Essays

Click on the links below to read short essays by contributors to our walking-themed anthology The Footing.  Many of the pieces include short films, recordings and other media.

Angelina Ayers: The Strait
Angelina Ayers traces the origins of her poem ‘The Bench’ in ‘All the Leaves Are Brown’.

Rob Hindle: Flights and Traverses
Rob Hindle has written five sequences and long poems (collectively titled ‘Flights and Traverses’) for The Footing. The poems developed from ‘five walks in and around Sheffield, each taking as its stimulus the notion of a one-way journey made by people at different points in history’.  In December 2010, February 2011 and June 2013 Rob invited audiences to accompany him on some of these journeys, punctuating his readings from the sequences with extracts from contemporary accounts of the Blitz and observations on 1920s gang culture. The accompanying essays appear here:
Cartography, Flights and Traverses (November 2013)
Under the Water (‘Flights and Traverses’, June 2013)
Ganglands  (‘Princess Street to the Wicker’, February 2011)
Dore Moor to the Marples Hotel  (December 2010)
A further essay by Brian Lewis, Dead Ends (January 2016), retraces the route of Hindle’s sonnet sequence ‘Hillsborough to Middlewood, February 1931’.

Andrew Hirst: Three Night Walks
Brian Lewis discusses the origins of Hirst’s Three Night Walks in ‘Haunts’ (December 2014).

Chris Jones: Death and the Gallant
Read Chris Jones’ reflections on the making of his sequence Death and the Gallant in ‘Drawing on Walls’. A series of three Death and the Gallant-themed essays and podcasts by Emma Bolland, Chris Jones and Brian Lewis, based on a tour of three Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire churches in September 2014, appears here.

Brian Lewis: The Footing
Brian Lewis recounts the five-year development of The Footing (and a brief history of Longbarrow Press) in ‘The pace of The Footing‘ (June 2014).

Fay Musselwhite: Breach
Fay Musselwhite’s account of her journey through the Rivelin Valley (the focus of her sequence Breach), shaped by the ‘ancient shifts, flows and drops’ of its eponymous river, appears here.