, with its own design style, rhetorical approach and policy towards comments. Some of the most cult of cult figures from the old print media, such as Simon Reynolds, Ian Penman and Mark Sinker, actually had their own blogs, but the focus became slightly or in some cases drastically younger people who had read the music press as teenagers – K-Punk, New York London Paris Munich, Poetix, Lenin’s Tomb, Infinite Thought, Voyou Desoeuvre, Velvet Coalmine, The Impostume, Fangirl, Fantastic Journal, Entschwindet und Vergeht, to name my own favourites and main interlocutors (some of them became, and still are, my friends; others are not). But what is odd, looking back at that 2005-2012 period when blogs were far more important than social networks or podcasts – which have largely replaced or superseded them as the places where young people interested in ideas spend their time online – is that very few of us actually wrote about music as such. With each generation of blogs there seemed to be less musical analysis. What had replaced it? Well, by the end, what replaced it was people writing up walks.

A lot of this came from one of the earliest and strangest bloggers, Luke Davis, who ran a variety of poetry blogs, beginning with Heronbone, from the early 2000s onwards. Heronbone was a mixture of incantations, randomly intercepted pirate radio chatter, Blakean speculation, and accounts of walks around the industrial fringes of London, particularly the river Lea, which has since become the Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park, which stands today on the site of the Tarkovskyan wastes of piled-up discarded shopping trolleys, pipes, industrial kipple and rare birds that Davis made his psychic landscape. The fact of blogs gradually becoming about space, rather than about records and books and films, owes more to him than anybody else, although his gnomic, puzzle-making style – once described as a cross between JH Prynne and Wiley – was impossible and unwise to imitate. One of the first examples of what would probably now be considered a podcast, Mark Fisher and Justin Barton’s londonunderlondon, a sound collage composed for Resonance FM, was produced under Heronbone’s enormous influence and features him briefly, if I remember rightly, reading, in his strong East End accent, from Heart of Darkness:

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

That’s how we wanted to write. The last posts I put up on the blog I kept from 2005 to around 2013 were all, when they weren’t CV-making and self-promotion, accounts of places and walks. These had started off being about London, but over time, as I started to get commissions and make enough from writing to have enough money to go elsewhere, they became attempts to work out what had happened to modernity and socialism– both things whose absence I felt extremely deeply – through, basically, wandering around housing estates, shopping centres and office districts, taking photographs. The process of composing these was always very straightforward – read up, partly online (Geograph, Flickr, local history sites), partly off (Pevsner); take a load of notes of what I wanted to see; and then, because of the aforementioned burner, I would as soon as I arrived in town get hold of a map, like the ones in the photograph above, so that I could find what I was looking for when, as was inevitable, I got myself very lost. Once, in winter 2009, in Toxteth, Liverpool, asking for an A-Z map at a newsagent led to the shopkeeper giving me a lift to my location, a bed and breakfast above a pub in the Dingle. You don’t get that with Google maps.